I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 867: The Ways of the World

“That is… the time law?” A sixth-level wizard could not help widening his eyes.

“Did the intelligence not say he was proficient only in knowledge of the spatial category?”

“What the intelligence said was that he displayed proficiency in knowledge of the spatial category at the academic exchange conference.”

Another wizard retorted without thinking, though his own eyes stayed fixed upon Jie Ming on the dueling platform:

“But I truly never imagined that his grasp of laws of the time category ran so deep as well. Time reversal to that degree is absolutely not something a time law newly entered upon could reach!”

Seeing Jie Ming work the reversal a second time, carrying the time of the entire dueling arena back to its starting point, a wave of muffled exclamations rose up all around at once.

The gazes no small number of wizards turned upon Jie Ming had changed completely.

Before this they had known, certainly, that this young sixth-level wizard's name carried great weight, and known that in the field of spatial studies he had won the public acknowledgment of three veteran eighth-level wizards.

Yet those very things had also, without their noticing it, confined their understanding of Jie Ming.

And now they had at last recognized something they might well have misjudged from the very beginning.

They had taken Jie Ming's strong suit to be space; yet as matters looked now, space was merely that one portion of him everybody had been permitted to see!

Compared with the shock of those sixth- and seventh-level wizards, however, the eighth-level wizards present bore themselves far more placidly.

Their eyes, of course, had changed as well.

Before, when they looked at Jie Ming, they had merely been regarding an outstanding genius of a younger generation.

But now, the gaze they turned upon Jie Ming had become one for a peer who had simply not yet finished growing into himself.

For a moment there, Wizard Noren and Wizard Anton could feel it too: the eighth-level wizards around them seemed to have grown a shade warmer.

…

…

Two bouts done, it was next the turn of Clark and Azrael to fight.

Nothing needed saying. Clark and Azrael stepped up onto the dueling platform at the same moment.

In the very instant the two of them set foot in the central area, the atmosphere of the whole garden seemed to congeal.

Sensing, it appeared, that the strength of the pair was no ordinary thing, the dueling platform began to expand of its own accord.

The space within began to swell madly, while grass and flowers grew up underfoot, until the whole of it looked like a stretch of open plain.

At the same time, dense ranks of defensive runes surfaced swiftly as well, raising the strength of the protective array.

Beyond that there were even a good many binding runes bearing upon space, to make certain that the battle between the two would not shatter this plane.

The wizards who had still been conversing by mental energy broke off one after another, wine cups halting in midair.

Even those eighth-level wizards who had been exchanging soul fluctuations stopped what they were doing as if by common accord, and turned their gazes upon the dueling platform.

A battle between seventh-level wizards.

Even a mere sparring match was, for the overwhelming majority of sixth- and seventh-level wizards, a rare piece of live instruction.

And as for the eighth-level wizards, they were observing just the same—observing these two peers who would inevitably reach the eighth level in time to come.

The instant the dueling platform completed its transformation, Azrael struck first.

There was no hint of probing about it; he came in at full force from the outset.

Boom!

A grey-white Law Solidification Domain of decay erupted out of his body in an instant, like a boundless tide spreading madly outward along himself.

The flowers that had only just grown up inside the dueling platform withered swiftly the moment they touched that aura of decay.

Bright petals lost their color, emerald leaves and branches turned ashen, and the vines curled up one after another.

Then, all at once, these dead plants turned to powder together and were swept off into the distance by an invisible storm.

In the blink of an eye.

The whole of the dueling platform had become a dead zone.

Withered grey patterns surfaced from every side, like countless fine chains winding layer upon layer toward Clark.

Clark did not fall back, nor did he show the least intention of unfolding a Law Solidification Domain.

He simply stood there quietly, watching everything Azrael did, until the first line of decay arrived before him.

Clark raised a single finger and tapped it lightly.

Hum…

That grey-white pattern was as though it had struck an invisible wall, and it dispersed just so, soundless and without trace, as though it had never existed at all.

Azrael's brows knitted faintly.

The next moment.

More spells descended all at once.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

One after another, each kind of attack directed at a different level of existence, with almost nothing repeated.

It could be said that Azrael had poured the whole of his understanding of “decay,” accumulated across tens of thousands of years, into these attacks.

Clark's defense on his side, however, was watertight.

A torrent of energy came surging in; a casual stroke of his hand, and that torrent was guided away elsewhere.

A withering mark landed on his body; he raised a hand and brushed at it, and the mark collapsed of itself.

Grey-white power crept soundlessly up from beneath his feet; Clark did not so much as look at it, and a film all but impossible to perceive spread outward from where he stood.

Those grey-white powers, on meeting the film, dispersed swiftly, like a tide striking a dyke.

The whole process flowed like drifting cloud and running water, without the least trace of exertion about it.

Jie Ming, standing before the dueling platform, could see it perfectly clearly: Mentor Clark had not truly entered a combat state at all.

More precisely, he had been leaving Azrael his face the entire time. Otherwise these attacks would not even have managed to come near.

Viola, at his side, leaned in toward Jie Ming. “Looks as though he means to take it to a draw.”

“Mm.” Jie Ming nodded. “Looks as though he does not want faces torn open.”

Viola folded her arms and gave a shrug. “Normal enough. We have won this contest regardless, and Teacher has already dealt with her end of the business. We have face and substance both, so there is no need to press too hard; leaving the other side a little room is no bad thing.”

Jie Ming was much of the same mind as Viola.

He knew his Senior Sister had more she had not said: Azrael, after all, was not one man alone. Eighth-level wizards stood behind him as well, and a faction of no small strength within the Crimson Court besides.

If this business were pushed to the point of leaving no room at all, they would have their face, but by then the nature of the affair would have changed.

A wizard's life was not only fighting and killing; there were also the ways of the world.

So from the beginning of the fight until now, Clark had been deliberately holding his own power in check, keeping himself at much the same level as Azrael.

Otherwise, to say nothing of anything else, on the single point of the Law Solidification Domain, Clark could have crushed the other man outright by his own domain alone.

Those who realized this, however, were only these three who knew Clark especially well, and those eighth-level wizards who could read what they saw.

To the other wizards present, the two of them were fighting quite fiercely.

And Azrael, as Clark's opponent, naturally perceived it as well; seeing how matters stood, his face turned colder still.

Suddenly he raised both hands, and the grey-white power of decay contracted abruptly, as though the energy of the entire dueling platform had been forcibly drained away for an instant.

In the next instant, a fluctuation of power utterly unlike anything before spread outward from within his body.