I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 829: The Breakout Sessions

Rades’s coaching sounded through the hall without pause.

Just as Jie Ming had expected, this session of Rades’s genuinely could not be called an academic report.

Everything the man explained was practical technique distilled from his own experience.

But that did not mean the technique Rades explained was poor. Quite the opposite: Jie Ming felt he had benefited a great deal.

Looking at the target before him, Jie Ming slowly adjusted the trajectory of his own mental energy fluctuation by the method Rades had just demonstrated.

He raised a hand.

Hmm!

A very nearly transparent wind blade quietly took shape, tore through the air in an instant, and opened a smooth split across the distant rune target.

Watching the target heal rapidly, a trace of surprise flashed in Jie Ming’s eyes:

“What an outrageous effect…”

Most importantly, the genuinely precious thing about this skill was not that small increase but its adaptability.

Whatever type of spell it was, it could be used so long as the corresponding mental energy fluctuation frequency was recalculated; it applied to very nearly every wizardry system.

To an ordinary wizard this might be no more than a decent little trick.

But Jie Ming was different. He had two systems!

At that thought, Jie Ming had already begun working through the possibilities in his mind, combining this mode of mental energy fluctuation with his various reworked magics.

“Or rather than on reworked magic, use it on new Talisman-Rune Artifacts. It might substantially raise the efficiency of casting spells, or reduce array overload further…”

But as he worked carefully through it, Jie Ming noticed something was off.

“This… no wonder Lord Rades said he could not work out the deeper principles for now.”

The surface principle of this technique sounded very simple: adjust the mental energy according to how different runes fit the mental fluctuation, and that was all.

But if it really were that simple, this skill would not have gone undiscovered until now.

The actual situation was that after Jie Ming analyzed several different rune combinations carefully, he found that even the same rune required an entirely different mental energy fluctuation frequency in different rune combinations.

Indeed, if different rune combinations were used together, the mental energy fluctuation frequencies some combinations required would diverge completely, and no useful pattern could be derived at all.

“So Lord Rades only taught the mental energy frequencies needed for some fairly basic rune combinations. It seems these results are purely combat experience…”

Jie Ming scratched his head helplessly. “With no pattern at all, how is one supposed to find it? Or is there some deeper principle that has not been discovered…”

In that case, for the short term he could probably only build high-level spells on the basis of these rune combinations.

Fortunately that was where logistics wizards were most skilled, so it was no great problem.

Right up until the session ended, Jie Ming had not found a useful pattern.

Slowly letting out a breath, watching Rades exchanging experience with other attendees, Jie Ming’s eyes held a good deal more genuine respect.

“Still, the value of a technique like this is probably no less than that of my Self-Stabilizing Field Regulation Protocol.”

Combat wizards might not be able to derive vast theoretical systems the way logistics wizards did, but they had a wisdom of their own.

That was experience summed up out of one life-and-death slaughter after another, technique accumulated through countless failures and a great deal of blood.

They might not know the principle, but it was absolutely and extremely practical.

Jie Ming also came to understand somewhat why the Academic Exchange Committee specifically invited these combat wizards to the conference.

Scholarship… has never existed only in the laboratory.

Nor is what can genuinely change wizard civilization limited to grand theory.

Sometimes an apparently unremarkable little skill, refined through the practice of countless generations, is equally enough to push a whole civilization forward.

After leaving Rades’s session, Jie Ming did not rest, but plunged straight into several more topical reports in entirely different directions.

Every session had an atmosphere of its own.

Standing among the crowd, Jie Ming suddenly felt a curious sense of dislocation: the rhythm of academic exchange here was very nearly no different from those conferences in his memories of his former life.

As time went on, though, Jie Ming could still clearly feel the gap between wizard civilization’s academic exchange conference and those of his former life.

Back on Earth, the flow of an academic conference was broadly fixed: reports in the morning, a communal meal and rest at midday, more reports or a poster session in the afternoon, a round of tea break slipped in between, and sometimes a dinner arranged for the evening.

But this was wizard civilization.

To wizards, whose lifespans ran to thousands or tens of thousands of years and who could go months without closing their eyes without the slightest effect on their mental state, such elaborate procedures were meaningless to begin with.

According to the schedule in the conference handbook, after the morning sessions ended there was under half an hour of tea break, which counted as free exchange time as well.

Wizards came out of the various sessions in twos and threes, taking a cup of tea offhandedly from the floating dolls beside them, or picking up a few pieces of confectionery that gave off faint energy fluctuations.

Chewing as they went, they carried straight on arguing over the details in the reports just given.

When the discussion got going, some would even unfold a light screen on the spot and start re-deriving formulas.

Before a cup of tea was finished, the afternoon sessions had already begun again.

Across the whole exchange conference there was very nearly never a moment of genuine pause.

To ordinary mortals an arrangement like this would be sheer exploitation; to wizards it seemed, if anything, rather too relaxed.

And after the brief midday tea break, Jie Ming went on to attend several more reports in a row.

The various techniques mentioned in these reports could not be called revolutionary breakthroughs, but they still gave Jie Ming a fair amount to take away.

Time slipped quietly by.

Before he knew it the sun had gone down in the west, and evening had come.

Just then, a long, gentle bell tone suddenly echoed among all the buildings.

Dong, dong, dong…

At the same time, a plainly artificial mechanical voice rose slowly. “The first-stage breakout sessions have ended. Attendees, please proceed to the central hall to rest.”

The wizards who had still been immersed in fierce discussion rose to their feet at that, with a certain reluctance.

Outside the hall, teas, sweets, fruits and high-energy nutritional foods of every kind appeared out of thin air on tabletops rising slowly from the floor.

A good many held a teacup in one hand and went on arguing red-faced over the topic of a moment ago.

Two seventh-level wizards even got so carried away that they snatched up the forks at hand and began sketching rune trajectories in midair, neither willing to yield to the other.

Jie Ming took a cup of flower tea as well and stood alone at the edge of the crowd, quietly sorting through what he had heard that day.

Those scattered fragments of inspiration in his mind were being pieced bit by bit into a new outline by the Entropy Brain talent.