I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 778: The Time Lag, and the Meeting

Order returned to the teleportation plaza.

The alchemy wizards responsible for array maintenance had already gathered around the smoking teleportation array and begun inspecting the damaged rune arrays. Jie Ming took a look and confirmed that only part of the energy circuitry had overloaded, with no harm done to the spatial anchor points, which eased his mind somewhat. At least it would not cost too much to make good.

He was about to head for the academy’s meeting hall when a familiar voice came from behind him.

“Jie… Ming?”

Jie Ming turned around.

Not far off, a young man in a black wizard’s robe was waving in his direction.

Bill Lyn Black.

The soul-system prodigy who had entered Noren Academy in the same year as him, and these days the largest distributor of his liquid Essence Gold within the Noren Workshop’s territory. Jie Ming showed a slight smile.

“Bill.”

Bill came over at a quick walk.

“What a coincidence. I thought for a moment I had the wrong person.”

But in the instant Bill began to speak, Jie Ming suddenly went still.

Because… it was too slow.

Bill’s lips parted slowly, every word coming out bit by bit as though it had been deliberately drawn out.

“How… have… you… been… lately…”

The voice was not distorted. It was simply astonishingly slow.

Even the motion of Bill raising a hand in greeting seemed slowed several times over.

Merely standing there waiting, Jie Ming could not help a strange feeling rising in him.

Faster.

A little faster.

At that speed, he half wanted to finish the other man’s sentence for him.

But the moment that thought surfaced, he caught himself.

It was not that Bill had become slower. It was that he himself had become faster.

To put it precisely.

The two sides’ perception of the passage of time had come to differ in kind.

A flicker of realization crossed Jie Ming’s eyes.

The greatest transformation of a sixth-level wizard was not only the Law Solidification Domain, nor only the spiritual sea.

What genuinely made the leap was the whole level of one’s life.

As his Law Solidification Domain improved, Jie Ming’s life level had been climbing rapidly too.

After several centuries of accumulation, plus the breakthrough in his true body, his speed of thought had long since far outstripped a fourth or fifth-level wizard’s. Which was why, in his own perception, Bill seemed so slow.

On the Infernal Sulfur Plane, everyone Jie Ming dealt with was a sixth-level being like the Black Giant priests, so he had never much noticed. At that thought, Jie Ming deliberately slowed his own speed of thought, and that sensation of time being stretched out eased considerably. “Things have been going well.”

He answered with a smile, his formidable powers of computation letting him make sure he spoke at the same pace as Bill.

“The experiments have gone fairly smoothly.”

Bill laughed. “I hear you have worked out an aptitude enhancement technique? When I found my family one day, do not you dare turn down my business!” “Of course.”

Jie Ming nodded.

“And on the liquid Essence Gold side, I have you to thank for these past years.”

“Mutual benefit, that is all.”

Bill waved it off.

“Speaking of which, you are one of the most famous figures in the academy now.”

The two of them chatted as they walked toward the meeting hall.

Throughout, Jie Ming deliberately held his speed of thought down.

Even so, he still had to keep reminding himself to be patient.

In the time it took Bill to finish one sentence, Jie Ming’s subjective perception was nearly long enough to turn a sentence of his own over a dozen times.

It was not a pleasant sensation.

And yet in the course of that somewhat drawn-out conversation, a certain feeling rose in Jie Ming.

So that was it.

That was why most of the high-level wizards he had met along the way had seemed so notably cold toward low-level ones.

He had always assumed it was simply that the gap in strength was too wide.

Having now experienced it himself, he finally understood.

The root cause was time.

The world in a high-level wizard’s eyes simply ran a great deal faster than in a low-level wizard’s.

Talking with a low-level wizard was like asking an ordinary person to sit patiently through a video slowed down dozens of times.

Every sentence had to be waited out.

Every movement dragged.

Worse, a high-level wizard also had to slow his own thinking deliberately and control his rate of speech before the other party could understand him properly. That was unquestionably a considerable drain on one’s patience.

Small wonder.

