I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 807: Poison

With the route planned, Jie Ming did not leave immediately.

He unhurriedly finished the last piece of meat, drained the hot soup in his bowl, then lowered his head and glanced at his own right hand.

“Now then…”

He flexed his fingers lightly, his expression as calm as ever. “Time to deal with the other matter.”

The words had barely left him.

Crack…

A splintering sound came from his fingertip, so faint as to be very nearly inaudible.

The next moment, his entire puppet body began to break down at a speed visible to the naked eye.

There had been poison in the food, and not an ordinary toxin either.

It was an exceedingly rare high-level transcendent toxin.

Not only could it slip past a sixth-level wizard’s perception, it was potent enough to have a lethal effect on flesh at the sixth level.

Jie Ming watched the end of his index finger melt away without a sound.

The skin slid slowly off the knuckle like a block of wax roasted over open flame, exposing bone within that had already been stained pitch black.

Then the decay spread rapidly along his limbs and through his whole body like a plague out of control.

Muscle fibers twitched steadily; skin peeled away inch by inch.

Jie Ming looked down at his own melting right hand without a trace of alarm in his eyes.

If anything, he looked thoughtful.

He raised his other hand, the left, whose alloy skeleton was already exposed, and used two fingers to carefully scrape off a piece of blackened necrotic tissue.

Then he took out a sampling tube and sealed the specimen inside.

At the same time, Jie Ming activated the All-Purpose Eye and began analyzing the toxin in his flesh.

As the analysis deepened, a curious light gradually surfaced in Jie Ming’s eyes.

“That is not right…”

His mental energy traced the toxin’s spread the whole way, and found in the end that what this thing was truly attacking… was not the body at all!

The toxin was steadily permeating inward along the nerve network.

Once its saturation of the flesh passed a certain threshold, it began to cross the boundary between flesh and soul.

And at last it followed that exceedingly well-hidden thread of connection between puppet and main body, attempting to cross space and lock directly onto the soul core he kept in his inner world.

Watching the toxin permeate steadily along his mental energy, Jie Ming’s eyes brightened slightly.

“Interesting.”

Even now, with half his body melted into something like a horrifying wax statue, his voice still carried undisguised interest.

“A toxin designed specifically to target the soul, highly latent and yet able to affect the soul by way of saturating the flesh, and capable of tracking along the connection between a puppet and its main body as well.”

“The design thinking behind this toxin… is rather good. It could be applied to the design of curse-type spells without any trouble at all.”

As he spoke, Jie Ming put the sampling tube away into his inner world, a trace of admiration even surfacing at the corner of his mouth.

“This thing is nothing like the mass-produced goods on the market.”

Just then came a shrill scream.

“Aaaah!!!”

Jie Ming turned to look, and found the restaurant owner already frightened out of his wits.

Having watched Jie Ming’s body melting steadily with his own eyes, the man had collapsed straight to the floor, his terrified screaming nearly lifting the roof off.

His legs kicked desperately at the floorboards, trying to shift himself into the back kitchen, but his body kept going limp with fear.

Jie Ming only glanced at him and shook his head:

“There is no need to be afraid. This has nothing to do with you.”

That said, he raised his right hand, and the gray-white radiance of the Ash Return to Origin Hand quietly kindled.

A gentle gray-white stream of light spread slowly out from his palm, sweeping down over the whole puppet body from head to foot.

The next instant time began to run backward, and that body, already more than half collapsed, was restored to its original state.

Jie Ming flexed his newly regrown right hand and nodded, satisfied.

Then he laid a few energy crystals on the counter to cover the meal:

“The food was good. Thank you for the hospitality.”

With that he turned and pushed his way out the door.

Inside the restaurant, only the owner was left, slumped on the floor, breathing in great gasps.

Staring at that departing figure, unable to gather himself for a long, long while.

Diagonally across from the restaurant, inside an unremarkable gray building.

A slender seventh-level snakeman stood before a floating crystal mirror, staring fixedly at the interior of the restaurant.

In the mirror’s surface, everything that had just happened was playing out.

When it saw Jie Ming’s body restored as though time had run backward, those serpent pupils contracted abruptly into slits.

“Impossible!”

The snakeman’s scales snapped taut all over its body, and it fled without hesitation toward the shadows.

But it was already too late.

Sssh!!!

A dark golden beam came tearing through the air from the restaurant doorway, and the snakeman’s upper body, soul and all, was vaporized entirely into the most basic particles.

