I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 798: The Meter Runs Backward

Time had long since lost all meaning in a fierce battle between high-level wizards.

Perhaps only a quarter of an hour had passed, or perhaps several years.

Inside the combat chamber, the simulated stellar system had lost every trace of its original form.

The armor formed from four planets had all become rubble drifting through the void, and the star had been drawn on and compressed and set burning again, over and over. In the end the whole system held nothing but a churning plasma storm and the training ground’s arrays endlessly repairing the cracks in space.

Boom!!!

Dark golden fist met the star giant’s fist once more, and a terrible shock swept out across millions of kilometers.

This time, Jie Ming finally frowned slightly.

Because the Dharma Form was becoming unstable.

Faint ripples had begun to rise across the whole two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometer form.

Cracks surfaced one after another, and healed rapidly.

But the healing was growing slower and slower.

“…as expected. At my present level, holding the Third Layer Dharma Form for long really is too much of a stretch.” Jie Ming sighed inwardly.

The Third Layer Dharma Form he had condensed had crossed the threshold only by force, on the strength of his sharply raised spiritual aptitude.

The larger the Dharma Form, the more terrifying the drain on mental energy and computation.

What was more, to verify his own true limits, he had not once connected to the Incense Fire Divine Dao in this fight.

No cross-spatial spiritual qi supply, no drawing on the whole divine dao system as a reserve power source, fighting purely on his own stores. And by now it was not only his mental energy. The spiritual power inside him had finally bottomed out too.

Boom!

Another collision of fists.

The cracks along the Dharma Form’s arm abruptly widened.

Then the entire right arm shattered with a roar, dark golden motes scattering across the void.

Jie Ming did not repair it at once this time, because he had no spiritual power left to spare.

Augusta naturally noticed the change.

She did not hesitate. The star giant swung all six arms at once, and the shadows of its fists came down blotting out the sky.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

At last, as the final punch landed, the entire Dharma Form shook violently and shattered with a roar.

The two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometer golden giant broke apart slowly in the cosmos, hundreds of millions of motes of light scattering in every direction like golden rain.

And Jie Ming’s ordinary-sized puppet body came free of the Dharma Form and floated quietly in the void.

On the other side, Augusta was in no better shape.

The star giant had long since lost human form. Of its six arms only two remained, and its lower body had lost all shape entirely, held together only by gravity forcing the plasma back into one mass, looking as though it might come apart at any moment.

She looked at the dispersed Dharma Form, let out a long breath at last, and slowly released the star giant’s power.

“It is over.” Augusta’s voice was as calm as ever.

But her forehead was covered in fine beads of sweat, and stabbing pain came from deep in her spiritual sea.

She, too, was near her limit in this fight.

Jie Ming nodded with a smile. “Mm. It certainly is over.”

At that, a trace of a smile appeared at the corner of Augusta’s mouth.

But his next sentence froze it there.

“A pity you lost.”

Augusta’s brows drew together at once, and she folded her arms. “Men who talk tough are not well liked. You are plainly the one who has lost the ability to fight. However you look at it, you lost.”

Jie Ming only smiled, and instead of arguing, slowly raised his right hand.

Pale gray divine radiance flowed once more.

The Void Ash Return to Origin Hand.

Only this time, the target of his casting was no longer his enemy.

It was… himself.

Or to be precise, the self that had fused completely with his inner world.

Gray radiance swept lightly across the whole inner world, and the next instant, time began flowing backward.

The spiritual power that had all but run dry recovered madly in a way that defied all reason, the heavily drained mental energy swiftly filled, and the fatigue vanished in a blink.

In very nearly an instant, Jie Ming was restored to his peak.

And outside, those hundreds of millions of golden motes that had scattered through the cosmos abruptly halted as one, then flew back.

Countless motes reconverged against the paths along which they had dispersed, and the shattered Dharma Form condensed slowly out of the void once more.

At last the six vertical eyes opened slowly again, and dark golden divine radiance lit the whole cosmos anew.

The Third Layer Dharma Form, restored!

“You…”

Watching this, Augusta was stunned.

For the first time she did not know what to say.

Augusta could feel that it was not only Jie Ming’s Dharma Form that had recovered. His own mental energy and physical condition had returned entirely to their peak as well.

“This… how is this possible?”

Augusta recognized it. What Jie Ming had used was the very “little trick” from the start of their fight.

But she could not understand how a little trick like that could do this.

Feeling out his own condition, Jie Ming was full of delight.

This was the main reason he had chosen the Void Ash Return to Origin Hand in the first place.

Exactly as his search criteria had specified, this was, beyond any doubt, the great divine ability that could reverse the course of a battle!

Used on himself, it disregarded every prior expenditure entirely and restored him out of nothing. The meter ran backward.

Which was to say, creation from nothing.

That was where this technique’s true terror lay.

What it genuinely reversed had never been the enemy. It was himself.

So long as he could still cast it once, he had a complete condition again.

Which meant that from here on, unless someone could kill him outright in a single stroke, it was impossible to beat him in a war of attrition!

Jie Ming worked the Dharma Form’s hand lightly and looked at Augusta with a smile.

