I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 857: Harvest

Augusta withdrew her palm from the mushroom cap of the mushroom-man leader.

At the same time, a faint ripple of mental energy rose out of her mind and linked with Jie Ming's.

It was the complete intelligence she had drawn from the depths of the mushroom-man leader's soul.

“Watching” the images that mental energy laid out in his spiritual sea, Jie Ming soon had the whole story of the mushroom-man race.

Just as he had guessed earlier, the mushroom-men really were the product of artificial modification.

In the distant past, the ancestors of this race had been nothing more than ordinary creatures at the very bottom of some plane's food chain.

These mushroom-men had no combat power whatsoever. Their one advantage was that they bred fast and grew fast, and it was on numbers alone that the species barely kept itself going.

Then one day a scientist singled them out as subjects for genetic modification, and remade them into biological tools built specifically for digging up ore.

The first modified mushroom-men did perform excellently at mining, well enough in fact to become quite a strong seller as mining tools on that plane.

But the mushroom-men still had the problem of being dim-witted, which made giving them orders far too much trouble.

Later, some scientist went on to develop a soul-linkage technology.

All this scientist had meant by it was to let the biological tools receive instructions more efficiently.

Yet with that soul-linkage technology in place, once the mushroom-man population swelled past a certain critical point, the soul fragments scattered through every individual actually integrated themselves through the linkage network.

With no external intervention whatsoever, one mushroom-man at the very top developed consciousness.

Which was to say, the mushroom-man leader Jie Ming and the others had met.

After that came a standard script for test subjects slipping their leash: rampage, backlash, loss of control, suppression, counter-suppression… round and round.

On the strength of their absurd reproductive capacity and a respectable amount of combat power, the mushroom-men even held the upper hand in the war for a time.

In the end that civilization had no choice but to exile the entire mushroom-man race to another world.

“…Hold on?!”

Jie Ming's head snapped up, light blazing in his pupils.

…Exiled to another world.

The mushroom-men came from another plane.

Which meant… there was another plane out there!

Augusta had clearly caught the same piece of information; the same flash of excitement crossed her eyes.

A civilization that could create a cannon-fodder modification base as excellent as the mushroom-men, and that had the technical capacity to exile them to another plane… its overall strength was absolutely not to be underestimated.

Even if that civilization had declined after the mushroom-men slipped its control, or even died out entirely, the knowledge and technology it had left behind were on their own well worth exploring in depth!

The two of them soon cooled off again, though.

The mushroom-men had been in exile far too long; even the mushroom-man leader itself had no clear idea how much time had actually passed.

And as a batch of discarded goods sent into exile, the mushroom-man leader's soul memories could hardly be expected to retain the void coordinates of its original plane.

…That civilization was hardly stupid enough to let exiled test subjects know where its home was, after all.

“Still… it isn't as though there's no way.” Jie Ming rubbed his chin, thinking. “As a creature native to that plane, its body structure has to still carry traces connected to it.”

Beside him, Augusta nodded in agreement. “We can try running an analysis.”

The mushroom-men were, after all, creatures native to that plane, and traces of the plane of their birth were bound to remain within their elemental frame structure.

Start from this mushroom-man leader's elemental structure, study its shell composition, its soul residue and its law imprints deeply enough, and there was a chance of working backwards to deduce the void coordinates of that unknown plane.

It would just take a considerable length of time.

“That side of it is no problem. The family has wizards who specialize in biology; they can take their time with the research.” Augusta's tone had recovered its usual coolness.

Even so, Jie Ming could hear the suppressed excitement in her voice.

“Good timing, then. We've just finished a planar war, the mandatory rest period still has a long way to run, and neither of us can take a second mission for a while yet.” Jie Ming nodded.

For him, the resource returns of an ordinary plane really weren't worth much of a look these days.

The military merit revenue share from the Blood Sacrifice Method and the Life Homeostasis Field technique alone was enough to steadily cover his current spending on array eye materials for the All-Heavens Star Grand Array and on day-to-day research.

But a civilization able to turn out a cannon-fodder modification base as excellent as the mushroom-men, and to possess cross-planar exile technology besides, had a store of knowledge and a depth of technique that were simply too attractive to pass up.

What was more, since the other side had been able to exile the mushroom-men to this plane, there might well be other, similar exile records somewhere in that long river of history.

And among them there could easily be new plane coordinates waiting to be dug up.

Which was to say, he stood a very good chance of reaping a whole string of gains from this plane in the days ahead.

“This has been a pleasant collaboration. Once the family's wizards have analyzed out that plane's coordinates, I'll invite you again; I hope you won't turn me down then.” Augusta gave Jie Ming a small smile.

Jie Ming smiled and nodded as well. “Then I'll look forward to it. I won't keep you any longer.”

