I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 805: The Ecological Structure of Black Wizards

“So the one who tampered with my teleportation coordinates was you.”

Jie Ming’s voice was calm, and yet entirely certain.

“And another thing. You told me earlier that black wizards are mostly just desperados stuck at the fifth level…”

He swept a glance around, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly.

“It seems that was only a rumor you people put out on purpose.”

As the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil passed over them, the information on everyone present lay open to him.

Of the dozen or more black wizards, more than half had in fact stepped into the sixth level.

That proportion was astonishingly high.

But a moment’s thought and Jie Ming understood the reason for it.

These people had started down the black wizard road in the first place because their talent was limited and their own intellect could not carry them past the sixth level.

But robbery is itself a way of accumulating resources.

If once was not enough, then ten times.

If ten times was not enough, then a hundred.

Rob often enough and even the most mediocre man could brute-force his way to being a sixth-level wizard on sheer volume of resources.

Once on that road, however, there was never a chance to turn back.

Withdrawing was simply impossible. The instant one tried, yesterday’s companions would turn into enemies and cut him down.

And with the combat standard of these desk-bound sixth-level wizards, there was no possibility whatsoever of surviving a swarm of fifth-level wizards closing in.

Better to stay in the dark than to leave and be silenced.

And so their numbers gathered and grew.

As time went on, the proportion of sixth-level wizards among them climbed higher and higher.

That overall rise in combat power in turn fed their greed, and so their prey shifted from fifth-level wizards to those newly promoted sixth-level wizards who had yet to find their footing.

Such as… himself.

“What a fascinating ecological structure…” Jie Ming remarked, thoroughly satisfied.

On the other side, the hearts of the assembled black wizards were sinking bit by bit.

Among wizards there is one iron law that very nearly everyone takes for granted.

When knowledge you cannot understand at all appears in the middle of a fight…

Do not hesitate. Run at once!

Because it means the level of knowledge the other side commands already towers far above your own.

More than a dozen black wizards fell back half a step at very nearly the same instant.

They wanted to withdraw.

But just then, Jie Ming had already exposed the innkeeper’s identity.

The innkeeper’s body went abruptly rigid, and beneath the black mist that middle-aged face, which had worn a mild smile throughout, turned utterly grim.

The urge to retreat that had just begun to form lasted only a moment before it was replaced entirely by something far more resolute: the determination to kill Jie Ming without fail.

The others around him realized something too, their eyes moving rapidly back and forth between the innkeeper and Jie Ming.

And then every gaze changed, and a bone-chilling killing intent spread through the air.

As wizards, even if their intellect fell short of promotion to the sixth level, no one present counted as a fool.

The identity of one of their number had been exposed.

All it took was for Jie Ming to leave here alive and report the innkeeper’s identity to the Star Ring Federation military department.

Follow that thread and the entire organization would be torn up by the roots.

No one doubted that the federation military department had the capability.

Killing the innkeeper right now to silence him would be meaningless as well.

With a high-level wizard’s abilities, one corpse was enough… no! Not even a corpse was needed. Any causal connection to him at all would lead straight back to every one of them!

And no one believed for a moment that they could slip out of the military department’s grasp!

So as long as Jie Ming went back alive, not one of them would get away.

In that case…

The only answer was to make sure the man who knew all this stayed here forever.

The killing intent was so thick it seemed to quiet the very air.

The next moment.

Boom!

Without a word exchanged, more than a dozen black wizards struck at very nearly the same instant.

Energy barriers rose first, one after another.

Dozens of layers of barrier nested inside one another, sealing off Jie Ming’s surroundings in an instant, locking down his movement as far as they could.

Right behind that, the outer barrier began to contract as well.

The whole of that space closed in fast as an iron cage, and every route of evasion was locked shut once more.

And then.

The real killing blow arrived.

Dozens of searing white energy beams tore through the void, spatial shears cutting across the world among them, while in another direction dissociation fields spread out layer by layer.

Every attack joined onto the next without the slightest gap.

Bind, control, seal, exterminate!

The whole sequence was as practiced as though it had been drilled a thousand times.

Facing an assault like that, Jie Ming simply stood where he was, and only when every attack was about to land did he “slowly” raise his right hand.

The vast wave of attacks struck his body first.

Hmmm…

An invisible fluctuation spread across his skin. That was the Return to Ruins Armor’s steady-state energy field.

Attacks enough to punch through a sixth-level wizard’s defenses vanished like a clay ox into the sea, swallowed and absorbed by the steady-state field in an instant.

The combined eruption of more than a dozen sixth-level black wizards poured wildly onto a single point, and all it did was raise one barely perceptible ripple across the Return to Ruins Armor.

And then everything returned to calm.

Jie Ming’s right hand was already raised, index finger extended.

At his fingertip, a thread of dark golden light quietly kindled.

Before the black wizards around him had time to be shocked, the dark golden Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light ran clean through the world!

Sssh!!!

A perfectly straight dark golden beam tore across the sky. Jie Ming turned his wrist lightly, and that beam became an infinitely extending divine sword that swept the whole battlefield.