Only the lower half of the tail slid on a few meters under its own momentum before falling to the ground and going utterly still at last.

Jie Ming slowly drew his finger back, his expression untroubled.

This snakeman was only an executor, certainly not the one behind it all.

A mere seventh-level snakeman could not possibly have obtained a high-level toxin designed specifically to target the soul.

At that thought, a golden vertical mark slowly split open between his brows.

True-False Void-Piercing Pupil, Fate Subsystem, Fate Law… all three systems open!

Countless pale golden tracings extended from the depths of his pupil, interweaving into a web of fate that covered the world.

Golden threads extended one after another out of the snakeman’s remains, tracing steadily back into the past.

Following the residual causality, Jie Ming locked at last onto a secret chamber hidden deep in the district.

He took a single step, and space folded of its own accord.

When he appeared again, he was standing in the middle of that chamber.

The light here was dim, the four walls covered in gray runes that blocked detection, and at the center hung a huge crystal sphere.

Within its surface, a live feed of the restaurant interior was still playing.

Several black wizards in deep gray robes stood around the crystal sphere.

They had clearly witnessed the entire process with their own eyes.

And having just watched Jie Ming vanish from the surveillance image, they now found him standing behind them like a ghost.

The air froze in an instant.

“Run!”

Someone roared, and several spatial teleportation runes lit up together.

But the silver radiance had barely bloomed before it was crushed by force under another, far more massive spatial law.

Boom!

Watching dark golden runes surface on all four walls of the chamber at once, every black wizard present changed color. None of them had expected this man to seal the site off in a single instant.

The cage was made. No one could leave.

Seeing no hope of escape, every black wizard struck at once, without hesitation.

Dozens of kinds of sixth-level spells filled the whole chamber in an instant, violent energy venting wildly.

Furniture, instruments and the crystal stand were pulverized on the spot, and only the chamber itself, covered in reverse by the Return to Ruins Armor, was preserved.

Facing that dense mass of attacks, Jie Ming merely walked slowly forward behind the Return to Ruins Armor.

A sky full of magic hammered ceaselessly at the steady-state light screen, unable to raise so much as a ripple.

As easily as a man strolling through rain, he passed through the torrent of destruction and came to a halt before one of the black wizards.

Under that man’s terrified gaze he raised a hand, ignored every bit of his resistance, and pressed it down on the crown of his head.

Fate Law seeped quietly in.

Avoiding the soul, reading information directly at the causal layer.

A moment later, Jie Ming slowly furrowed his brow.

Too clean!

The tracks of fate on these people were clean to the point of being uncanny.

A normal person’s fate ought to be woven out of countless threads.

Every choice, every action, leaves a new node behind.

But these men’s fates looked as though they had been thoroughly wiped down.

Every causal link that might have led back to the one behind them had been cut neatly at the same point, leaving no trace whatsoever.

“Troublesome…”

Because of the Star Orbit Tribunal’s protection of wizard knowledge, Jie Ming did not dare casually soul-search another wizard either.

As for interrogation, that was out of the question. These fellows had plainly signed some sort of contract.

That being so, his only remaining means was to rely on fate-type knowledge to find the connection of fate between the two parties.

But now even that had been erased…

“The other side is rather careful…” Jie Ming slowly withdrew his right hand.

In his mind, though, the clues were linking up at speed.

Looked at this way, the first group of black wizards had not been there to rob him. They had been probing.

Probing his strength, and probing his method of fighting alike.

And now.

The second group, the snakeman included, was a targeted assassination plan the other side had drawn up after receiving the first group’s intelligence.

The two operations advanced in stages, one upon the other.

The purpose was clear, and it was certainly no coincidence.

A cold light flashed at the bottom of Jie Ming’s eyes.

“Since there is no useful information here, there is no need for you to exist either.”

The Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light bloomed from his palm, and the whole chamber was swallowed in dark golden radiance in an instant.

When the light dispersed, every black wizard had been reduced entirely to elementary particles.

In the whole chamber, only the gray walls protected by the Return to Ruins Armor were left, still giving off a searing residual heat.

Jie Ming was silent for a moment, then turned and left.

The chamber door slowly opened, and outside was still that same silent street.

He did not linger, and soon found the teleportation array for this district.

The silver-white spatial radiance rose once more, and his figure slowly dispersed.

“You will always leave more clues behind the next time you move.”

Jie Ming watched the flowing currents of spatial light, his gaze calm.

“I would rather like to see how much longer you can stay hidden.”