I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 773: The Second Layer Dharma Form Completed

Another hundred years and more went by.

On this day, Jie Ming was bent over his workbench, absorbed in his research into the Temporary Enlightenment Technique.

The desk was piled with a thick stack of experiment records, stacked almost to the ceiling, looking like a solid wall.

As he leafed through the records, he used his mental energy to observe this enlightened test tube ferrying samples back and forth between the cultivation tanks and the reagent rack. This was not the original one.

That first test tube had long since made a home for itself on a Black Giant priest’s shoulder, where it had fallen in with the main laboratory’s most senior hauling crew and become something like an unofficial member.

The one here now was the thirty-seventh batch of test specimens, enlightened specially so he could control his variables.

It walked with small, fussy steps, its movements far smoother than that first batch.

Occasionally, passing a cultivation tank, it would stop without thinking and rise on tiptoe to peer inside… despite having no eyes.

Watching it haul samples with such perfect solemnity, Jie Ming could not quite keep the corner of his mouth still.

He was about to note down the behavioral deviations of this batch of enlightened bodies when an extremely subtle tremor suddenly welled up from the deepest part of his spiritual sea.

It was as though a puzzle that had slept for a thousand years had slowly turned over in the depths of his consciousness and finally seated the last piece flush into place. Jie Ming stopped, and his gaze lifted from the experiment bench.

He did not hesitate. He set down the records in his hand, rose and left the laboratory, passed through the teleportation array, and made his way out to the cosmic space beyond the continent of the Infernal Sulfur Plane.

Space was silent and vast.

No wind, no gravity, no other superfluous interference of any kind, only the faint light thrown out by distant stars.

The next instant, dark golden light came surging out of Jie Ming’s body.

His thousand-meter true body unfolded in the void.

The broad-backed dark golden giant rolled its shoulders and worked out its limbs, and the three eyes across its two faces lit at once like six golden flames. Then he unfolded the Second Layer Dharma Form.

A golden phantom five hundred kilometers high rose slowly to its feet in the void.

This time the Dharma Form’s outline was already far more solid than before, and yet it still carried a faintly illusory edge.

Like a divine statue not yet fully cast, its presence astonishing but still one breath short of being genuinely settled into substance.

Jie Ming was in no hurry to test the power.

He sat cross-legged at the very center of the Dharma Form’s chest cavity and slowly closed his eyes.

In his spiritual sea, everything the Dao Integration Realm had accumulated over a thousand years began, in this moment, to run at a roar.

His deep analysis of the Spiritual Qi Law, his understanding of alchemy, his cross-system research into soul studies, his countless deductions of the All-Heavens Star Grand Array…

All of the knowledge, understanding, insight and accumulation, in this one instant, was like a vast ore vein thrown into a furnace, beginning to melt in the heat and then to crystallize anew.

The Infernal Sulfur Plane’s plane origin was the first to answer.

Deep within the main continent, that golden plane origin turned slowly, giving off ripple after ripple.

The next moment.

The elemental tides of the entire plane seemed to be drawn by some invisible will, converging together toward the depths of space.

Feeling that unmistakable change, the Black Giant priests stopped what they were doing almost as one and raised their heads to the sky in surprise. At the center of that endlessly converging elemental vortex, the Dharma Form began to change.

The slightly illusory edges of its outline gradually grew sharp.

The unreal golden halo began drawing inward.

When the mist of light dispersed, what it revealed was no longer a semi-transparent phantom, but a dark golden body as dense as the true body itself.

Lines of sinew and muscle exactly like the true body’s surfaced across the Dharma Form, and the joint of every finger, the edge of every nail, the lie of every strand of hair, all passed step by step from phantom into substance.

And the true body inside the Dharma Form was growing steadily more insubstantial.

The dark golden light of the thousand-meter true body went from solid to semi-transparent.

The outlines of bone and muscle melted away bit by bit within that light.

The thousand-meter true body began to break apart inch by inch, every piece of flesh and every strand of sinew turning back into the purest flow of light and rushing into the Dharma Form solidifying around it.

As though a statue had melted itself down and been recast into an enormous divine image.

The essence of Dharma Form techniques had never been to wrap one more, larger phantom around a true body.

Dharma Form techniques had from first to last been a kind of biological modification surgery. When each layer of Dharma Form reached its peak, it fused the original true body and the Dharma Form completely, making the Dharma Form itself the new true body.

When the last stream of dark golden light poured out of the old true body and fully into the Dharma Form, what sat cross-legged in the void was no longer a thousand-meter golden giant wrapped in a five-hundred-kilometer phantom.

In its place was a genuine five-hundred-kilometer body of substance.

Dark golden skin, a broad-backed outline, a face front and back, a golden vertical eye between the brows.

That was Jie Ming’s new true body.

Jie Ming slowly opened his eyes and stretched his new body out in the space around him.

The mere act of raising an arm stirred a ring of visible spatial ripples in the void, like the rings that spread when a stone drops into deep water, running outward layer by layer.

