I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 782: The Experiment

Inside the laboratory, cold blue illumination fell quietly, leaving the whole hall spotless.

A row of brand-new cultivation pods stood in neat order at the center of the experimental area.

Pale green, highly concentrated nutrient solution flowed slowly, giving off a faint sound of bubbles.

Through the semi-transparent walls of the pods, ten bodies could clearly be seen suspended inside.

They had exactly the same contours of face, the same skeletal proportions.

Even the fine lines on their skin were no different in the slightest from Jie Ming’s own.

The ten clones floated quietly in the nutrient solution, eyes shut, chests rising and falling gently and regularly with the circulation of the fluid, like ordinary people deep in sleep.

Jie Ming stood before the pods with his arms folded, studying his handiwork carefully.

After a moment, he nodded in satisfaction.

“The bodies are fine. So… next comes the soul.”

His gaze swept slowly across the ten sleeping clones.

The reason he had chosen to make the specimens the slower way, from his own genetic material, rather than creating them outright with alchemy, was not any particular preference. It was caution.

For all that he had studied the Blood Sacrifice Method quite thoroughly, it remained at the theoretical stage and had never actually been performed. By the technique’s own account, though it was called blood sacrifice, what was genuinely sacrificed was not merely the body but a complete life constituted of bloodline, flesh and soul together.

Jie Ming was concerned that creating them outright with alchemy might introduce some subtle deviation he had not even noticed, which could cause the whole sacrifice to fail, or even trigger a backlash.

So to be safe, in these early experimental tests the closer the material was to the target, the better.

Of course, precisely because these clones were only experimental material, Jie Ming had not wasted many resources cultivating them.

They possessed nothing but Jie Ming’s appearance and bloodline.

Beyond that, in both physical strength and mental talent they were at the level of the most ordinary mortal.

Apart from inheriting, through his own life information, a portion of the special resistances the body forging method had left behind, they did not hold so much as a trace of extraordinary power. Now these ten bodies lacked one last thing: a soul.

Jie Ming slowly raised his right hand. “To be safe, better to cut a sample directly from my own soul and copy that.”

In his spiritual sea, two entirely different systems of knowledge began running rapidly, and countless pieces of knowledge about the soul surfaced like a tide.

On this subject, Jie Ming was quite grateful to hold knowledge of two systems, so that he could combine the strengths of both.

In the cultivation system, the understanding of the soul leaned toward “joining.”

From the Qi Refinement realm onward, the three treasures of essence, qi and spirit fused continually.

The whole process of cultivation was, in essence, the continual regathering of scattered life origin until it returned to a single whole.

So cultivators had extremely deep attainments in strengthening the soul, tempering the primordial spirit, and influencing the divine sense.

But techniques for dividing the soul were very nearly forbidden ground.

After all, an ordinary person’s soul is fragile to begin with, and the slightest misstep scatters it entirely.

And while a high-level cultivator’s soul is solid enough, they prize roundness and unity, and for the sake of their own cultivation potential very rarely cut their own primordial spirit on purpose.

So within the cultivation system, those genuinely skilled at dividing souls were either demonic-path heretics who cared nothing for their future potential.

Or great powers who had cultivated to an extremely high realm and then divided their primordial spirit by means of avatar secret arts.

The wizard civilization was the exact opposite.

Wizards had never regarded the soul as anything sacred or inviolable.

What they genuinely valued was intelligence and knowledge. Beyond that, whether their own or another’s, whether soul or body, anything could be twisted and remade at will.

In their eyes the soul was merely another energy structure that could be observed, studied, taken apart and reassembled.

It was special, but by no means beyond comprehension.

Because of that, over long ages of pushing forward through countless soul experiments, wizards had long since studied the soul to an extremely fine degree. A soul could be taken apart, stitched together, copied, even remade.

So-called soul division was, to a wizard, no more than a routine laboratory operation.

For a high-level wizard, what made cultivating a new soul troublesome was not the technique but the cost.

Cultivating a high-level soul comparable to one’s own consumed far too many resources, and for most wizards who were not specialists in the field it was simply not worth it.

So unless it was necessary, very few were willing to do it.

And Jie Ming happened to be skilled in both systems.

“In that case, there is no reason not to use it.”

The words fell, alchemy activated, and an invisible force reached slowly into the depths of his soul.

Throughout, his movements were exceedingly light, like a surgeon performing a delicate operation.

Several transparent fine blades, condensed out of alchemical force, descended slowly and drew gently along the fluctuation patterns of the soul.

Ssss…

A few soul fragments as fine as hairs were stripped away intact.

The whole process was done without the slightest messiness.

