I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 786: The Answer Written in Plain Sight

Another decade and more went by.

In the laboratory, projected light screens scrolled line after line of data under the cold blue illumination.

Jie Ming sat at the experiment bench, chin propped on one hand, looking at the last derivation report before him, and let out a light breath.

“So that is it… I finally understand.”

Over these past ten-odd years he had put nearly all his energy into parsing the underpinnings of the Blood Sacrifice Method.

Every jade slip in the Great Dao Book Pavilion touching on comparable techniques had been read through more times than he could count.

Demonic secret arts concerning aptitude, orthodox canon, even scattered fragments of cultivation notes had all been sorted and organized item by item. At the same time, the wizard civilization’s theories on mental energy, soul structure and the essence of life had been drawn into the same analytical model. And today, the last piece of the puzzle had finally fallen into place.

Jie Ming stretched out a hand, stared at the conclusion on the light screen for a long while, and suddenly laughed.

“So that is how it is.”

“The answer to the riddle was written on the riddle all along.”

What the cultivation system’s “spiritual aptitude” referred to was simply a living being’s spirituality.

Yes. From the very beginning that word had been telling everyone what aptitude truly was.

Why is the cultivation system’s energy called spiritual qi?

Why is the power it cultivates called spiritual power?

Why is talent for cultivation called spiritual aptitude?

The answer had been lying in the open all along.

Because all three were different expressions of the same thing.

Spirituality was a living being’s capacity to perceive and receive external knowledge and rules… or in other words, the Dao.

It was also the medium by which a life established a connection with spiritual qi.

The stronger the spirituality, the more easily spiritual qi is perceived.

The more easily spiritual power is controlled, and the more easily the Dao is understood.

Jie Ming leaned back in his chair, fingers tapping lightly at the desk.

“In other words… so-called spiritual roots are merely the outward expression of spirituality.”

“Or rather, a concrete name for spirituality.”

At that thought, he could not help shaking his head again.

He had always felt the cultivation system liked to make its concepts obscure to the point of mysticism.

Only now, having genuinely grasped the underlying logic, did he find it was not mystical in the slightest, and if anything was excessively plain in its naming and description. At that thought, something else occurred to him.

“Which is to say… a life like a human being, born with intelligence, effectively has spiritual roots from birth.”

His eyes brightened slightly.

Ordinary mortals cannot cultivate, but not because they lack spiritual roots. It is because their spirituality is too weak, too weak to actively perceive the spiritual qi of heaven and earth. Only those with exceptionally strong spirituality display what is called aptitude for cultivation.

As for those existences with genuinely no spirituality… the Great Dao Book Pavilion had records of those too.

Puppets that had entirely lost self-awareness, for instance, or certain lives whose spirituality was congenitally defective and whose spirit-souls could not fully form. Those were the ones that genuinely had no spiritual roots.

Then Jie Ming turned his attention back to the Blood Sacrifice Method.

Having understood the essence of aptitude, this demonic technique finally lost its last veil of mystery.

What a blood sacrifice genuinely offers up is not flesh, and still less life force.

What is actually seized is spirituality.

After the sacrifice dies, its spirituality is drawn out and then merged into the recipient’s body.

To avoid conflicts of spirituality between different lives, the Blood Sacrifice Method has an extremely complex screening mechanism built into it.

Through extensive refinement and purification it ensures that the spirituality the recipient gains is sufficiently harmonious, and the process strips away very nearly everything incompatible with him.

What genuinely survives in the end… is less than one percent.

“Small wonder it has to be close kin. Use someone with no blood relation at all, someone who did not even grow up in the same environment, and you probably could not extract a single scrap of matching spirituality.”

Jie Ming shook his head lightly. “But even sacrificing close kin, the gain is very limited.”

The closer the blood, the higher the compatibility of spirituality, and naturally the higher the proportion retained.

But even so, under normal conditions it came to only about one percent.

Enormous cost, limited return.

More critically, even using close kin, and even with the vast filtering process such techniques employ, it still leaves the user with a serious hidden danger.

By the records in the Great Dao Book Pavilion, the overwhelming majority of cultivators who raise their aptitude by such external means end up stopping at the God Transformation Realm.

Beyond that, Void Refinement and Dao Integration were almost never achieved, to say nothing of climbing on to ascend as an immortal.

Of course, those born with heaven-defying comprehension can, even with ordinary cultivation aptitude, grasp the Dao directly through their own insight before God Transformation and ascend as immortals in a single step.

But existences like that…

Jie Ming thought about it for a moment and shook his head with a laugh.

“Anyone with comprehension like that would hardly be studying the Blood Sacrifice Method.”

At this point he could finally confirm one thing beyond doubt.

There was nothing wrong with his line of thinking.

A clone, especially one copied out of his own flesh and soul together, possessed spirituality fundamentally identical to his own. Sacrificing them genuinely produced no rejection, left no hidden danger, and did not contaminate his own foundation.

It sounded like the same conclusion he had reached back then, but this time Jie Ming knew not just that it was so, but why.

Rather than simply arriving at the result through a mass of experimental observation.

That was what understanding an essence was worth.

If all he had wanted was to localize the Blood Sacrifice Method, there had never been any need to study it to this depth.

He could simply have taken its various operating modules apart and rebuilt each with the wizard civilization’s existing technology.