“So as I said. The one who lost is you.”

Augusta was silent for several breaths, then let out a slow breath, her gaze sharpening again. “It is not over yet!”

The fighting spirit in her eyes blazed once more.

Even with stabbing pain running through her spiritual sea, even with her strength long since near exhaustion, she raised both hands again!

The ruined star giant moved once more, launching its attack on Jie Ming.

Jie Ming smiled and stepped forward as well.

What followed was another battle long enough to make one forget time.

Augusta displayed the true strength of a combat-system wizard.

She broke through her own limits almost continuously in the fighting, and every time she approached collapse she found a new way to adjust her control. Her command of electromagnetism grew ever more precise, her gravity ever more concentrated, and the joins between the four fundamental forces ever more natural.

She grew rapidly in a fight that came close to being hopeless.

Every punch was stronger than the one before.

Jie Ming even had the illusion that the woman before him was like a protagonist out of those novels, growing stronger the longer she fought, never stopping.

Unfortunately, even if Augusta could hold out, the star giant, scattered again and again, could not.

Once the matter it had lost passed a certain threshold, the whole star giant collapsed with a roar, stellar matter scattering across the sky.

But just as Jie Ming was about to withdraw, a figure suddenly burst out of the endless flame.

It was Augusta.

Using the cover of the star giant’s collapse, she had finally closed on Jie Ming’s puppet.

By now, through that long battle, she had mastered the four fundamental forces to their limit. Once she filled in the knowledge she still needed, she would be able to unify them. Augusta abandoned every defense, wrapped all four forces about herself, amplified them in concert to reinforce herself to the very extreme, and unleashed one final strike! She turned herself into a streak of light and drove hard at the Dharma Form’s chest!

Boom!!!

The Return to Ruins Armor, already shaken violently by the collapsing torrent of stellar matter, shattered with a roar, and then the Dharma Form’s chest was punched through by Augusta. That streak of light ran clean through the Dharma Form and finally slammed into the puppet that held Jie Ming himself.

Bang!

The puppet was blown back who knew how many kilometers before Jie Ming finally halted his body.

He glanced down at the shattered puppet, then at Augusta still charging toward him, raised his head and smiled. “Impressive.”

Then gray divine radiance lit once more.

The Void Ash Return to Origin Hand.

Time flowed backward.

The Dharma Form restored.

The puppet restored.

Augusta looked expressionlessly at the Dharma Form blazing golden again before her, and her charging steps came to a halt.

“Ha…”

Augusta laughed in exasperation.

Her eyes had gone red with fighting, and at this sight the look in them settled again.

“That ability of yours… is genuinely cheap.”

At last she raised both hands. “I concede.”

Jie Ming dispersed the Dharma Form as well.

The dark golden radiance faded slowly, and the whole cosmic scene began breaking down along with it.

The darkness withdrew, the starfield dispersed, and their surroundings became once more that flawless white hemispherical metal combat chamber.

Only then did Jie Ming notice the state Augusta was in.

That last strike had exhausted her power utterly, and with nothing left to protect it, her black robe, made of merely ordinary material, had long since burned to ash in the star’s heat. She could only rely on her loose hair to cover herself.

Jie Ming raised his right hand, an alchemical array unfolded, and the elements in the air converged rapidly.

A moment later, a loose black robe settled slowly into his hand.

He held it out. “Put this on. You are already very strong. If not for how peculiar that technique is, I certainly could not have beaten you.”

Augusta took the robe, and as she pulled it on she gave a cold snort.

“No need to console me. Say what you like, that technique of yours called Light God Transformation went unused from beginning to end.”

She tied the sash and became once again that cold-faced War God.

“And you need not worry that I will give up. I am not so weak-willed as that. I know there is still a gap between us, but I will not concede!” Jie Ming smiled.

“Challenge me whenever you like. Before that, though, the academy garrison duty is yours for a while.”

Augusta rolled her eyes and did not answer.

She only waved a hand and walked straight for the door.

The combat chamber door opened, and outside it there was an instant of silence.

The apprentices and mentors who had gathered nearby all turned their heads elsewhere at very nearly the same moment.

Someone began studying the patterns on the wall.

Someone crouched down to inspect the metal floor tiles.

And one small apprentice was crouched in a corner, refining a potion with perfect gravity.

Only, that pot of potion did not even have a flame lit under it.

Jie Ming looked at the scene, could not help a laugh, shook his head lightly, and followed Augusta out.

Only once both figures had entirely disappeared did the discussion, suppressed for so long, finally erupt across the training ground.

“Who actually won?”

“No idea!”

“They came out without a scratch on either of them!”

While everyone was still arguing, one sharp-eyed mentor suddenly pushed up his glasses.

“Wait! When Lady Augusta went in… she was not wearing that robe, was she?”

The whole group froze together.

And then all of them realized it at once.

If even the robe had been changed…

then it meant that in that fight, one side had been beaten to the point of not even being able to keep a robe.

The answer needed no stating.

For a moment.

The whole of Noren No. 147 Academy boiled over on account of that sparring match.