I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 806: The Public Zone

The silver-white pillar of teleportation light slowly dispersed.

Jie Ming opened his eyes again, but stayed where he stood, blank for a moment.

The scene before him was utterly unlike any junction point he had passed through before.

The junction points inside federation territory, however many civilizations’ architectural styles they blended, still kept the particular sense of order that belonged to the Star Ring Federation.

Essentially every junction point had broad, straight streets, buildings with clearly divided functions, patrol units stationed at the teleportation plaza, and public defensive arrays everywhere you looked.

This place, though, was like another world entirely.

At the edge of the teleportation plaza the paving had not even been laid in one complete ring before it broke off abruptly, running on into a pitted road of broken stone.

On either side of the street, building after building stood like fortresses braced for battle.

Heavy walls were covered on the outside with layer upon layer of defensive arrays, hundreds of runes turning slowly and interweaving into an energy barrier visible to the naked eye.

Quite a few corners still bore scorched black burn marks, plainly having taken a direct hit at some point from high-energy wizardry or alchemical weapons.

Every door and window had been deliberately narrowed, leaving only gaps barely wide enough for a person to pass.

What was set into the window frames was not glass either, but a layer of semi-transparent protective field with a faint blue sheen to it.

In short, the shops along this street did not look like shops. They looked more like blockhouses standing ready for war at any moment.

Pedestrians on the street walked quickly. No one lingered, and no one was willing to stand outside and talk.

A faint, indefinable oppressiveness hung in the air.

And while Jie Ming was taking in his surroundings, he could feel clearly that several streams of mental energy had swept over him at very nearly the same instant, from different directions.

Malice with not the slightest concealment about it poured over him, naked.

Someone was testing him.

A few strands of mental fluctuation even carried crude suggestion within them, trying to force out his true strength through the most primitive kind of mental pressure.

“Oh? The rules here are that much of a jungle? I like it!”

At that, the corner of Jie Ming’s mouth curved, and he “lightly” let his own mental energy go.

Boom!

Soul power vast as an ocean spread out abruptly.

In the space of a breath the entire teleportation plaza was covered by it.

Those malicious probes of mental energy were bounced straight back, as though they had run into an invisible city wall.

From several nearby buildings came a number of stifled grunts at once.

But Jie Ming’s counterstroke worked beautifully. Every probe was withdrawn at speed, and no one dared test him again.

Jie Ming set off toward the depths of the street as though nothing at all had happened.

At the same time, the mental energy he had spread out was not recalled. It simply went on expanding outward.

At a normal junction point Jie Ming would naturally never behave so rudely, but since the people at this junction point had done it first, he was not going to be polite about it either.

The outline of the whole city district took shape rapidly within his spiritual sea.

Broadly, compared with the highly commercialized junction points Jie Ming had seen, this area was more like a “city.”

Through his mental energy Jie Ming even saw a “slum” in the distance.

It was squeezed into the gaps between several large fortress structures, countless low shacks piled layer on layer, thrown together out of scrap metal plating, snapped wooden beams and broken armor.

Some of these so-called houses were nothing but a few steel plates leaned together into a triangular lean-to.

The narrow alleys were wide enough for one person turned sideways, murky wastewater flowed slowly along the slope of the ground, and the air was thick with the mingled smell of rot and mold.

Honestly, seeing this left Jie Ming a little dazed. He could not recall how long it had been since he last saw a place like it.

The ones living there were assorted alien races, such as many-legged creatures armored in thick carapace, or humanoid beings with semi-transparent gelatinous skin.

Humans alone were absent.

Jie Ming pushed his mental energy into a few of the shacks, and a moment later several scattered fragments of thought exchange were rapidly parsed out.

He quickly understood the reason.

Put plainly, it was simple enough: in this junction point, humans were the higher race!

You could even say they were rulers standing above every other race.

A merely second-level warrior-type human transcendent was enough to order third- and fourth-level aliens around at will.

The more a race resembled the humans of wizard civilization in appearance, the higher its status.

“Listening” to a “human” in a mansion dozens of kilometers away smugly showing off his own physique, Jie Ming withdrew his mental energy with a strange look on his face.

Leaving that street at a brisk pace, now far too quiet on account of the mental energy Jie Ming had unleashed, he soon came to another district.

At the roadside, a lizardman hauling cargo instinctively raised his head.

It was a fourth-level creature, covered all over in heavy scale armor, its thick arms enough to tear warship plating apart with bare hands.

Yet the instant its line of sight met Jie Ming’s, those vertical pupils contracted abruptly into thin slits.

The lizardman’s scales flared up all over its body with a rasp, and it pressed itself into the corner of the wall almost as a conditioned reflex.

Head hung low, tail clamped hard between its legs, it even held its breath.

Several others of its kind behind it scrambled back against the wall too, not daring to so much as lift their heads.

Jie Ming walked calmly past them, the hem of his robe swaying gently in the wind.

Ahead on the street, the crowd parted of its own accord like a tide.

Several alien merchants who spotted the wizard sigil on his chest from a distance did not even stop to pack up their stalls, but turned and ducked into a side alley.

And one alien woman tending her young immediately clutched the child tight to her chest and rolled away at speed like a ball.

