I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 880: A New Line of Thought

Jie Ming quickly suppressed the urge in his heart.

Jie Ming knew his own measure very well. With his own abilities there was no possibility whatsoever of doing as Mentor Clark had done, entering every law by force of sheer intellect; he could rely only on Plane Origin.

His assets might be considerable now, but if he meant to lay a foundation in every law by way of Plane Origin, the military merit required would be a truly astronomical figure!

His present earning power could already be called outrageous, and yet spreading out a foundation across the whole body of laws in one sweep was not something to be finished in any short span of time.

What was more, even if he really did buy up every Plane Origin there was, the absorption alone would likely take him more than a thousand years.

And after that, letting his law mastery counts grow of their own accord to the standard needed for advancing to the seventh level, on the strength of his Dao Integration properties, would cost more than a few tens of thousands of years besides.

Of course, long as that sounded, set against Clark’s hundred thousand years and more it was already very economical.

“What is troublesome at present is that a good many Plane Origins with rare properties simply have a price and no market. Even spending high-level military merit, they are not easily bought.”

Jie Ming stroked his chin, thinking. “And if I want to accelerate the growth of my law mastery counts, buying up all the various kinds of knowledge in the later stages will consume a great deal of military merit too.”

“So it comes to this: if I mean to walk the path of all the laws in my present circumstances, I still have to obtain the Level-One Cultivation Protocol first.”

The requirement for obtaining the Level-One Cultivation Protocol was very “simple”: develop a technology capable of raising the combat strength of the entire wizard civilization appreciably.

Jie Ming had in fact had a plan for that in reserve for a long while; he had merely been held back all along by the insufficiency of his own knowledge, unable to put it truly into practice.

“Mm… next, then, I can begin sifting out the relevant knowledge and Plane Origins and start raising myself.”

Having thought that far, Jie Ming was in no hurry to go and buy new knowledge and Plane Origin at once.

“Dear me, several years of hard work all in one go. Let me see… I shall look over a few of the latest papers first and relax a little.”

…

…

A dozen years and more slipped by in a flash.

On this particular day, Jie Ming had been staring for a long while at the densely packed analytical data on the light screen.

He leaned back in his chair and could not help letting out a sigh. “This really is… a nuisance!”

The data on the light screen was the fully parsed elemental structural signature of the mushroom-men.

Through these several decades of continuous research, Jie Ming had at last taken the mushroom-men’s bodily structure entirely apart.

With the research complete, looking again at these half-elemental, half-living creatures, Jie Ming’s assessment of them was rather different from before.

The mushroom-men truly were superb base material for cannon fodder: fast to breed, with a high survival rate and strong vitality, and once they formed a collective intelligence through soul connection they had quite respectable battlefield coordination as well.

But… they were far too difficult to modify!

“And here I thought the ordinary ceiling for these things was the seventh level at the very most, and that the mushroom-man leader advancing to the eighth was a stroke of luck… I never expected this!”

These years of research had led Jie Ming to a rather astonishing conclusion: the strength of the mushroom-man race at its height had very likely far exceeded what he had first imagined!

Put simply, those sixth-level commanders he had first encountered inside the mushroom-men’s plane had very likely been eighth-level creatures originally.

Jie Ming scrolled back through the data on the light screen and soon found the particular passage of analysis he wanted.

Among those sixth-level mushroom-men captured earlier in the mushroom-men’s plane, their elemental skeletons contained abundant traces of high-order energy that had been compressed and deliberately damaged.

This indicated that these creatures had in all likelihood been eighth-level creatures to begin with, which was why they could fall back rapidly to the sixth level once they had obtained sufficient replenishment.

Their levels had dropped, in all probability, because they had done it to themselves on purpose.

“That makes sense. Even in low-output dormancy, the gap in energy consumption between an eighth-level creature and a fifth- or sixth-level one is a difference of heaven and earth.”

To get through the long famine of resources, these mushroom-men had chosen to demote themselves deliberately, trading away power in exchange for a longer span of survival.

“Which means it was only innate limits that kept the mushroom-man leader from reaching the ninth level; otherwise, in that final battle against the civilization that created them, the outcome would certainly have gone the other way.”

Jie Ming stroked his chin. This showed the species’ potential ran even deeper than he had imagined.

