I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 770: A Grave Injury, and Mockery

Jie Ming sat up grimacing, one hand braced on the floor, the other pressed to a forehead that had healed over but still ached dully. The pain of having his head blown off was, if anything, the lesser problem.

The body forging method was old hand at flesh wounds of that kind.

What really made him draw a breath through his teeth was the ache in his soul.

That blast had blown apart the “head” of his soul in the same moment.

Soul injuries were not like injuries to the body. Even though the body forging method offered the soul a degree of protection too, the pain of having a soul burst by an excess of information still made his scalp crawl.

If he had not once been through a complete “death,” which had earned the body forging method a measure of death resistance, that blast would have cost him a Death Doll.

Holding his forehead, Jie Ming rapidly traced back through his spiritual sea over everything that had happened in that span of less than a nanosecond.

At the instant the Fate Law activated, his perceptual field had been filled completely with information.

Nearly infinite information, from across the whole of the Noren Workshop’s search angle, had poured into his consciousness in the same instant.

Merely recalling it made Jie Ming feel a dull ache behind his eyes.

He understood now that he had done something stupid.

Planes might genuinely be hard to find in the Endless Chaotic Void, but those planes existed, solidly and actually.

Every one of them had its own complete system of law, elemental structure, spatial parameters and causal trajectory, to say nothing of the vast numbers of living things inside some of them.

Using the Fate Law to “see” which direction a plane could be found in amounted to seeing, in a single instant, the entire body of information on every plane that existed within his search angle.

The quantity was very nearly infinite in the true sense.

With that volume of information, never mind his head, an eighth-level wizard taking it head-on would not have fared much differently.

Getting off with only his head blown apart counted as good luck.

Jie Ming braced himself against the wall and stood, withdrew his true body, compressed himself back into human form, then sat down cross-legged and sank his consciousness into his spiritual sea. What he found there drew a bitter laugh out of him.

The Ring of Truth was trembling faintly in the aftershock, a dozen or so fine cracks showing across its surface, the golden law threads twisting unnaturally where the cracks ran.

The Spiritual Qi Law’s thread was not too bad, only somewhat dimmed, but several of the other threads had been shaken loose from the Ring of Truth for a good part of their length.

The whole spiritual sea looked as though it had just been through an earthquake.

Fortunately the spiritual sea’s capacity for self-repair at the Dao Integration Realm was strong enough, and the body forging method had already begun evolving adaptively against this class of injury. By Jie Ming’s rough estimate, it should take no more than a few years to be as good as new.

For an injury that ought to have been fatal, that was a very small price.

He leaned against the wall of the chamber and took several slow, deep breaths, easing that lingering ache in his soul a little.

He had known perfectly well, before this, how dangerous fate-system knowledge was.

Back when he had first begun studying it, every piece of fate-system material had warned him at the outset that the Fate Law was not a thing to be used carelessly. And he had indeed remembered it, and had always kept the proper reverence toward fate-system knowledge.

But fate knowledge was too convenient.

Processing information, anticipating attacks, tracing cause and effect… that convenience had worn away, bit by bit, the wariness he ought to have kept. At the beginning he had only used it for support in small matters.

Later, the more Jie Ming used it, the more natural it felt, and the bolder he became.

Back in the bizarre world he had in fact sensed the danger through self-fusion.

But he had to admit that sometimes excessive convenience really does make a person let his guard down.

At that thought, Jie Ming could not help a self-mocking laugh.

“Fate does not lie.”

“It only tells you, exactly as it is, everything you asked it.”

“As for what it costs you afterward… that is your own affair.”

Jie Ming closed his eyes and began regulating his breathing.

His spiritual sea would need several more years to fully repair.

Until then, the business of searching for planes would have to be shelved.

“…”

On the communication screen, Viola was bent over the desk laughing.

“Hahahaha… Jie Ming, you actually blew your own head off?”

She laughed until her shoulders shook without stopping, her long silver-gray hair trembling along with them, and a few tears even squeezed out at the corners of her eyes.

“I have heard of things like this before. I always assumed it was a joke somebody made up.”

“Who would have thought, who would have thought, that it would happen to someone right next to me. Good grief… hahahahahahaha!!”

As she spoke she made an effort to act out the scene, both hands flung suddenly outward:

“Tell me, was it a really spectacular sight when you went off? You… hahahahahaha!”

Halfway through, Viola lost it again and burst out laughing once more. “Jie Ming, do you think your head is on the hard side?”

Jie Ming’s temple twitched slightly.

He was silent for a few seconds, then said calmly:

“Senior Sister.”

“Mm?”

“Have you laughed enough?”

“No.”

Viola answered with total conviction.

“I can mock you over this for the rest of your life!”

The corner of Jie Ming’s mouth twitched.

It suddenly occurred to him that being honest about this problem of his had perhaps been a mistake.

Ten years had passed since that accident.

The blood-reddened walls of the quiet chamber had long since been replaced with new metal plating.

The cracks across his spiritual sea had also closed completely in the long course of self-repair.

Only, these ten years had not been smooth all the way through.

For the first several years, with his spiritual sea gravely damaged, both his Law Solidification Domain and his own cultivation had been all but at a standstill.

Not until the injuries had fully healed had he returned to his original rhythm of cultivation.

It was because the Law Solidification Domain’s development had fallen so far below expectation that, on this once-a-century routine call, he told his mentor and his senior sister exactly how he had been hurt.

He simply had not expected…

Viola’s first reaction to be not concern, but laughter.

“Then again, that reaction is not exactly a surprise…” Jie Ming grumbled silently to himself.

On the other light screen, Clark had said nothing at all.

Only once Viola had more or less laughed herself out did his mentor speak, slowly.

“Jie Ming.”

Clark’s voice was as level as ever, but rather heavier than usual.

“Tell it again, from the beginning.”

Jie Ming nodded and hid nothing.

From his fusion with the plane origin, to searching for unclaimed planes, to attempting to use fate knowledge to assist the search.

And finally, his head blowing apart, his spiritual sea gravely damaged, and the years it had taken to heal.

He laid out the whole course of it in full.

Through all of it, Clark listened in silence.

When Jie Ming had finished, the laboratory stayed quiet for a long while.