And as for spiritual aptitude… the wizard civilization’s mature talent enhancement system could have substituted perfectly well.

That too would have produced a high-level aptitude enhancement technique.

But… beyond being a cultivator, Jie Ming was also a wizard, and his thirst to know had always mattered more to him than efficiency.

“It was a bit of a detour, but now that I know the essence, adapting other cultivation techniques should be a good deal easier.”

Jie Ming rose and walked to the door on the other side of the laboratory.

As the heavy metal door swung slowly open, spiritual qi so dense it was nearly liquid rolled out at him.

Across the whole hall, several hundred cultivation pods stood in neat rows.

In each of them floated a body identical to his own.

After all these years of Jie Ming pouring the military merits he earned into buying resources, they were no longer the mortals they had started as.

Every one of them had been forced to maturity at the Dao Integration Realm.

Only in terms of cultivation strength, of course. Never mind combat power, these clones could not even enter the Dao Integration state.

The sole meaning of their existence was to be sacrifices.

Looking at the pods before him, a long-absent smile finally appeared on Jie Ming’s face.

“Ten years and more of resources, not wasted after all.”

He could not help rubbing his hands together. “Then… let us begin!”

The whole hall had long since been prepared, the blood sacrifice array covering the entire room.

As Jie Ming gave the order, crimson lines interwove into a super-array vast enough to hold several hundred sacrifices at once.

The moment Jie Ming stepped into the array’s center, the whole hall lit up together.

Boom!!!

Dark red light rose slowly, six hundred-odd pods opened at once, and one sleeping clone after another drifted slowly upward.

As countless blood-colored runes surfaced out of the void, the clones began slowly breaking down.

Countless streams of crimson light converged from every direction like rivers pouring into the sea, and all of it sank at last into Jie Ming’s body.

The whole process went on for a full day.

Only when the last pod stood completely empty did the hall return to silence.

“Hah…”

Letting out a long breath, Jie Ming slowly opened his eyes.

The completion of an aptitude increase came with no earth-shaking phenomena and no surge of aura.

Jie Ming stood quietly where he was, feeling as though the whole world… had changed very slightly.

And yet also as though nothing at all had changed.

It was an exceedingly subtle sensation.

He slowly raised a hand, and a thread of spiritual power surfaced naturally in his palm.

Before, spiritual power had felt to Jie Ming like a body of soldiers requiring constant direction.

Now it was more like his own fingers.

A thought stirred, and it flowed of its own accord.

Feeling that smooth, effortless control, Jie Ming’s eyes brightened.

“So this is what raised spirituality feels like.”

He had not even deliberately directed it. Having finished the aptitude increase, he had simply thought idly of the problem that had blocked him, and his spiritual power had begun running the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art by itself.

Spiritual power circulated, Dao resonance answered, and his inner world trembled slowly.

Those paths of spiritual power flow, once so obscure they gave him headaches, were now as natural as breathing.

The whole process was excessively smooth, as though it had always been meant to work this way.

And then, abruptly, Jie Ming vanished from the laboratory.

There was no trace of a spell being cast, no spatial fluctuation. He simply vanished out of the laboratory into thin air.

At the same moment.

Inside his inner world.

A consciousness slowly “opened” its eyes.

Feeling his own state, Jie Ming froze.

He instinctively went to look down at his own body, and instead only “saw” the boundless expanse of the inner world.

Jie Ming could feel clearly that the whole inner world had become his body, moving freely at his intent.

It was a long while before Jie Ming let out a slow breath. “Did I just… succeed?”

Dharma Form Dissolution.

Inner World Casting.

The first two steps of the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art had somehow been completed in that instant, on instinct.

He had not even controlled it deliberately. His body had done it entirely on its own.

Jie Ming was silent for a long moment, then could not help a rueful laugh.

“So this is what the jade slip meant by… naturally, as water finds its channel!”

When he had first read those words, he had thought the author was exaggerating.

Now, having experienced it himself, he knew it was not exaggeration at all.

Once spiritual aptitude genuinely met the requirement, the problem that had blocked him for a century turned out to be as simple as drinking water.

Those obscure and difficult transformations of spiritual power now looked laughably childish.

He even suspected that if he cultivated it again from the start, a few breaths would cover the road that had taken him several centuries.

But Jie Ming soon discovered another problem.

He could not… get out.

To be precise, his true body had sunk completely into his inner world.

But he had not yet had time to comprehend the third step of the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art, Reflected Projection, still less the method for undoing all three. So at this stage he had no way at all to project the new body, fused of inner world and true body, out into the world.

His entire consciousness could only stay inside the inner world.

Jie Ming was silent a moment, then sighed helplessly.

“All right. I was getting a little greedy.”

His original purpose had been to use this method to solve the problem of an oversized true body, and that was in fact solved now.

The combat power the method granted later was purely an unexpected bonus.

He waved a hand, and in a corner of the inner world an alchemical puppet, long since prepared, slowly opened its eyes.

Jie Ming’s consciousness descended directly into the puppet along their soul connection.

In the laboratory.

In an area that had been empty a moment before, a puppet identical in appearance to Jie Ming suddenly appeared. It slowly raised its head, and a human light came into its eyes.

Jie Ming worked the body about a little, and a somewhat satisfied smile appeared on his face.

“It seems comprehending the third step of the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art needs moving up the schedule too.”