He drew a slow breath, and the elements within several hundred thousand kilometers shook as one, raising an elemental storm in space.

Jie Ming looked down at his own hand with something like wonder.

He could feel clearly that the power surging inside him was more than an order of magnitude beyond the old true body.

The Law Solidification Domain had expanded rapidly during the conversion of Dharma Form and true body as well.

Jie Ming no longer needed to unfold it deliberately to comb every element within several hundred thousand kilometers into order.

He hung quietly in the void, feeling the fine sensations coming from every inch of skin on this new body.

The feeling was extraordinary, as though his whole self had been recast, steadier than before, and more real.

By his reckoning, it had been over a thousand years since he entered the Dao Integration Realm.

Relying on what made the Dao Integration Realm special, and on continual study, those thousand-odd years of accumulation had finally carried the Second Layer Dharma Form to its final evolution. By the cultivation pattern of the Self-Sovereign True Body Sutra, what came next was the Third Layer Dharma Form.

The first Dharma Form evolution had gone from a body of less than two meters to a thousand-meter true body.

The second had gone from a thousand-meter true body to a five-hundred-kilometer one.

Extrapolating by that ratio, the final height of a Third Layer Dharma Form should be two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers.

At that scale, “giant” was no longer a word that could describe it.

It would be a colossus large enough to make an ordinary planet look small.

Jie Ming hung still in the void a while longer, then slowly drew his body in.

The five-hundred-kilometer true body pulled back like a receding tide, the dark golden light fading layer by layer, until he returned to the human form he usually wore.

When he came back through the teleportation array to the main laboratory of the Infernal Sulfur Plane, a group of Black Giant priests was already waiting beside it.

At the front stood the priest who had been carrying the activated test tube all this time.

The tube leapt down from his shoulder, trotted over to Jie Ming’s feet in tiny steps, tilted its slender body up and waved a “hand” at him. “Congratulations, our Master!”

The vertical mouths on the Black Giant priests’ chests opened and closed together, giving off a low and respectful vibration.

The activated test tube imitated them, raising a little arm as fine as a hair and tapping it twice against its own quartz body, producing a crisp “ting, ting” and looking exceedingly earnest.

Jie Ming nodded to them, then hurried back into the laboratory.

Once the laboratory door was shut, his gentle expression collapsed and he could not help frowning slightly.

Because Jie Ming felt that the world around him had suddenly become extraordinarily fragile.

The Infernal Sulfur continent, once so immensely broad, now felt in his perception as though it had shrunk into a paper box.

He had to keep himself carefully folded up inside it, and one moment of carelessness might burst it open.

The main laboratory ceiling was three stories high, and yet he ducked his head instinctively, afraid he might knock into something without meaning to. The metal floor underfoot could easily bear the weight of his transformed shape.

But he could feel the rock strata beneath the floor trembling faintly under the pressure of his presence.

Fortunately, the Infernal Sulfur Plane’s real size was by now large enough.

After the merger with the Tentacle Tree Plane, the space beyond the continent had expanded outright to a cosmic volume tens of billions of light years across.

In an environment like that, stretching out his true body brought no sense of confinement for the time being.

When he had unfolded his five-hundred-kilometer true body in the void a moment ago, it had been like an ordinary person standing on an empty plain, with room enough all around to move freely.

But as the Dao Integration Realm went on advancing, his true body would only grow larger.

At the completion of the Second Layer Dharma Form it stood at five hundred kilometers.

As the “Dao” went on accumulating, that figure would keep growing until it approached the threshold of the Third Layer Dharma Form.

And the threshold of the Third Layer Dharma Form was two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers.

That was already several times larger than an ordinary star.

Vast as the cosmic space of the Infernal Sulfur Plane was, the continental region where he went about his daily business would, against a scale like that, sooner or later become a “paper box” again.

Jie Ming reached up and pressed the space between his brows, and then thought of another, more practical problem.

Several world fragments still hung in orbit beyond the Infernal Sulfur continent.

Stored inside those fragments were his many bizarre specimens, high-risk experimental materials, and research items connected to the Reflection Dimension.

And a world fragment was itself an ultra-miniature plane stripped off an independent one, each no more than a few dozen kilometers across.

Back when he had a thousand-meter true body, he could still just barely squeeze inside using a special stabilization array.

Now, with a five-hundred-kilometer true body, there was no way the independent spatial structure inside a world fragment could withstand the pressure of law his body exerted.

Forcing his way in would only make the fragment’s internal spatial structure collapse from the level of law upward.

Thinking this over, Jie Ming absently touched the experiment bench, and the runes on the bench began to fall into disorder.

That was the effect of his abruptly heightened standing of being.

Jie Ming sighed, raised his head to the laboratory dome, and wore an odd expression.

“Let us remodel the laboratory first… and for a problem like this, I really will have to go digging in the Great Dao Book Pavilion.”

To see whether there was any technique or method that could handle this class of problem.