Jie Ming had little interest in the reorganization of the spoils that came next.

The mushroom-man plane's own resources had long since been gnawed clean, and what mineral deposits remained had all been eaten down to nothing by the mushroom-man leader.

The reorganization work amounted to counting prisoners, taking inventory of ore and dividing up the occupied territory: the sort of business logistics wizards were best at.

Returns on that scale simply did not catch Jie Ming's eye.

“Well then. Until we meet again, if the chance comes.”

“Goodbye.”

His farewells to Augusta done, Jie Ming returned to the Infernal Sulfur Plane.

…

…

Back on the Infernal Sulfur Plane, Jie Ming first checked over the losses from this planar war.

The Tentacle Tree Civilization had lost a batch of warships, mostly ships caught in the shield-overload explosions set off when the mushroom-men rammed them in suicide runs.

They were all standard models, though; a run from the automated factories would replace them.

As for personnel casualties…

He had spread the power of the Incense Fire Divine Dao across in step with the invasion from its very start, and not just to look busy.

Every Black Giant and Tentacle Tree crewman on the verge of death had been teleported back at the last instant by the Dao Soldier System to the resurrection altar on the Infernal Sulfur Plane.

After these days of treatment, the wounded had long since healed completely.

And then came the harvest.

Jie Ming came to the main laboratory, and the teleportation passage of his inner world opened slowly behind him.

Three seventh-level mushroom-men, along with several dozen sixth-level ones, hung fixed in the void by binding formations.

Mottled cracks left over from the fighting still marked their rocky shells.

The Black Giant priests to one side moved in quickly, holding the mushroom-men in their sealed state as they hauled them one by one deep into the laboratory.

Following Jie Ming's instructions, they settled each mushroom-man into a separate binding formation of its own.

Although he had gained no new knowledge or resources this time, the mushroom-men alone counted as coming out ahead.

These mushroom-men really were well suited to serve as the modification base for cannon-fodder units.

Fast reproduction, a short cycle to adulthood, strong survivability, and a half-elemental, half-living body structure that was naturally suited to fighting in every sort of extreme environment.

And once their numbers built up, the soul-linkage network let them generate a collective intelligence of their own accord.

It was just that their current ceiling on combat power was too low, and growing purely by devouring matter to climb a level was far too crude a method.

Jie Ming intended to give them a round of modification and upgrades while preserving their core advantages.

“Though… no inspiration for the moment.”

Thinking this, Jie Ming went back to the laboratory.

…

…

Several decades slipped by in a flash.

That day, in the center of the laboratory, the last set of law deduction data in front of Jie Ming was finishing its archiving.

He reached out and shut off the light screen, then leaned back into his chair, closed his eyes, and sank his consciousness deep into his spiritual sea.

On the Ring of Truth, countless golden law threads wove through one another.

Jie Ming set about reviewing what he had accumulated across these decades.

Taking the law mastery of a wizard freshly promoted to the sixth level as the baseline and setting it at “one,” then after the academic exchange conference the only law he could genuinely call an advantage was the spatial law.

At that time, his spatial law mastery had just barely reached thirty.

That was owed chiefly to the three masters of spatial studies, Savien, Bastian and Morna.

That stretch of the academic exchange conference had helped him far more than it looked from the outside.

But it was true of the spatial law alone; his mastery of the other laws mostly still sat in the single digits.

After these years of systematic catching up, however, he had finally filled those weak spots in bit by bit.

The fastest riser among them was the time law, whose mastery had reached fifteen.

Jie Ming looked at that golden thread, noticeably thicker than the others, and felt rather satisfied.

The reason the time law could improve as much as it had was owed mainly to the Ash Return to Origin Hand.

The technique itself involved power on the temporal level, and over these years Jie Ming had cast and deduced with it extensively almost every single day.

Every use was one more study of the time law.

Accumulated across several decades, the effect was naturally quite pronounced.

And the law's improvement in turn drove the Ash Return to Origin Hand forward.

“Precision aside, the main improvement in the Ash Return to Origin Hand now is response speed…”

Jie Ming thought back and made the comparison. “It should be close to twice as fast as when I first mastered it.”

That meant that once he was actually in combat, he could finish constructing the technique far more quickly.

It did not look like much of a gain, but for a high-level wizard, technique response speed was often the difference between life and death.

Especially in a fight between wizards of the same level, being one instant faster meant the opponent died first.

Jie Ming turned his attention next to the inside of his dantian.

Floating there was an ancient, many-colored precious mirror: the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror.

Over these years, he had not let this natal magic treasure sit idle.

Drawing on the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror's own spirituality, he had had the natal magic treasure run near-limitless simulations automatically through those years.

