I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 876: Trump Card

Looking at the Death Husk in his hands, a burning heat flashed at the bottom of Azrael’s eyes.

For this one thing, he… or rather their whole line, had been laying plans for a very long time.

After all, to obtain a Death Husk, the first step was to find the chaotic interlayer and pin down the range within which the spatial fold beasts moved.

For an eighth-level wizard that much was no great trouble; the one difficult part was that it took an enormous amount of time.

By what Azrael knew of it, his line had spent several hundred thousand years finding the corresponding coordinates.

But the genuinely difficult part was the second step, which was to deal with a spatial fold beast.

Their reflection ability alone made it clear enough: at bottom, a spatial fold beast was a creature that bullied the weak and feared the strong.

Because an eighth-level wizard could never become a target of their reflection, a spatial fold beast that sensed the presence of an eighth-level being would simply hide itself away.

Between the peculiar spatial environment of the chaotic interlayer and the peculiar state of existence of the beasts themselves, even an eighth-level wizard would find them very hard to locate.

So if one wanted to dispose of a spatial fold beast, no eighth-level wizard could be allowed to appear at all. Only then would the beast come out of its own accord.

And after that, one had to find some way to kill it.

But that was exactly where the problem lay.

Once reflected, the individual so reflected had almost no chance whatsoever of defeating the spatial fold beast.

Azrael counted as one of the very foremost geniuses among the seventh-level wizards of the Scarlet Hive, and against a spatial fold beast the most he had managed was to keep himself from dying.

So under normal circumstances this was a loop with virtually no way out.

Until Azrael met Viola.

Her primary cultivation was the Law of Pain, and she could convert the pain she endured into power.

In that instant, Azrael knew that the opportunity his line had waited so bitterly for had come.

It could fairly be said that Viola was an even better candidate for dealing with a spatial fold beast than Kastilla was.

Given the relationship between the two sides, even if that relationship could be smoothed over in future, it would still take a vast amount of time.

Which was why Azrael had taken the risk of using the collapse of the spatial runes in the dueling arena to draw the whole group into that chaotic interlayer.

In the end the plan had gone exactly as smoothly as he had imagined.

The one thing Azrael had not foreseen was, more or less, that the person who truly changed the plan had not been Viola.

Azrael looked at that broken “Death Husk,” a few traces of hardly concealable astonishment still lingering in his eyes.

“I had thought the key was Viola. I never imagined…” He let out a soft breath. “That it would be that Jie Ming.”

The other, the necromancy-system eighth-level wizard, gave a laugh at that. “He is genuinely outstanding, to manage that at the sixth level. One can only say he is worthy of being a man acknowledged at once by all three of the spatial masters Savien, Bastian and Morna.”

The decay-system eighth-level wizard nodded as well. “The little fellow is certainly no simple matter. A pity that we have not managed to build a good relationship with him this time.”

Azrael was silent a moment, then in the end smiled faintly. “Still, so long as the thing is in hand, doing without his connections is no great loss.”

The necromancy-system eighth-level wizard looked at the Death Husk before him, his voice full of feeling.

“Indeed. For a wish this line has carried down through who knows how many generations. That much risk… was worth it.”

Azrael said nothing, and only slowly tightened his grip on the Death Husk in his hands.

In those eyes of his, always so calm, there rose a vision of the future he could not hold back.

Seeing him like that, the decay-system eighth-level wizard shook his head with a smile. “We are going. Remember to set the array in order; our descendants will still have use for it in time to come.”

“Yes!”

Azrael turned back and set about adjusting the array.

As one rune after another slowly went dark, the enormous array gradually lost its light as well.

At the same time, within the chaotic interlayer, the light of that identically shaped giant array likewise sank slowly into stillness, and even the space around it, which the array had been churning, returned to calm along with it.

And as the array in the chaotic interlayer slowly went quiet, deeper in still, amid a stretch of elemental turbulence, a battered head drifted slowly along with the current.

