I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 796: Probing

Jie Ming stood at the entrance of the hemispherical combat chamber and looked up at the unfamiliar space before him.

After all his years at Noren No. 147 Academy, this was somehow the first time he had set foot in its highest-specification live combat training room.

The whole chamber was seamless, as though cast from a single block of pure white metal.

The dome hung high without a single seam or any exposed runic tracery, only soft white light seeping slowly out of the depths of the metal, lighting the space down to the finest detail.

A faint smell like ozone hung in the air, the particular odor produced only by a seventh-level defensive array on long standby. Jie Ming’s gaze swept around, his mental energy reaching out by instinct, only to be gently turned back by an invisible barrier.

Clearly, until training mode was activated, everything here stayed locked down.

Ahead, Augusta had already walked to the center of the field.

She turned, her black robe swaying with the motion, her voice as crisp as ever.

“What environment do you want?”

Jie Ming smiled. “Anything. Though I would like the space as large as possible.”

Augusta nodded. “Then a cosmic environment.”

Snap.

At a light snap of her fingers, the whole world changed in an instant.

The white metal overhead receded like a tide, and the space around them expanded madly.

Dome and walls vanished beyond the limits of sight in the space of a single breath.

The next moment, darkness fell.

Or rather, not darkness, but genuine outer space.

A deep and boundless starfield replaced the white dome, and a blazing star rose slowly, casting golden light in every direction.

The ground underfoot changed rapidly as well.

The white metal melted into gray-brown rock strata, countless fissures, canyons and impact craters spreading outward, until a desolate, deathly silent world of stone lay beneath the two of them.

In only a moment the space had changed completely, and their surroundings looked like a desolate plain of rock.

Jie Ming instinctively released his mental energy, and the structure of the entire planet mapped itself into his mind.

Rock crust, scalding mantle, searing core…

Probing further out, three other planets orbited the star slowly, forming a complete stellar system.

Surprise crossed Jie Ming’s eyes. “Worthy of the academy’s highest-specification training ground.”

Spatial simulation at this level had gone beyond the class of illusion. It had constructed an entire set of physical rules outright. Augusta showed none of Jie Ming’s surprise. She simply worked her wrist.

She rolled the wide black sleeves up to her elbows, her forearms long and strong.

She raised her eyes to him. “Ready?”

When her gaze fell on the puppet, she frowned almost imperceptibly.

“You really are not switching to your main body?”

Jie Ming worked the puppet’s shoulder, its metal joints giving a faint grind.

“Do not worry. It will not affect my combat power.”

Augusta nodded. “Good.”

The word had not finished leaving her.

Boom!

The ground for several kilometers underfoot burst apart at once.

Augusta vanished outright, so fast she did not even leave an afterimage.

Very nearly the same instant, she was already in front of Jie Ming.

A pale, slender fist came straight at him with force enough to shatter the earth, and space itself gave a groan of unbearable strain before that punch. The air had no time to produce a sonic boom before the fist was in front of Jie Ming’s eyes.

Jie Ming’s expression did not change in the slightest. His right hand rose “slowly.”

In his palm, a thread of pale gray radiance turned quietly.

The Void Ash Return to Origin Hand.

His five fingers closed lightly, and gray ripples spread out like rings on water.

The next instant, Augusta suddenly went still.

She found the scene before her abruptly reversing, her body retreating at speed along the path she had come, entirely beyond her control.

In the space of one moment of disorientation, she was standing back where she had been.

Her motion, her posture, even the angle of her lifted hem, had not changed in the slightest.

As though that punch had never been thrown.

Augusta looked down at her own fist, then at Jie Ming.

For the first time, clear interest showed in those black pupils.

“So this is the new trick you have picked up? Time? Or some other power?”

Jie Ming only smiled and did not explain.

Augusta did not press him. She preferred to work it out herself.

Her right hand rose again.

Hmmm…

An invisible magnetic field spread abruptly, and the ground underfoot shook violently.

Vast sheets of rock strata were torn bodily loose, and boulders of hundreds of thousands, even millions of tons rose into the air.

And the moment they left the ground, their internal structures began changing madly.

Under Augusta’s control, electromagnetic force rearranged their crystal structures outright, and the gray stone rapidly took on a dark metallic sheen. Ordinary rock had its hardness multiplied several times over in an instant.

Then.

Boom!!!

Dozens of mountain-sized boulders broke the sound barrier together and came crashing down on Jie Ming with terrifying force.

Jie Ming stood where he was, and gray ripples spread out again.

The first boulder had barely touched the gray light.

Booom!

The whole boulder abruptly disintegrated.

The rest came at Jie Ming in an unbroken stream, but every one of them seemed to strike a region that did not exist and turned on the spot into a sky full of gravel. Countless rock fragments scattered like a downpour.

Standing behind the storm of debris, her black robe snapping, Augusta’s gaze only grew brighter. “So that is it.”

She had already seen it. Those rocks had not been shattered.

They had… returned to their original state.

The reinforcement she had given them vanished, and once they were ordinary rock again they naturally could not survive a collision at that speed, so they broke apart on their own. “It seems your ability sends a target back to some previous state of existence.” She gave a small laugh. “Interesting indeed. In that case, let us continue.”