Following the rune frequency combination techniques Rades had shared at the academic exchange conference, it ran extensive tests on other rune combinations.

The overwhelming majority of those experimental results carried no practical significance at all.

But so long as the sheer number of experiments was large enough, something always surfaced out of the countless failures.

The most direct outcome was that the Terminus Ray's destructive power had risen another notch above where it had stood decades ago.

The Echo Shell's improvement was no small thing either: its elemental particles stacked faster, letting it reach greater destructive power in less time.

Jie Ming slowly opened his eyes. “All in all, this harvest isn't bad.”

Even so, his gaze fell without his meaning it to on the dozen-odd golden law threads growing slowly in his spiritual sea.

The ease drained slowly from his face.

“After the sixth level… the difficulty of advancing hasn't dropped at all. If anything, it's gone up.”

Fifth level to sixth was an obvious qualitative change.

The Law Solidification Domain was born, and from that point on a gap in life level in the truest sense opened between sixth-level wizards and low-level ones.

But the next genuinely qualitative change after the sixth level had to wait for the eighth, when Law Fixation could be mastered.

Which was to say, the standard for advancing to seventh-level wizard was in fact an artificially drawn line as well.

It amounted to nothing more than requiring a wizard's extension or deepening research on his own law to reach a certain degree.

These days there was not even a fully uniform “advancement ceremony” for a wizard reaching the seventh level.

The so-called seventh level was, in essence, a realm wizard civilization had marked out for wizards whose research into their own laws had reached a certain point.

Jie Ming spread a light screen open on the workbench beside him and called up a set of data.

“If the law mastery and mental energy base of a wizard who has just reached the sixth level are both taken as one…”

Within the light screen, a data line unfolded slowly.

“The advancement standard for an ordinary seventh-level wizard is a law base of one hundred and a mental energy base of one hundred.”

Which was to say.

Even going by surface figures alone, a sixth-level wizard and a seventh-level wizard were a hundred times apart!

Of course, given that a wizard's output efficiency grew along with his knowledge, the actual gap in combat power was a hundred times the mental energy multiplied again by a hundred times the difference in knowledge.

It was only because the increase in base his Dharma Form brought was so utterly outrageous; otherwise even that bandit who had only just reached the seventh level back then would have been beyond him.

But… this was still only the gap on the surface.

It was only once he actually began the research that Jie Ming learned just how long this road was.

The further on it went, the harder the knowledge became, the more difficult it was to research, and the greater the talent it demanded.

At the stage past the sixth level, the law base that could be raised by relying on a Plane Origin was limited.

What a Plane Origin recorded, after all, was only the regularities by which a plane operated, which was to say the most “superficial” knowledge there was.

Even absorbing it without pause, the most it would do was raise the law base to a dozen-odd points.

And advancing to the seventh level required further extension or deepening research into law knowledge.

And this was only the conventional seventh level.

There was also the unconventional seventh level: the elite route, where law extension and law deepening research were pursued at the same time.

Pursuing extension or deepening alone meant a law base of one hundred.

But researching both at once did not mean simply adding them up and reaching two hundred. It meant one hundred multiplied by one hundred, which was ten thousand.

Deepening dug downward, after all, while extension spread out to the sides.

Combine the two and you got their product.

At the same time, the demand on mental energy was likewise ten thousand times over.

This was no longer an accumulation an ordinary seventh-level wizard could even imagine. It was more like a road prepared specifically for monsters.

Of course, there was one more realistic option.

Advance to the seventh level first, then double back and fill in the other road.

Whether one could extend and deepen a law at the same time was the dividing line between an elite seventh level and an ordinary one.

Jie Ming suddenly thought of what Clark had demanded of Viola.

Looking back on it now, he finally understood something of what that had actually meant.

“Extension and deepening… sure enough, Senior Sister's talent really is exceptional.”

That was what a real monster looked like.

Jie Ming “looked” toward his own golden law threads.

For now, he had only gradually pushed his second-echelon laws to somewhere around ten.

Even the spatial law, which had come furthest, was still a long way from the one hundred of an ordinary seventh level.

To say nothing of… ten thousand.

Jie Ming was silent a moment, though he felt no anxiety over it.

A road was walked one step at a time, and more importantly, the Dao Integration Realm of the cultivation system had been developed for the express purpose of comprehending the “Great Dao.”

The rest was nothing but a matter of time.

Suddenly, a communication alert lit up on the magical network terminal.

It was an academy notice from Dean Avery Knight: “All Mentors of the academy, assemble in the conference room.”

“Something's happened again?”

Jie Ming rose, straightened his robe, and headed for the teleportation array.

Spatial light flared, and his figure vanished from the laboratory.

Author's Note: Just one chapter today.