I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 804: The Ambush

Hmmm…

Silver-white spatial radiance shot into the sky.

As the light dispersed and Jie Ming had barely stepped out of the spatial passage, a sense of crisis hit him.

Not good!

At very nearly the same instant, the space around him abruptly froze.

Spatial laws laid in ambush long beforehand closed in an instant, like countless invisible chains sealing off every route of evasion he had. And then the attack, long since prepared, arrived!

Boom!!!

Dozens of entirely different spells erupted at very nearly the same moment.

Not one attack was wasted, and the joins between them were seamless.

The outer protective wizardry did not hold half a breath before it was punched through in succession.

And then it was the turn of Jie Ming’s body.

Thud!

A searing white energy beam punched precisely through the space between his brows, and his skull burst apart.

Fragments of bone mixed with brain tissue sprayed through the air.

At the same time, every other attack landed as well.

In very nearly the blink of an eye, that body had been thoroughly dismembered.

Countless fragments of flesh mixed with broken bone drifted slowly above the wasteland.

Half an eyeball trailing a few strands of nerve tumbled through the air, reflecting the gray figures surfacing slowly all around.

A dozen or so wizards walked out of the void.

They wore uniform dark gray robes whose surfaces flowed with obscure tracery, blocking mental detection entirely and blurring even the outlines of their bodies into shadow.

Every one of their auras held steady at the fifth level.

And yet every one of those auras was uncannily indistinct.

Clearly, the robes themselves also served to disguise their auras.

Their positions answered one another at a distance, every angle sealing off precisely the escape routes Jie Ming might have taken.

The entire ambush ring left no blind spot at all.

Seeing this prey brought down so easily, several of the lead black wizards moved slowly forward to confirm the spoils.

Then one of them, a rather small and thin wizard, seemed to sense something and abruptly threw up his right hand.

“Do not go over there!”

His mental energy fluctuations turned urgent. “That is not the main body! It is a puppet!”

At those words every black wizard halted at once, and several even backed off a few wary steps.

Then dozens of detection spells erupted together, very nearly every probing technique capable of confirming a target’s identity pouring out at once. Ripple after ripple of wizardry swept across those fragments of flesh that had not yet fallen.

That flesh was as real as a living person’s, every scrap of it giving off a vigorous life aura.

And that was precisely the problem!

Shattered to that state, it still maintained a vigorous life aura, and yet they could detect no trace of a soul whatsoever.

This was no living person at all!

Exactly as their companion had warned, it was a puppet.

The air went quiet for a moment.

And then, under everyone’s gaze, the flesh scattered across the ground began to tremble faintly.

Every fragment rose into the air at once and reconverged as though time were running backward.

Broken bone rejoined, shattered organs recondensed, muscle fibers interwove, and skin spread rapidly from the fingertips to cover it all. In a very short time, a complete body stood before them all again.

Jie Ming worked his newly recondensed right hand lightly, then raised his head and looked around, genuine admiration on his face. “Impressive. Worthy of professionals in this line of work.”

He meant it.

To bait out black wizards, he had not once activated the Return to Ruins Armor on this trip.

But that did not mean he was undefended.

Thanks to wizard artifacts he had purchased, this puppet body carried permanently active sixth-level standard protective wizardry certified by the federation military supply department.

By the theoretical figures, it was enough to take a sixth-level wizard’s strike head-on.

But a moment ago… that protection had not held even an instant before being punched clean through.

That one round of coordination alone was enough to prove these black wizards were no rabble.

Yet in the face of Jie Ming’s admiration, the black wizards on the other side had fallen silent.

The band of them kept releasing detection spells.

But however many times they scanned, the feedback remained blank.

Jie Ming’s main body might as well not have existed there at all.

Some exchanged glances. Some had cold sweat beading on their foreheads.

There had been nothing about this in the intelligence they held.

The target was merely a sixth-level wizard of a few centuries’ standing.

Skilled at alchemy, runes, research… a standard technical specialist.

In the intelligence officers’ combat ratings he had even come in slightly below an ordinary sixth-level wizard.

But now a dozen or more experienced black wizards had executed a perfect ambush from a prepared encirclement, and it had failed. Jie Ming paid them no further attention and looked around instead.

This was a desolate, deathly silent rocky waste, the gray-brown ground extending all the way to the horizon.

Clearly this was no junction point. It had to be an artificially created “hunting ground.”

The sky showed an uncanny dark violet, the particular phenomenon produced when starlight refracts through space compressed and sealed layer by layer.

The True-False Void-Piercing Pupil opened slowly.

Before long, the outline of an enormous spatial barrier surfaced in his vision.

The entire waste was wrapped in a substantiated barrier.

This place was completely cut off from the outside.

Never mind combat fluctuations. Neither spatial teleportation nor a call for help could leave it.

Jie Ming quickly understood: his teleportation coordinates had been altered deliberately.

These black wizards had intruded directly into the junction point’s teleportation network and dragged him off his original route into a hunting ground prepared in advance.

At that thought, the admiration in Jie Ming’s eyes deepened.

“Your professional competence really is quite good.”

He nodded lightly, then looked back at the group before him.

His gaze traveled slowly past the several leaders at the front and came to rest at last on an utterly unremarkable gray-robed wizard at the back of the crowd.

The corner of Jie Ming’s mouth lifted slowly.

“I did not expect us to meet again so soon. Master… innkeeper.”

The calm voice echoed slowly across the silent waste.

That figure stiffened visibly.

The gray robe concealed his features, his aura and his mental fluctuations, enough to fool the overwhelming majority of detection spells.

But in the field of the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil, none of that meant anything.

Above the man’s head, an information screen only Jie Ming could see hung quietly.

Innkeeper.

Sixth-level wizard.

There was even a portrait marker for the innkeeper beside it.

Every piece of information he had once recorded still hung there, complete.

Those robes, capable of blocking mental probing, might as well not have existed before the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil.

Jie Ming folded his arms, his smile as mild as ever, only with rather more mockery in his eyes now.

“Back at the inn you kept me company through quite a conversation. Warning me to be careful of black wizards, remarking on how full of vigor young wizards are.”

“And it turns out… you are a black wizard yourself?”