I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 783: Identical Multiples

Jie Ming closed his eyes again and sank his consciousness into his spiritual sea.

At the center of that boundless space of consciousness, the Great Dao Book Pavilion of white jade stood quietly.

This time he was not looking for a new technique.

At a stirring of his intent, scroll after scroll of jade slips recording demonic-path secret arts flew out of the depths of the shelves by themselves and unfolded in order before him. The Blood Sacrifice Method, the Soul-Searching Spirit-Refining Scripture, the Bloodline Devouring Record, the Fate Origin Plundering Art…

One heretical text after another was leafed through at speed.

Jie Ming was in no hurry to find an answer. Instead he took apart the core mechanism of each technique bit by bit and cross-checked them against one another.

“The essence of what is sacrificed is really the transfer of some more fundamental substance…”

“Bloodline resonance…”

“Soul mapping…”

Line after line of information arranged and recombined at speed in his spiritual sea, turning into countless interwoven threads of light.

Time slipped quietly by.

He did not know how long had passed when every deduction abruptly halted.

Jie Ming’s gaze had fallen on an utterly unremarkable annotation at the end of one technique.

It did not even count as part of the main text, merely cultivation notes left by some unknown cultivator.

But the look in his eyes brightened bit by bit.

“…so that is it.”

He murmured to himself.

“So that is where the problem lies.”

He called the Blood Sacrifice Method’s data structure back up and fed in the data from the experiment he had just run.

The next moment, everything that had made no sense before fell into place at once.

The reason the growth in aptitude had been so absurd came down to one word: multiples.

To be precise, identical multiples.

In the judgment of the cultivation world’s laws of heaven and earth, identical multiples, especially individuals whose bloodline, soul and origin were all but completely the same, were not regarded as two independent lives.

Heaven and earth held that they were one person to begin with.

After all, their life origins overlapped, their soul trajectories overlapped, and even their fate patterns were very nearly identical.

So several of the most important steps in a normal blood sacrifice were, in their case, entirely void.

Jie Ming waved a hand and unfolded the Blood Sacrifice Method’s complete structure.

Countless dark red runes connected to one another, forming one enormous and immensely complex array diagram.

His gaze settled on several of the most crucial positions in it.

“Here… and here… and here as well.”

He tapped lightly, and great swathes of rune dimmed at once.

These were all “subsystems” inside the Blood Sacrifice Method used for “purification” and “refinement.”

Under normal circumstances, any sacrifice carries its own life imprint, soul impurities and residual fate pattern.

To ensure that the recipient is not contaminated by a foreign bloodline, and that his foundation is not destabilized by soul conflict, the Blood Sacrifice Method must screen and filter continuously.

The “resource” that genuinely survives to raise aptitude is in fact only a very small portion.

The overwhelming majority of the power is automatically erased by the laws as impurity.

But if the sacrifice and the beneficiary were the same person to begin with, that entire purification mechanism lost its reason to exist.

It simply never engaged during the process.

At that thought, Jie Ming could not help laughing. “Small wonder the effect was so outrageous.”

He finally understood why sacrificing one ordinary clone just now had lifted another clone’s spiritual aptitude from “average” straight up to “superior.”

Because… that had not been an increase after screening at all. It was complete superposition.

In a normal blood sacrifice, perhaps only around one percent of the effect would be retained in the end, depending on the connection between the bloodlines. The other ninety-nine percent would be stripped away outright by the laws of heaven and earth during refinement.

But sacrificing an identical multiple was simply one plus one equals two.

Neither side’s aptitude was wasted at all, which amounted to a straight doubling.

His breathing quickened slightly.

Two civilizations, two systems, and in this moment they meshed perfectly.

The cultivation system supplied the underlying technique by which aptitude could be stacked.

And the wizard system… possessed the alchemical technology to copy a completely identical living being without limit.

Taken separately, neither ability was especially earth-shaking.

The Blood Sacrifice Method was merely a piece of demonic-path heresy, and life transmutation was no more than a normal branch of high-level alchemy.

But once the two were combined… a closed loop capable of breaking the entire cultivation system’s understanding had been born just like that.

Jie Ming slowly opened his eyes, a flicker of excitement showing in the depths of his pupils.

“It seems my line of thinking was not wrong.”

The next instant, his consciousness withdrew from the Great Dao Book Pavilion and the laboratory came back into view.