“No wonder that civilization chose exile. Fighting it out with a monstrous race like this, they would definitely have lost. Though looking at it this way, a civilization able to exile a race of that calibre was no weakling itself!”

Just as Jie Ming was pondering, the laboratory door was pushed open and several Black Giant priests hurried in.

The Black Giant priest at their head was carrying a research report only just completed.

“My Lord, the research you called for has yielded new results.”

“Speak.”

The Black Giant priest looked somewhat helpless. “Regarding the project you proposed earlier, of modifying the mushroom-men’s reproductive capacity into the Dragonmen, it has failed. Whatever method we adopt, no stable corresponding structure can be formed.”

Jie Ming was not greatly surprised. The core of the mushroom-men’s combat strength lay in the elementalised half of their constitution, the half that had been modified, together with the high-intensity soul and intelligence born of their mental connection.

But in essence they remained that race at the bottom of the food chain; their reproductive capacity was bound deeply to the essential nature of their life, which was altogether unlike the essential nature of a Dragonman’s.

To have a higher form of flesh-and-blood life such as a Dragonman acquire the mushroom-men’s mode of propagation by spores was not to say it could not be done, but it was certainly beyond what Jie Ming’s present techniques could achieve.

“A pity.” Jie Ming rubbed his temples helplessly.

His original plan had been to try whether the Dragonmen could be given the mushroom-men’s reproductive capacity.

Had it truly succeeded, the Dragonmen would have had the mushroom-men’s rate of troop production, and in the space of only a few years he could have fielded an entire Dragonman army.

“Ah well. Since there is no way to produce a Dragonman army out of the mushroom-men’s propagation, I can hardly go and produce a heap of dragonblood mushroom-men instead. At my present standard, dragonblood mushroom-men would have no combat strength to speak of… eh?!”

Following the thought that far, even Jie Ming himself was brought up short.

Seeing Jie Ming’s reaction, the several Black Giant priests exchanged glances. “…My Lord?”

Jie Ming slowly raised his head, his eyes growing brighter and brighter.

“Why… should it not work?”

Paying no mind to the trembling apprehension of the several Black Giant priests, Jie Ming had already sat up straight and begun to think the matter through in earnest.

That was it: why not do it the other way round?

Rather than turning the Dragonmen into mushroom-men, better to turn the mushroom-men into Dragonmen.

With his present modification techniques, while ensuring that the mushroom-men’s propagation and their mental connection went unaffected, the most he could do was give them dragon blood of the very thinnest sort.

Since the mushroom-men’s combat strength derived chiefly from the other half of them, the elemental body, that thread of draconic lineage could produce no qualitative change in their fighting power.

But its true function was to open, for the Dragonmen, a back door into the mushroom-men’s mental connection.

Dragonmen could resonate with one another through their bloodline; it was precisely this property that let a higher Dragonman suppress a lower one.

Relying on that property, a Dragonman could intervene directly in the mushroom-men’s mental energy network and become something like a commanding officer.

“What is more, the mushroom-men’s mental network is itself constantly producing new soul fragments, and if those fragments gather into a new mushroom-man and give birth to a new soul, it slips free of control.”

The last civilization that had meant to control the mushroom-men had come to grief in exactly that way, after all.

“But if I plug a Dragonman into the mushroom-men’s mental connection…”

Then the mental energy and the soul fragments produced by the mushroom-men’s collective intelligence could flow along the mental connection and converge upon the Dragonman commander, stabilising the mushroom-men’s legions and strengthening the Dragonman himself at the same time.

Jie Ming’s earlier definition of the Dragonmen had been as a spearhead force assembled for making breakthroughs, but in truth he had never given the matter much attention.

Because any enemy his own strength could not deal with would be difficult for a Dragonman legion to deal with either.

So even a project like the bloodline rune modification he had handed straight to his subordinates as practice.

But going by this idea of his now, the Dragonmen could serve perfectly well as the command nodes of the mushroom legions.

And command nodes strong enough to have no fear of decapitation, at that!

Dragonmen commanding dragonblood mushroom-men with their intelligence: that was a combined legion in the true sense of the word!

“Worth a try!”

Jie Ming’s eyes lit up, and he set about his preparations at once.