That head was damaged past all recognition, its surface skin peeled away, the alloy skull within cracked through the greater part of it, and the mental core inside long since gone inert.

But deep in the one eye that remained, a point of exceedingly fine light was flickering.

At that same moment, the main laboratory on the Infernal Sulfur Plane was unusually lively.

Jie Ming stood before his workbench, adjusting the data on the light screen without pause.

Viola lay half-reclined in a sofa to one side, her long legs crossed, playing with a lock of her hair.

Clark stood by the door, as silent in his bearing as ever.

And besides them, Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton had both come; even Teacher Kastilla was present, sizing up the furnishings of Jie Ming’s laboratory with considerable interest.

“Well?” Grand-Mentor Anton was the first who could not hold back, his small face full of impatience. “Have you worked out what those fellows were really up to?”

“The other side’s array has already withdrawn, and I am detecting no monitoring signal, so it should be possible to transmit now.” As Jie Ming spoke, he raised a hand and tapped once at the workbench.

A suspended crystal ball lit up, its radiance projecting into the air and congealing into a clear light screen.

What appeared on the screen was precisely the scene of that array at work in the depths of the chaotic interlayer: an immense battlefield of space fragments dragged steadily along by a colossal array, until at last, like a broken mirror, it was compressed and carried off by some manner of power.

When Jie Ming had first entered the space fragment to fight the spatial fold beast, the puppet that had been smashed to pieces there had never been recovered by him.

Beyond the fact that the fight had genuinely been too pressing at the time, there had been another important reason: he had wanted to leave those remains behind in the chaotic interlayer to serve as a coordinate and a monitor.

Jie Ming’s original objective had in fact been the spatial fold beast itself, for a sparring partner able to press a target with such precision, right at the limit of what that target could bear, was simply far too precious!

Especially for a Jie Ming whose Body Forging Method possessed adaptive evolution, the thing was quite literally a piece of training equipment made to his measure.

The time-afterimage training he had so often used before had already lost much of its effect since he entered the sixth level, and a creature like the spatial fold beast happened to fill that gap exactly.

While he was setting it up, though, Jie Ming had been extremely careful, going so far as to make it look deliberately like a battle loss.

After all, it had already been established by then that the accident was Azrael’s doing, and nobody could be certain whether he might still be covertly watching the wizards in the other space fragments even in the middle of the fighting.

It was only that Jie Ming had never expected them to turn up something quite this astonishing.

Viola leaned in a little closer, watching the light screen intently. “So this thing is what they were after? A stretch of space that had already been smashed to pieces to begin with?”

Jie Ming looked up at Mentor Clark without thinking. “About this thing, I am rather at a loss.”

To his surprise, however, even Mentor Clark shook his head, and Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton beside him, after careful thought, shook theirs helplessly as well.

Fortunately, with the name of the spatial fold beast to work from as a starting point, extending the search to the associated information was not especially difficult.

After spending a little high-level military merit to purchase the relevant knowledge, not one of those present could keep from being somewhat astounded.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk… these fellows had it all worked out nicely. No wonder the goodwill they offered was so generous; they were terrified we would keep pursuing the matter. So it was that they were afraid we would discover their real purpose.”

Grand-Mentor Anton curled his lip, then broke into a sinister little smile. “Still… now that we know, we can get hold of some ourselves later on. Young Jie Ming, you did well this time. A good thing you had that wreckage of yours to mark the coordinates!”

For given the peculiar nature of the chaotic interlayer, even an eighth-level wizard, lacking coordinates, would have to spend incalculable time and effort simply finding the place, let alone pinpointing the range in which the spatial fold beasts moved within the interlayer.

“I will handle the research.” At this point Wizard Noren put in mildly from one side. “With these coordinates, a few hundred years should see us able to enter again.”

Grand-Mentor Anton laughed all the more happily at that, rubbing his small hands together hard, as though he could already see a great crowd of Death Husks beckoning to them.

Jie Ming and Viola exchanged a glance, and neither could keep a smile from showing.