The next moment, she raised her hand again.

Boom!!!

This time the entire planet shuddered violently.

A force more terrible than before erupted, and the whole continent began tearing free.

Mountains collapsed, continental plates were ripped up whole, fissures ran ten thousand miles in every direction, and the crimson, searing core lay wholly exposed.

Then countless continental fragments recombined within the magnetic field.

In the blink of an eye, rock fists each the size of a mountain range hung in the sky.

Every one of them had been magnetically reinforced to the utmost.

Then the atmosphere around the fists began to shake, and layer upon layer of electromagnetic acceleration rings appeared in the rippling air.

With that acceleration, the fists broke a thousand times the speed of sound in an instant.

The whole sky was very nearly filled with those enormous rock fists.

Against an attack like that, Jie Ming had nowhere to dodge, though he had never intended to dodge in the first place.

Gray ripples spread outward, ring after ring.

Each ripple that passed turned dozens of those giant fists into gravel, as though no attack could genuinely reach him at all.

But as the fists came down without pause, Jie Ming’s heart gradually sank.

“Troublesome.”

He had already understood what Augusta was doing.

She had never expected the rocks to hurt him. She was simply… forcing him to keep casting.

To her, electromagnetic control at this level was as natural as breathing.

But he was different.

Every activation of the Void Ash Return to Origin Hand required precisely locking a target’s state of existence and then forcing the reversal, and the cost in both mental energy and computation ran far above hers.

Keep this up… and he would certainly be the one to lose out.

“Worthy of the combat system.”

Jie Ming sighed inwardly.

In a single exchange, without even knowing the details of his ability, she had used pure combat experience to find the optimal answer.

Just then, a violent warning tore through Jie Ming’s perception.

Danger!

Jie Ming shifted sideways almost on instinct, driving the Void Ash Return to Origin Hand to its limit at the same moment.

But he was still a step too late.

In the same instant, a blinding beam of light ran clean through heaven and earth.

Sssss!!!

The gray domain was torn bodily open, and the various protective layers Jie Ming had put on himself at the start of the fight were punched through one after another.

Finally the beam slammed into the surface of the Return to Ruins Armor.

The armor shook violently, its light patterns flickering madly.

Though it succeeded in blunting the overwhelming majority of the force, what remained still ran the puppet clean through at the chest.

More than half of the body burst apart in an instant, metal fragments scattering everywhere.

Augusta slowly lowered her hand, a thread of lightning still lingering at her fingertips.

Looking at Jie Ming, whose defenses she had punched through, Augusta said calmly:

“Your methods are ingenious. But whatever the method, raise the output high enough and it can be broken through.”

Jie Ming looked off into the distance.

Only now did he notice that the core of the entire planet beneath him was long gone.

At some point Augusta had drawn out the whole of the planet’s metal core.

Then compressed it continuously, reinforced it continuously, and finally used electromagnetic acceleration to drive it to sublight speed.

So what had genuinely launched the attack had never been those rock fists. Those were only sleight of hand to hold his attention.

The real strike had been the innermost core of an entire planet.

Jie Ming let out a slow sigh.

As expected, thinking he could fight a sixth-level wizard with the Void Ash Return to Origin Hand at its present stage had been naive.

What makes a high-level wizard most terrifying has never been technique. It is absolute power.

Low-level wizards like to win by way of all sorts of strange and clever wizardry.

But the higher one goes, the more things return to simplicity.

When the power unleashed is strong enough to crush every rule, then however exquisite a technique may be, it remains only a technique.

While he was still thinking, the sky darkened again. A second wave of rock fists had already covered the entire firmament.

Jie Ming’s gaze sharpened abruptly, and dozens of modified wizard artifacts flew out at once.

The Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light!

Countless dark golden beams converged in an instant.

Boom!!!

A golden torrent running clear through heaven and earth burned bodily through the sea of fists.

Jie Ming used the Great Void Step, turning into a streak of light that shot up through the gap into the sky.

Only once he was clear of the encirclement did he halt.

Augusta did not pursue.

She rose slowly to a great height, and behind her was that ruined planet, stripped now of both rock strata and core.

Her black robe whipped in the storm left behind by the planet’s collapse, her jet-black hair streaming.

She hung there quietly, like a goddess of war ruling over the stars.

She looked at Jie Ming, her voice as level as ever:

“Jie Ming, if you keep playing these little tricks, there is not much point to this.”

She slowly raised a finger and pointed at him. “Bring out your main body, or you are going to lose.”

Jie Ming glanced down at the badly broken puppet.

Gray radiance turned, the Void Ash Return to Origin Hand activated again, and the shattered body began rapidly returning to its original state.

Looking at the restored body, Jie Ming spread his hands helplessly.

“I told you already. It is not that I do not want to come out. It is that this is the only state I can hold at present.”

Augusta frowned slightly.

Clearly she genuinely had not expected that to be the situation.

Jie Ming slowly worked his newly restored hand, and the smile in his eyes gradually withdrew.

“Still, your point stands. That move just now really is only at the beginner stage for me. Using a little trick like that against you was far too presumptuous.” He raised his head and met Augusta’s eyes, fighting spirit surfacing in his own.

“I apologize for what I just did. So from here on, you had better be careful!”