Inside the pods, the remaining eight clones still floated quietly in the pale green nutrient solution, chests rising and falling slowly, deep asleep.

And the specimen whose aptitude had risen to “superior” had been returned to its pod as well.

Jie Ming did not pause at all. The True-False Void-Piercing Pupil slowly opened, silver-white starlight flowing out from the depths of the pupil.

At the same time the detection array beside him activated, and beams of analysis passed through the pods and deep into every inch of the clones’ flesh.

Bone, bloodline, soul, meridians, fate pattern, spiritual circuitry…

Countless pieces of underlying information kept surfacing, and Jie Ming recorded all of it in full.

The scan went on a long while, and just as the analysis at the soul level was about to finish, Jie Ming suddenly raised an eyebrow slightly.

“Hm?”

He readjusted the analysis magnification and scanned again.

Several minutes later, he slowly lowered his hand, and something like regret came over his expression.

“None?”

Looking at the scan results, he actually felt somewhat disappointed for a moment.

Because he had found no karma on this clone.

Jie Ming even checked himself over carefully again and confirmed that there was no karma present on him either.

The Blood Sacrifice Method was the most standard sort of demonic-path heresy. Whatever purpose the caster held, simply performing the ritual inevitably stained him with the karma of heaven and earth. That karma would attach to the depths of the soul, and the higher one’s cultivation, the more obvious its effect.

At best it bred heart demons; at worst it killed you crossing tribulation.

But now… there was nothing at all.

“What a pity…” Jie Ming shook his head lightly. “It seems karma is part of how the cultivation world’s laws of heaven and earth operate, rather than an ordinary conceptual material.”

Seen that way, obtaining karma could only work if it rested on the cultivation world’s own rules of heaven and earth.

“Though it makes sense when you think about it. If karma really existed, the wizard civilization would be the first to suffer.”

Given the experiments wizards ran as a matter of course, in the cultivation world they would long since have been wrapped in karma to a man, with heavenly tribulations without end. Then he looked at a jet-black banner set beside the laboratory.

The black banner was only a little over two meters tall, its pole black as ink, its face densely covered in dark red runes, countless fine array patterns connecting to one another and giving off a faint heretical presence.

This was a magical artifact he had refined in advance, specifically for collecting karma.

His original plan had been that if the blood sacrifice produced any karma, he would seal all of it in the black banner first.

That way he would both raise his aptitude and gain a new conceptual material, getting two dishes out of one fish.

“A pity. I went to the trouble of spending quite a bit of extra time on it, and it seems the preparation was entirely wasted.”

Jie Ming waved a hand casually, and the black banner turned into a streak of light and flew back into his inner world.

“Never mind. No karma does make things simpler.”

Jie Ming shook his head with a laugh, then sat back down at the experiment bench.

The Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror unfolded slowly, and as experimental data was fed into it, the mirror automatically computed and organized it at speed.

Reviewing the results as they came, Jie Ming began drawing up the next phase of his plan.

Confirming that clones could complete a blood sacrifice was only the first step.

What came next required a great many experiments.

First, the gradient experiments.

Sacrifice two, four, eight, sixteen… and see whether the gain in aptitude showed diminishing returns as the number of sacrifices rose. Second, the compatibility experiments.

If it were stacked several dozen times in succession, would the soul remain stable? Would the bloodline structure become deformed from excessive strengthening? And last, the most critical of all: the limit test.

If a hundred clones, or even several thousand, were all sacrificed to a single target, what degree of aptitude would result in the end? And would it break through the carrying limit of body and soul and produce negative effects?

Jie Ming tapped lightly at the experiment bench, his expression exceptionally serious.

Every one of these questions had to be verified in advance.

He had no intention of gambling with his own main body directly.

As a proper researcher, every risk had to be resolved on the experiment bench.

At that thought, his gaze returned to the array laid out in the Blood Sacrifice Method.

Jie Ming had not forgotten his own purpose.

Raising his own spiritual aptitude was only part of the plan. The other part was, naturally, making money.

So beyond raising his aptitude, he had to parse the Blood Sacrifice Method as thoroughly as he could along the way, and extract from this demonic technique every piece of the underlying technology that actually did the work.

After that he would rebuild it using the wizard civilization’s soul studies and alchemical systems…

If he succeeded, it would amount to “creating” an entirely new aptitude enhancement technique.

“With an effect this good, the returns might well run far past what I expected…” Jie Ming’s eyes glittered.