I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 875: Rescue and Purpose

One had to admit it: the research those Scarlet Hive wizards had done was correct.

Clark and the others had barely finished their fight when a will so vast it beggared description descended abruptly upon them.

Boom!!!

The chaos around them was torn bodily open, as though by some vast invisible hand. Jie Ming felt the space before his eyes twist all at once, every color, distance and bearing drawn out together into weird long streaks.

Then his field of vision flared bright, and the feel of solid ground returned beneath his feet.

Grey-blue flagstones. The soft scent of flowers.

On the long banquet table in the distance, the wine glasses still stood where they had been left, unfinished.

They were back.

Taking in the scene before them, the whole party felt dazed, as though that life-and-death battle had never happened at all.

Jie Ming steadied himself and looked up at once.

On the far side of the garden, several eighth-level wizards were still standing exactly where they had been.

Their dress was immaculate, their expressions calm; some of them had not even set down the glasses in their hands.

Their composure made it seem as though Jie Ming and the rest being swept away by spatial turbulence had been nothing more than a trifling little interlude.

Not that every eighth-level wizard was so calm. The faces of Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton, for instance, had gone noticeably darker.

Grand-Mentor Anton stood with his hands clasped behind his back, and that small face of his, which always wore a smile, was for once utterly cold.

He said nothing, only looked at the two eighth-level wizards standing behind Azrael, while invisible fluctuations of power gathered in the air.

Given the control an eighth-level wizard had over energy, a convergence of power that obvious was plainly a statement of where he stood.

Wizard Noren was more direct still. His gaze settled on the two eighth-level wizards opposite.

“Your Excellency, was this ‘accident’ not rather too much of a coincidence?”

With those words, the atmosphere dropped at once to freezing.

The decay-system eighth-level wizard took no offense at Wizard Noren’s accusation; he merely set down his glass.

“The matter was indeed an oversight on our part. We had not expected the spatial stabilization structure of the dueling arena to develop a sudden anomaly. You were all badly startled, and for that we sincerely apologize.”

The other, a necromancy-system eighth-level wizard, nodded in agreement.

“We will have a quantity of resources prepared shortly, as compensation for the accident.”

Their manner was perfectly courteous, and yet there was not the slightest admission that the accident had been man-made.

Still, it could be seen that they had no wish to let the affair grow any larger either.

Wizard Noren held their eyes for a while, and in the end said nothing further.

He understood perfectly well that without any substantive evidence, the matter would in fact end here.

After all, once wizards of their level truly tore off the mask of civility, things would only become more troublesome.

Grand-Mentor Anton curled his lip and gave a snort, and the gathered fluctuation of power around him dispersed with it.

“Never mind. If everyone insists on calling it an accident, then an accident it shall be.”

There was a great deal here that everyone present understood perfectly well; it was simply that nobody was willing to poke through that last layer of paper.

Of course, it was also because none of their own people had come to any real harm that they had no intention of pursuing it further.

Elsewhere, having satisfied herself that Clark and the others were unhurt, Kastilla had walked over to stand before her own mentor, Morin.

“Teacher.” She bowed her head slightly.

Morin looked at this disciple taught by their own hand, then smiled, raised a hand and patted her head. “You have made up your mind?”

“I have.” Kastilla nodded.

“I decided a long time ago. This is something I want to do myself.”

Morin looked at her for a long moment, and at last sighed.

“You have had that temperament since you were small. Once you have settled on something, there are few who can make you change it.”

Kastilla laughed. “Teacher knows me best after all.”

“Go, then.” Morin nodded slightly. “Your own road is yours to walk.”

Kastilla bowed in salute, then went over to Aislinn, who stood to one side, and saluted her as well.

Aislinn looked at her with a smile. “Will you still come back, one day?”

“Of course.” Kastilla said with a smile, “This will always be my home.”

With that she turned and walked toward where Clark stood.

…

…

The people of Noren Workshop had already left.

Under the cover of night.

Deep within the Scarlet Hive, on a certain plane, a private laboratory had been sealed off layer upon layer.

And at the very center of that laboratory stood a huge and intricate array.

Azrael stood at the middle of the array, with his two eighth-level elders standing to either side of him.

None of the three spoke, and the atmosphere was unusually heavy.

Then Azrael raised both hands. “The fluctuations have resonated. Let us begin!”

“Very well.”

The two eighth-level wizards nodded, raised their own hands with the same gravity, and released their mental energy into the array.

Hum…

As the array started up, a wan grey radiance rose bit by bit from its base.

An exceedingly faint spatial tremor spread out from it without cease.

Then the space at the center seemed to be torn open from within by something, and an exceedingly fine crack appeared.

Azrael brought his hands abruptly together.

Boom!

As the light of the array surged violently, the two eighth-level wizards beside him poured vast quantities of their own mental energy in at the same moment.

A moment later, a shattered object was dragged forcibly out of the depths of space.

It was a broken mirror.

Or rather… something that looked like a mirror.

The “mirror’s” glass had been broken past all recognition, countless cracks running across the whole of its surface.

The mirrored face as a whole showed a strange three-dimensional distortion, as though countless spaces had been forcibly compressed to make up the thing before them.

Azrael reached out with both hands and cradled it with great care.

And the moment he actually made contact with the “mirror,” that face of his, which had not shown the slightest ripple even when Teacher Kastilla left, revealed an excitement he made no attempt to hide.

“It worked!”

And it was not only Azrael; even the two eighth-level wizards at his side underwent a visible change of feeling.

One of them let out a long breath. “The long-held wish of our line, at last…”

The other clapped Azrael on the shoulder, his face full of approval.

“Well done! This time you have rendered a great service. Our line… is about to soar!”

Azrael lowered his head to look at the “mirror” in his hands, a near-fanatical light in his eyes.

“We have it at last. The Death Husk…”

“Death Husk” was the name they had given this thing.

It was what a spatial fold beast truly left behind once it had died.

Each broken shard of that “mirrored surface” was in fact a miniature of a dead space; or to put it another way, it was precisely the collection of those space fragments they had just passed through.

And the so-called “Death Husk” was simply the most essential structure of a space, laid bare after that space had died.

Because of the peculiar place in which the thing was born, once a spatial fold beast was wholly dead it would go on absorbing concepts related to “death,” endlessly.

That made it ideally suited to the research of wizards who cultivated laws of the decay kind.

A wizard who specialized in the laws of the power of decay very often did not even need to study it deliberately; simply holding it year after year was enough to raise his knowledge in that direction, through comprehending the concept of death inside it.

More important still, the thing could even assist a seventh-level wizard in completing Law Fixation!

It was one of those exceedingly rare treasures capable of helping a wizard ascend to the eighth level!

Although it could not be used forever, neither was it a single-use item: every shard upon it represented one more chance at an assisted Law Fixation.

Which meant that even if an attempt at Law Fixation with its aid failed once, there would still be several chances left!

It is no exaggeration to say that the thing could fairly be called a sacred relic of the School of Decay!