I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 883: Research and Improvement

The seeding of the media was done quickly.

Once Jie Ming had manufactured a great heap of media under Augusta’s guidance, he stopped paying the matter any attention.

By Augusta’s account the method relied on sheer blind luck to begin with, and even when the luck ran well one generally had to wait several hundred or a thousand years.

So after handing the media over to Augusta, Jie Ming let the business drop and turned his attention instead to two matters bearing on his own magic.

That is, to the strengthening of the Return to Ruins Armor and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.

The trip to the Crimson Court had left him keenly aware that his defensive power was far too low, and that his means of dealing damage head-on still fell somewhat short.

To take either of them a step further, he would need a deeper comprehension of the Great Dao that each represented.

Sitting in the quiet chamber of his laboratory, Jie Ming slowly closed his eyes, and soon arrived in the depths of his own consciousness.

Looking at the white jade pavilion standing there in those depths, Jie Ming once again stepped slowly into the Great Dao Book Pavilion.

As his mind stirred, countless jade slips and classical texts concerning Trigram Fire rose to float about him.

Jie Ming reached out and beckoned, and from one side an ancient book, dark red through and through as though steeped in the colour of flame, fell of its own accord into his hand.

He opened it. There, set down in ancient runes, was a description of the concept of Trigram Fire:

“Trigram Fire: it belongs to the south; it is the sun; it is lightning; it governs weapons of war; it holds sway over civilization…”

Jie Ming turned the pages, mulling over what he read as he went.

Trigram Fire was not merely flame.

What it truly pointed at was the macroscopic concept of “the release of energy.”

The sun was the wellspring of energy.

Lightning was the most direct manifestation of energy in the natural world.

Weapons of war were the result of force colliding with force.

As for civilization… in essence it was a body of intelligent life learning without cease how to obtain, control, make use of and further sublimate energy.

Seen from this angle, what Trigram Fire represented was not a mass of fire at all, but the force that set life, civilization and even the world itself in motion.

Placed within the knowledge system of the wizard world, these descriptions were the deep essence of the fire elemental law.

“No wonder…” Jie Ming slowly closed the ancient book.

“No wonder that however I strengthened the Return to Ruins Armor and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light before, it always felt as though a layer stood in the way.”

Because in essence neither the Return to Ruins Armor nor the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light was merely a piece of magic; each was the concrete embodiment of the comprehension of the Great Dao held by the cultivator who created it.

So in the immortal cultivation world, when a cultivator trained in magic of the Spirit Transformation Stage or above, he had to hone that magic through comprehension of the Great Dao.

In the wizard world, however, before he could take that step, he needed to find these concepts a place of their own again within the system of laws of the wizard civilization.

That was the true road to a breakthrough.

As his thoughts unfolded, an entirely new direction of research gradually surfaced.

So Jie Ming revised his cultivation plan without hesitation.

As for the technological goal that would win him the Level-One Cultivation Protocol, his accumulated knowledge in the directions of life and soul had essentially met the requirement.

Next, then, what he had to conquer were the four great elements.

Within the wizard civilization, wind, fire, water and earth had never been four simple elements; they were the fundamental laws that composed all things.

And the two pieces of magic Jie Ming now wished to strengthen both happened to correspond to them.

The Return to Ruins Concept belonged to the immortal cultivation system, yet what it represented, a “returning to nothingness” and an “annihilation of all things,” bore a very high similarity to the laws of the abyss and of annihilation in the wizard world.

And in the end none of these concepts could get around the concept of “space.”

Space, in its turn, was one of the vast systems of law covered by the wind element.

As for the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light, the case was more direct still.

Flame, energy, detonation, destruction…

Almost every one of those key words was bound tightly to the fire elemental law.

Which was to say that if only he could raise his comprehension of the laws of the wind and fire elements a step further, the Return to Ruins Armor and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light would naturally undergo a qualitative change.

“Looked at this way, studying the knowledge bound up with the four great elements counts as killing two birds with one stone.”

His satisfaction gave way to a difficulty. “Research into the two base elements of wind and fire can be used to improve these two pieces of magic, and knowledge relating to the water element can serve to improve the Ash Return to Origin Hand. But that leaves the earth element…”

Thinking it over carefully, Jie Ming found that at this stage he really did have nothing suited to the earth elemental law.

“Never mind. Sharpening the axe never delays the woodcutting; I will lay the foundation first, and researching magic later will be that much simpler.”

Having reasoned that far, Jie Ming immersed himself in the study and research of the knowledge of the four great elements.

In the gaps between his research he would try strengthening the Ash Return to Origin Hand, the Return to Ruins Armor and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light, and from how each felt afterwards would go on to fix the direction of his next round of study.

From time to time he would also enter the Great Dao Book Pavilion to look through the classics that held the Great Dao comprehensions of those who had come before, setting them against the wizard world’s own knowledge of the four great elements for comparison.

Time slipped quietly away in this full and steady cultivation.

…

…

Several hundred years later.

The Infernal Sulfur Plane, in a remote star region.

Jie Ming hung suspended in the cosmos.

The Black Giant legions had received their orders and had laid out a great number of arrays throughout the region in advance.

As the legions moved into position, one enormous rune after another lit up.

Four seventh-level Black Giants stood at the core of the arrays, charged with directing the legions’ attack systems as one.

“Since preparations are more or less complete, then… begin the first phase of the test.”

His order went out.

Boom!!!

In that instant the whole star region was drowned in light.

Thousands upon thousands of high-energy rays erupted from every direction at once and bore down on Jie Ming in a torrent that blotted out the sky.

At a stirring of Jie Ming’s thought the Return to Ruins Armor activated, and a wholly transparent layer of force covered his body.

But unlike the old Return to Ruins Armor, whose force field, transparent though it was, could still be felt to actually exist, the armor now had become far more “void.”

Unless he deliberately held it in a high-intensity active state, a wizard whose perception was even slightly lacking would not detect its existence at all while it sat idle.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…

In the blink of an eye countless high-energy rays came down one after another.

Yet just before they touched him, those attacks of astonishing power seemed to plunge into some incomprehensible abyss, returning to nothingness without a sound.

When the first round of attacks subsided, Jie Ming still floated in the cosmos, entirely unharmed.

The various energy readings around his body had scarcely fluctuated, as though every attack before it had never existed at all.

“Continue.”

So the Black Giant legions raised their firepower without pause.

By the end the entire test area was shaking violently under the scouring of that terrible energy; had it not been reinforced beforehand, the very space of the region would likely have been shattered.

Even so, the attacks never managed to shift Jie Ming by so much as a hair.

Only when the test ended did the cosmos return to silence.

Jie Ming lowered his head for a glance at himself. The Return to Ruins Armor was still running smoothly, without the slightest fluctuation.

A trace of a satisfied smile surfaced at last at the corner of his mouth. “Not bad!”

In his earlier reworkings of the Return to Ruins Armor, Jie Ming had added a great many functions along the lines of absorbing energy and feeding it back.

In this round of reworking, however, he had done the opposite and deleted every one of them, returning wholly to plainness and simplicity, back to the effect of the most basic version of the armor.

And although those flashy functions were gone, the design’s concentration on defensive power had achieved exactly what he wanted.

The Return to Ruins Armor at this stage fell entirely outside the category of ordinary seventh-level defensive spells.

In pure defensive capability it was already enough to tower over the vast majority of seventh-level spells.

Even facing the head-on bombardment of a great many ordinary seventh-level wizards, he was confident of relying on the Return to Ruins Armor to weather it by main force!