Wherever it passed.

Every protective spell was cut in two, and nothing could hold it back for even a moment.

“…What?!”

“Aaah!”

Amid several screams, more than a dozen black wizards were severed cleanly at the waist at very nearly the same instant, blood fountaining into the sky.

Someone hurled out a sixth-level protective wizard artifact in desperation.

But that staggeringly valuable wizard artifact held for only an instant before it, and the laws inside it, were run through completely by the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.

The severed bodies dropped heavily, blood streaming on across the rock.

Yet a wizard’s tenacious vitality kept them from dying.

On either side of each cut, countless buds of flesh writhed wildly, trying to reconnect the bodies.

That one strike, though, had torn the black robes they used to disguise themselves, and the concealing effect went with them.

Seeing that the disguise was now pointless, they all tore their black robes away at once.

Boom!

One short, heavy-set wizard’s body swelled violently.

His skin burst open and dozens of thick tentacles bored out from inside, each one ending in a gaping maw lined with serrated fangs.

Elsewhere, another’s entire body elementalized with a roar, rolling thunderclouds churning as countless violet bolts converged madly and came crashing down as dozens of lightning pillars as thick as water barrels.

Further off, a burly wizard let out a deafening bellow, his body swelling wildly.

In the blink of an eye he had become a giant more than a hundred meters tall.

Collapse laws wound about his fists, and one punch came down and shattered space layer by layer.

“Die!!!”

With their combat power fully unleashed, several utterly different attacks descended on Jie Ming from every direction at once.

Facing the wizards’ desperate assault, Jie Ming at last raised his head.

“It seems you have nothing new left, so… let us end it.”

Jie Ming slowly extended a single finger and pressed it lightly… toward the void.

Rumble!!!

The world went abruptly dark.

An unimaginable dark golden finger descended slowly from the far end of the firmament.

The Third Layer Dharma Form, two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers tall, showed itself for only an instant.

But one of its fingers had already been manifested above this wasteland.

The entire sky was covered over by that finger.

Magnificent! Vast! Impossible to look upon directly!

Every ridge of its skin seemed woven from countless runes, and the radiance of law flowed slowly through them, unsettling to behold.

It had not even truly come down yet, and the terrible pressure of its descent alone had already started the whole wasteland collapsing.

Rumble, rumble…

The ground sank steadily, countless fissures spreading wildly, the rock strata splitting inch by inch.

Every black wizard raised his head at once, the terror in their eyes now impossible to hide.

“No!!!”

Some let out despairing roars, some turned at once and tried to flee, and some, like the mantis before the cart, tried to stop the finger from falling.

That tentacled horror lashed dozens of tentacles that had abruptly grown to several kilometers, in a vain attempt to hold up the sky.

But before they even drew near, every tentacle was crushed by the invisible weight into a fine red mist across the sky.

The thundercloud churned wildly, trying to escape by way of elementalization.

But under the shadow of the Dharma Form the entire cloud was compressed steadily, growing smaller and smaller.

In the end only a faint speck of electric light was left.

Snap!

Extinguished entirely.

The giant roared and swung his fist up to meet the sky.

But while his fist was still dozens of kilometers from the Dharma Form, both arms burst apart inch by inch, and then his whole body shattered with a roar.

At last that finger came down “lightly” upon the wasteland, and gave out a boom so deep that the entire world seemed to shudder.

Boom!!!

A terrible shockwave swept out in every direction, and the whole wasteland collapsed in an instant.

Rock became powder, the powder was compressed into crystal, the crystal went on collapsing, and in the end all that remained was a crystalline plane as thin as a cicada’s wing.

The outer spatial barrier shook wildly, countless runes shattering one after another, dense cracks spreading across the whole wall, and then it fell apart with a roar.

After some unknown length of time, the dust slowly cleared.

The once vast wasteland had vanished completely, and in its place was an enormous crater several hundred kilometers deep.

The floor of the pit was smooth as a mirror, like one whole piece of natural crystal.

In the center of that entire pit, only the area beneath Jie Ming’s feet remained perfectly intact.

And the teleportation array beside him had likewise been shielded by an invisible force.

Every rune was still running steadily.

Jie Ming looked around and nodded, satisfied.

“A decent haul.”

He had not reached the transfer station as planned, but by following the vine to the melon he had worked out how a black wizard organization operated, and had wiped out one of their strongholds along the way.

He had pinned down the “ecological structure” of black wizards and tested their combat strength as well, so the trip had not been wasted after all.

He crouched down and began examining the teleportation array.

The base-layer coordinates had indeed been tampered with, but under his deliberate protection the array body itself was undamaged.

For Jie Ming, who had mastered the rune system, a modification of that order was nothing but a little extra time spent working it backward.

A short while later, as the last rune node returned to its place, the silver-white spatial radiance lit up once more.

Jie Ming stepped into it, his figure gradually swallowed by the light.

Across the whole ruined wasteland, a deathly silence settled again.