Those soul fragments were crystalline and clear, their edges smooth and round, without any trace of tearing, as though they had grown that way naturally.

Even the soul body itself showed no visible wound, as though the alchemical force had merely carried off some debris that had been clinging to it all along.

Jie Ming felt only a faint sting, and then he was back to normal.

For him as he was now, soul depletion of that degree would fully recover in the blink of an eye.

He raised a hand, and the ten soul fragments flew to the ten cultivation pods and sank slowly into those sleeping bodies.

The next moment, the alchemical arrays at the base of the pods lit up together.

Runes lit layer by layer, and the concentrated nutrient solution flowed rapidly.

Great quantities of life energy were drawn out by the arrays and poured continuously into the clones.

With alchemy assisting, the soul fragments, which had held only the barest rudiment of form, began growing rapidly.

Neural network after neural network was actively connected by the soul, and the brain tissue genuinely began to “live.”

A few minutes later, all ten pods trembled faintly at almost the same instant.

The next moment, the ten clones slowly opened their eyes.

Twenty eyes looked together at Jie Ming outside the pods.

That gaze looked utterly empty.

Which was perfectly normal.

Their brains were complete and their souls had matured, but Jie Ming had not fed them any knowledge at all.

So these clones could breathe and their hearts could beat, and they could carry out the most basic physiological activity.

But they could not speak, and they could not think.

Jie Ming observed quietly for a while.

Once he had confirmed there was nothing abnormal, he nodded lightly.

“Good. The cultivation counts as a success.”

Then he opened two of the pods, and two clones drifted slowly out.

Jie Ming raised a hand and pointed, and a hypnosis spell came down. The two, whose consciousnesses were blank to begin with, immediately fell into a deeper sleep and lay quietly on the experiment bench.

The third eye between Jie Ming’s brows slowly opened, and a pale silver whorl of stars began to turn.

The True-False Void-Piercing Pupil.

Activate!

The wizard civilization had no instrument specifically for measuring spiritual aptitude.

But the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil parsed the underlying information of all things, and it came from the cultivation system to begin with.

So-called spiritual aptitude naturally could not escape its observation either.

A moment later.

Two sets of data surfaced in his field of vision.

[Spiritual aptitude: average.]

Both clones returned the same result, which did not surprise Jie Ming in the least.

He drew some blood from each of them, and the bright red blood floated in midair under his mental energy’s control, then settled slowly onto the experiment bench. The blood seemed to have a life of its own, flowing along a set course by itself.

Crimson lines interwove and joined rapidly, until at last they formed a complex and sinister blood-colored array.

The whole array was thick with a heretical presence.

Jie Ming set one clone at the sacrifice end and the other at the receiving end.

After confirming that not one rune was in error, he slowly extended his right hand, pressed it lightly at the array’s center, and began feeding in spiritual power.

“Let us begin.”

Boom!!!

Dark red light flared abruptly, and the whole laboratory was cast crimson in an instant.

Within the array, countless threads of blood-colored light spread out like living things and swiftly wound around the clone at the sacrifice end.

That clone’s body began breaking down bit by bit.

Skin, flesh, bone, organs, and even the soul…

Everything that constituted a life was decomposed anew under the array’s working, turned into some particular form of power, and then flowed slowly along the whole array toward the other end.

The clone at the receiving end shuddered faintly, and a faint red glow began seeping out through its skin.

Some deeper structure of life began slowly reorganizing.

The whole process was not long.

In no more than the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea, all the red light dispersed and the laboratory returned to calm.

The sacrifice end was empty. Of what had been a complete clone, only a small heap of gray-white ash remained.

The next second, the automatic cleaning array activated and the ash vanished without a sound.

Jie Ming did not look at the ash. His whole attention was fixed on the other clone.

The True-False Void-Piercing Pupil opened again, and readings surfaced rapidly.

Having found the information he wanted, Jie Ming’s pupils contracted sharply.

Even the vertical eye between his brows widened slightly without his meaning it to.

[Spiritual aptitude: superior.]

The laboratory fell briefly silent.

Jie Ming stood there without moving, his pupils unsteady as he scanned the clone again.

The result was the same.

He slowly straightened, his gaze falling on the bloodstains left on the experiment bench, then moving slowly to the eight pods still running behind him. “Hiss… average… straight up to superior?”

He murmured to himself, his eyes full of thought.

In the cultivation system.

Going from ordinary aptitude to superior aptitude usually meant several complete remakings of the body through fortuitous opportunity.

There was no telling how many cultivators never crossed that threshold in their entire lives.

And now.

One ordinary clone had crossed it merely by sacrificing another clone exactly identical to it.

This was no longer a matter of the effect being good.

It was… somewhat absurdly good.