Magic network terminals had a real-time communication function, and yet the high-level wizards who actually ran the academy far preferred to send written messages. After all, written exchange has no time lag.

At that thought, Jie Ming suddenly smiled.

He thought of Senior Sister Viola and of Mentor Clark, neither of whom had ever shown the slightest impatience when talking with him. Viola especially, who would even trade barbs with him for ages.

Looking back now, the two of them had probably been accommodating his pace of time all along.

At that thought, a certain warmth rose in Jie Ming.

The two of them arrived at the meeting hall.

The enormous semicircular hall could easily seat several thousand.

Tiered seating extended upward ring by ring, the silver-white walls were inlaid with a great many mental amplification runes, and dozens of three-dimensional light screens hung at the center. At this moment the hall was nearly full.

Everywhere one looked there were wizards, packed close together.

In an ordinary civilization, these thousand-odd wizards could easily have wiped out several worlds.

But at Noren No. 147 Academy as it now stood, this was merely a routine meeting.

Jie Ming looked around.

A certain feeling stirred in him too.

Several thousand years ago, when the academy had just been founded, those seated here had been almost uniformly first and second-level wizards.

Third and fourth-level wizards had been very few.

And now, across the whole hall, the lowest were fourth-level, while fifth-level wizards made up a considerable proportion.

There were even several dozen sixth-level wizards.

In the space of a few thousand years, Noren No. 147 Academy had genuinely grown into an important academy capable of reliably producing high-level wizards.

Jie Ming and Bill nodded to one another, then went off to their respective sections.

By custom, seating at the meeting was divided by wizard level.

Fourth and fifth-level wizards sat around the outside of the hall, while sixth-level wizards were at the very front.

Jie Ming went to his own seat and sat down.

Not long after he did, the whole hall abruptly fell silent.

On the high platform, a figure slowly appeared.

Dean Avery Knight was in his usual plain gray robe.

He released no pressure of any kind, and yet when he stood there the whole hall naturally lapsed into silence.

Dean Avery Knight swept his gaze over the assembly, and once he had confirmed that everyone was present he spoke without any preamble. “My mandatory rest period is coming to an end.”

That one sentence alone set the whole hall stirring slightly.

A good many sixth-level wizards took on serious expressions.

Jie Ming was somewhat surprised, but his expression quickly settled.

This was not something he had failed to anticipate.

By Star Ring Federation regulation, a seventh-level wizard who completes a long-term frontline assignment must undergo a mandatory rest period of ten thousand years. However, if during that period he takes on important duties such as cultivating the next generation or building an academy, the term can be halved.

Avery Knight’s choice to found Noren No. 147 Academy fell under that clause.

Five thousand years had now passed, and his rest period had formally ended.

A seventh-level wizard is qualified to enter the wizard civilization’s front line.

There they carry out various high-level assignments and earn high-level military merits.

Though most of the time the work is auxiliary, such as strategic support, plane stabilization and law repair, each assignment tends to last several hundred years, or even several thousand.

So Dean Avery Knight leaving the academy for a long stretch was all but a settled matter.

Avery went on. “Thanks to everyone’s efforts, the academy’s development is on track. My leaving will not affect its normal operation.” “However, by federation regulation, every academy must for safety’s sake retain at all times at least one combat unit at the high level or above as garrison.” At that, his gaze swept slowly across the front row and came to rest on Jie Ming.

“Jie Ming, I have already notified Viola.”

“From here on, the two of you will take turns holding the academy garrison duty.”

Jie Ming nodded. “Understood.”

Around the hall, a good many wizards wore expressions of having expected exactly that.

A garrison unit is chosen mainly on combat power.

In the whole academy as it stood, those two were the only ones who could reliably hold the post.

Avery paused, thought for a moment, and added:

“If Wizard [War God] Berta Vera Augusta advances to the sixth level during this period, then the three of you will rotate the garrison.” At that, a good many people nodded slightly.

Clearly the academy’s leadership held equally high expectations of Miss Augusta reaching the sixth level.

Having said his piece, Avery calmly surveyed the hall.

“Next, let me set out the academy’s specific work for the period ahead…”