I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 809: The Broken Bone Corridor

The last supply point outside the Broken Bone Corridor was even more deserted than Jie Ming had expected.

It was a small space station hanging in the void, an irregular metal polyhedron overall, its outer shell covered in repair scars large and small.

Energy barrier generators were set into the armor plating like patches, weak blue light flickering across them now and then, maintaining the station’s most basic stability.

There were not many people in the supply hall.

A few recruiters for smuggling fleets squatted in the corners of the corridor, their fleets’ insignia propped up beside them.

They looked bored to death, but in fact every time someone passed, their eyes would sweep over the newcomer like knives, with undisguised wariness and scrutiny.

The small wizard power that ruled the place had laid down a certain amount of order, so as to guarantee the safety of every living thing here.

But compared with the junction points and supply points of other public zones, the atmosphere here still carried an oppressiveness that was hard to put a name to.

“This is the map you purchased. It was updated only thirteen days ago.”

Taking the record crystal the front-desk puppet passed him, Jie Ming nodded.

Jie Ming imported the information in the crystal into his magical network terminal and, looking over the newest map he had bought, confirmed his route once more.

North by seventeen degrees west from the supply point, straight across the core area of the Broken Bone Corridor, around the largest seepage node of the Reflection Dimension, and he could go the whole way to the rendezvous coordinates marked on the academic exchange conference invitation.

Once he had confirmed it was correct, he turned without hesitation and walked out of the supply point.

Watching the elemental turbulence surging outside the energy shield, Jie Ming let a layer of dark golden Law Solidification Domain unfold slowly around his body. Like a membrane with radiance flowing through it, it bore him up and carried him off into the depths of the Broken Bone Corridor.

Through the information he had gathered over this period, Jie Ming had come to understand a good deal more about the Broken Bone Corridor. It was, you could say, a famously perilous stretch of the public zone.

It had been under continuous erosion by the Reflection Dimension for tens of thousands of years, and its spatial structure had long since been torn to pieces. Never mind establishing a stable teleportation array, even the “official” shipping lanes run by several neighboring wizard powers had abandoned the region entirely.

So there were only two ways to enter.

One was to be a powerful individual at the sixth level or above.

A sixth-level wizard, for instance, could rely on a Law Solidification Domain to hold off the elemental turbulence of the Endless Chaotic Void by force and cross the void directly.

The other was to find one of those smuggling fleets who carried their heads on their belts and cross alongside them.

Relying on safe channels bought with the lives of countless generations, they could thread their way through the maze of spatial rifts.

The first required strength. As for the second… a pack of smugglers who licked blood off a knife’s edge, and one should not count on them actually keeping an agreement.

Jie Ming’s strength was quite good, so naturally he chose the first.

As he pressed deeper in, the scenery around him gradually changed.

Space in the Endless Chaotic Void is chaotic to begin with, but here it was exceptionally severe.

Space was like a sheet of thin paper crumpled and smoothed out again countless times, covered everywhere in naturally formed spatial creases.

Seen from a distance, they were only a slight distortion of the light.

But stray into one and an entire ship, along with every bit of matter inside it, would be torn apart in an instant by the twisted space.

More dangerous still were the dimensional fissures hidden in the void.

They were very nearly impossible to find with any conventional detection spell. Only in the instant of actually touching one would the crack reveal itself.

After that, the terrible dimensional differential of the Reflection Dimension would erase every scrap of the target’s matter and energy in a single moment.

For this reason, the so-called “safe channels” of the smuggling fleets were in truth nothing but a narrow crevice piled up out of countless corpses.

Every stretch of the route had been felt out inch by inch with the lives of generation upon generation of crewmen.

And precisely for that reason, every fleet treated its own channel as its greatest secret.

Unfortunately, these dangers meant very nearly nothing to Jie Ming.

The True-False Void-Piercing Pupil opened slowly, and the world at once became something else entirely.

The void, which had held nothing at all before, now showed layer upon layer of transparent structure.

Spatial creases drifted quietly, like so many warped mirrors.

And those unobservable dimensional fissures became pitch-black cracks, their edges steadily absorbing fine particles, like so many great maws waiting for prey to fall in.

Jie Ming’s expression was calm; he simply kept adjusting his flight path.

Every time he shaved past the edge of danger with perfect precision, strolling through that perilous region as though it were his own garden.

…

…

Several days later, Jie Ming, flying at high speed, abruptly slowed.

Because a moment ago, the Causal Trace Shadow Technique he had been maintaining continuously had returned fresh news: ahead and to the left, there was fighting.

He immediately drew in his own aura and compressed his law domain down to the size of a single man, becoming a shadow without a trace of fluctuation to it, closing soundlessly on the source of the disturbance.

The battlefield soon came into view.

Among these spatial rifts, a medium transport ship was hemmed in by three modified light assault ships.

The transport’s outer shield was already as thin as a cicada’s wing and could collapse entirely at any moment, and its hull was covered in penetrating wounds.

Pale blue coolant sprayed steadily out of the cracks and froze into patches of glittering ice mist in the Endless Chaotic Void.

Stamped on the hull was an insignia he had never seen before.

Judging by the translation of the writing on it, the name should be the “Turan Chamber of Commerce.”

Jie Ming cast his mind back briefly and confirmed there was no record whatsoever of this chamber of commerce in his intelligence library.

Then, looking again at the layer upon layer of repair scars on the transport, Jie Ming understood well enough: this was probably a small outfit scraping by at the edge of the void, and it was perfectly normal that he had never heard their name.

What genuinely caught his attention was the other three assault ships.

Put simply, those three assault ships were far too new!

The hulls were brand new, the armor intact, the energy coating polished to a mirror shine, and even the weapon arrays were laid out neatly and to specification.

Although all three assault ships flew a pirate flag, no matter how you looked at it, this was not equipment pirates ought to have.

On the battlefield, the chamber of commerce side had two sixth-level beings and the pirate side three.

In both the number of high-end combatants and the performance of the fleet, the pirates held an absolute advantage.

By rights, this battle should have ended long ago.

Yet the facts were exactly the opposite.

Both sides fought with a great show of force, main guns roaring without pause, shields flashing violently, energy collisions raising ring after ring of spatial shock. It looked fierce in the extreme.

Jie Ming stopped behind a broken spatial distortion, using the spatial disorder to hide himself.

Arms folded, he watched the distant battlefield in silence, a trace of a smile gradually rising at the corner of his mouth:

“Interesting.”

Fishing. And rather clumsy fishing at that.

As for whether it was the pirates fishing, or the chamber of commerce, or whether both sides were in it together and putting on this show as one…

That could not be told yet.

It did not much matter, though.

If it was not aimed at him, then the question was simply whether the other side bore him any malice.

But if this really was a trap set for him…

Then to refuse to step into it himself would be to waste all that painstaking effort on their part.

At that thought, Jie Ming lightly straightened the robe on his puppet body and stepped out of the meteorite’s shadow.

Dark golden light cut across the void, flying straight toward that battlefield.