As though disaster would fall the instant she was a moment too slow.

Jie Ming observed all of it in silence.

Clearly, what they feared was not him but the robe he wore.

More precisely… the wizard civilization the robe stood for.

Only here could Jie Ming truly feel how outrageous wizard civilization’s ill fame was out in the Endless Chaotic Void.

After all, wizard civilization had been at war in the Endless Chaotic Void far too long, and countless civilizations had fallen beneath wizards’ feet.

So much so that outside wizard territory, “human” had long since stopped being merely the name of a race.

It was more like a calamity, a fear carved deep into the blood and handed down through the generations.

Some races who had been in contact with wizards for a long time had even carved that fear into their genetic information, where it had become a near-instinctive stress response.

Jie Ming let out a soft breath and turned the corner.

Leaving behind the district where mercenaries and high-level transcendents gathered, he entered a quarter closer to ordinary residential life.

Here at last there was some sign of everyday warmth.

The road became packed earth, and the buildings on either side were no longer covered in expensive defensive arrays but built of ordinary brick, stone and steel.

Small stalls selling fruit and vegetables, spices and handicrafts lined the roadside.

Most of those living here were merely ordinary alien races, or held only first- or second-level transcendent power.

And yet the reaction of these ordinary residents was even more extreme than in the core district.

At the mouth of the street, an old woman sorting vegetables looked up.

The instant she saw Jie Ming her body froze, the vegetable basket slipped soundlessly from her hands, and green leaves scattered across the ground.

The next moment, without even stopping to pick the basket up, she turned and bolted indoors at a speed entirely at odds with her age.

Bang!

The door slammed shut.

At very nearly the same instant, the whole street erupted.

Every alien scattered and ran, as though an alarm had reached them in advance.

In no more than a few breaths.

The formerly bustling street had emptied completely.

All that remained were a few wooden doors still swaying gently, and goods strewn across the ground that no one dared come back for.

Standing in the middle of the street, Jie Ming did not know whether to laugh or cry:

“Come on… what exactly have the wizards here been doing? That reaction is a bit much!”

A whole street cleared the moment he passed through it. Rather than any “street-clearing tiger”… it was more like a natural disaster out for a walk.

It was in that complicated frame of mind that he pushed open the door of a restaurant.

The doorbell rang softly.

The restaurant was not large, its wooden tables and chairs long since polished glossy by the years.

The air was full of the warm smell of spices, fat and roasting meat mingled together.

Behind the counter stood a solidly built middle-aged alien.

His skin was covered in fine short fur, and two round ears drooped softly on top of his head.

But the instant he looked up and saw Jie Ming, those ears shot bolt upright and the man froze solid.

Those round eyes had every last emotion written across the face beneath them: I am not… going to die here today, am I?

Jie Ming could not be bothered to explain anything. He simply found a seat by the window, picked up the menu, and ordered a few of the recommended specialties.

The owner took the order down with his hands shaking almost the whole way through, then fled into the back kitchen as though running for his life.

When he came out with the dishes again his hands were still trembling nonstop, the soup bowls on the tray clinking against one another in a string of crisp notes.

Jie Ming picked up a piece of roast meat coated in a dark red sauce.

It was tender in the mouth, sweet and sour with a rich spiced heat behind it. The flavor was rather good.

He nodded lightly.

Seeing that, the owner’s body visibly relaxed.

That look of relief was as though he had just recovered his own life.

Jie Ming did not disturb him in his good fortune.

Instead he opened his magical network terminal, and a semi-transparent map slowly surfaced above the table.

From the map, the region Jie Ming was to pass through next was called the Strife Star Region.

It was a long, narrow triangular gap at the meeting point of three great powers.

It held over three thousand small wizard organizations, more than a hundred thousand alien settlements, and an unknown number of wandering wizards.

Along with three Reflection Dimension seepage nodes listed as high-risk zones.

He opened the safety rating, and the terminal immediately produced a line of blood-red warning:

【Hazard Grade region.】

【Wizards below the sixth level are advised not to travel through alone.】

【Forming a party or hiring escorts is advised.】

He read on.

Disappearances of wizards at the sixth level and above in the past century: twenty-three.

“Oh?”

Seeing that figure, Jie Ming’s eyelid twitched.

From the records, sixth-level wizards willing to come to the Strife Star Region were almost never desk-bound wizards.

Which was to say that the ones who had vanished were all genuine elite wizards capable of going to the front lines and fighting.

This… might well be a higher death rate than a plane war!

Jie Ming then enlarged the map and began planning a route.

After several rounds of selection, his gaze came to rest at last on a patch of deep red.

The Broken Bone Corridor.

There had been no major incidents there in the past century, but mainly because people deliberately avoided the place.

The reason lay deep inside the corridor: a Reflection Dimension seepage node that had persisted for a thousand years.

For any other wizard, that was the most dangerous spot on the entire route.

But Jie Ming only smiled a little. “Put that way, this road actually suits me rather well.”

Thanks to the adaptability he had evolved through the Body Forging Method, the Reflection Dimension was the very last thing he feared now.

What genuinely warranted caution was the roving armed bands drifting through it instead.

Still… those enemies could be gone around, or killed.

Whereas the Reflection Dimension node would serve him as a natural barrier.