I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 884: The Great Dao Is Simplicity Itself

Jie Ming was thoroughly satisfied with the reworking of the Return to Ruins Armor.

So he left the testing ground without waiting a moment longer and made for another region, meaning to test his other piece of magic.

Compared with the last, this test area held a good many more meteorites.

Arrays glimmered across their surfaces as well, another thing Jie Ming had had the Black Giant legions prepare in advance.

“Activate the test targets.”

“Yes, My Lord.”

The Black Giant priest at his side heard him and at once worked the light-screen before him a couple of times.

Soon the light on those distant meteorites grew more brilliant still.

Looking at the scene before him, Jie Ming could not help a stirring of feeling.

As a wizard’s level rose, the cost of testing his own spells rose along with it.

The legion-level array set up for the Return to Ruins Armor test was one thing: it had consumed a great quantity of high-level materials, but at least once that array was taken apart, much of the material could be recovered and used again.

The consumption in testing attack-type magic, though, was far more outrageous.

The arrays on these meteorites were each of them worth no small sum, every one of them able to withstand a conventional seventh-level spell.

If the attack under test proved too strong and destroyed a meteorite outright, the resources invested in it could not be recovered at all.

Jie Ming came to a halt on a floating test platform, and only once all the auxiliary personnel around him had withdrawn did he slowly raise a hand and level it at a meteorite far away.

He stilled his breath and gathered his spirit, and a moment later a thread of golden light surfaced in his palm.

Unlike the dark gold radiance of the usual Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light, this golden light was extraordinarily bright.

But Jie Ming did not fire it off at once. Instead he frowned, using his mental energy to work the magic in his hand.

Soon the gold in the light grew fainter and fainter, and the light itself came to seem more and more “gentle.”

In the end the whole of it turned a nearly transparent hue.

Hum… crack, crack!

And in the very instant that this seemingly unremarkable light appeared, dense fine cracks broke out through the void around the pillar of light.

It should be understood that the space of this test area, like the last, had been deliberately reinforced, and carried the blessing of the Incense Fire Divine Dao besides.

Even so, the power leaking off the magic tore it open with ease!

Even as the one casting it, Jie Ming looked at the ball of light in his hand and felt a danger that set his heart pounding.

He could feel clearly that the light, once born, had turned violently unstable, as though it might slip his control at any moment.

Jie Ming held his breath, focused, and released the constraint he had laid on it.

Freed, the ball of light became a nearly transparent pillar and shot out from his palm.

Through the whole of it there was not the slightest concussive report, nor any shock of energy.

Had the path it travelled not been strewn with dense spatial fissures, the beam would have looked less impressive than an ordinary flashlight.

And as it pierced into the meteorite cluster ahead, the world began to collapse.

Every meteorite the beam swept across collapsed and dispersed without a sound.

The protective arrays laid upon them, capable of resisting a seventh-level spell attack, might as well have failed outright at that moment; they produced no effect whatsoever.

When the attack ended, a clear path had been opened through the cluster.

Everywhere the beam had passed, the meteorites that served as targets had been wiped from the cosmos like writing taken off by an eraser!

Though he was the one who had brought it all about, Jie Ming could not help staring blankly at the sight.

Only after a moment did he murmur to himself, “So this is it… where the divine light bewilders, water and fire lose their order, and metal and wood collapse together!”

Jie Ming’s reworking of the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light had gone differently from that of the Return to Ruins Armor.

As his grasp of the fire elemental law deepened, he had stopped confining himself to the Divine Light’s original form, and had tried instead to fold into it every concept of flame he had come to understand, the fire elemental law, and even the inspiration he had drawn from the entropy-increasing flame!

And so the present beam was born.

Strictly speaking it could no longer be called the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light at all; it was an entirely new piece of magic!

As it happened, going by the beam’s nature, Jie Ming had actually found a similar piece of magic in the Great Dao Book Pavilion.

One could only say that what the Great Dao Book Pavilion recorded was simply too rich, and that the immortal cultivation world’s overlong history had left no idea of any kind untried by its cultivators.

In the Great Dao Book Pavilion this magic was called the “Great Annihilation Divine Light”!

And the line Jie Ming had just muttered was precisely how the Pavilion’s classics described its effect.

The magic was built upon the foundation of the Li trigram, drawing on the concept of conflict represented by the image of Ge, the hexagram of revolution, among the eight trigrams.

Put in the language of the wizard civilization, the magic destroyed the balance of connection between elemental particles, causing the elemental structure inside anything at all to disintegrate of itself, ruining at the root the elemental linkages that formed matter or energy.

Put simply, anything that took this blow would revert to the most primal state of the four base elements.

So even reinforced space would shatter, because the connections among the wind elements composing that space had been destroyed!

The destructive power of the magic was therefore outrageous; measured by that alone, it had long since passed beyond the category of an ordinary seventh-level wizard.

Even an elite seventh-level wizard, taking such a hit with no intelligence on what it was, could die of a moment’s carelessness.

“A pity the duration of this magic is far too short.” Jie Ming turned the attack over in his mind and shook his head in regret.

By the reckoning of his True-False Void-Piercing Pupil, the Great Annihilation Divine Light had existed for only about five milliseconds before collapsing completely and losing its original attacking effect.

It attacked at the speed of light, naturally, so an existence that brief meant an attack range of only about fifteen hundred kilometres.

A range like that was nothing for a seventh-level wizard; even among sixth-level wizards there were plenty whose spells reached further.

Set against the seventh level, his attack range was pitifully short.

Jie Ming frowned and began to think it through. “The range is short because the Great Annihilation Divine Light is far too unstable.”

He raised a hand and condensed the barest thread of the divine light in his palm.

Even under his utmost control, the thread flickered only a moment longer before disintegrating of its own accord.

The Great Annihilation Divine Light was, after all, a temporary existence by its very nature.

As a divine light that represented the concept of conflict, the stronger its power grew, the fiercer the conflict within it became.

And fiercer conflict only made the magic collapse the faster.

“A short attack range is not really much of a problem; at this stage the distance is enough, and at worst I fight up close.” Jie Ming’s expression was a little helpless.

“The trouble is that if that is how it stands, there is simply no way to store the thing inside a wizard artifact.”

The magic Jie Ming had reworked before was all stored directly inside wizard artifacts and released from them, the artifacts cycling their releases to raise his firepower.

To run suddenly into a piece of magic that could only be condensed on the spot in battle was plainly no good news for a wizard accustomed to preparing every sort of trump card in advance.

Fortunately, Jie Ming soon thought of another of his own inventions: the Talisman-Rune Artifact.

“That, now, could actually work…”

The core mechanism of the Talisman-Rune Artifact used mental energy as a key, drawing on the power of heaven and earth through special patterns to build and release magic on the spot.

Applied to other spells, the Artifact’s chief use lay in that temporary mobilising of the power of heaven and earth, which could raise a spell’s destructive force by a wide margin.

Used on the Great Annihilation Divine Light, however, he could make use of the very property that set it apart from traditional wizard artifacts: that it did not store the body of the magic itself in order to deliver the attack.

The only problem was… the Divine Light’s destructive power was so great that a great many materials simply could not bear it.

Jie Ming reckoned that releasing it through a Talisman-Rune Artifact would leave the Artifact itself utterly ruined after a single casting.

Which was to say that the Talisman-Rune Artifact, reusable by design, became a single-use article.

At that thought, the expression on his face turned very strange indeed. “Hold on… why does that sound so familiar?”

A single-use article that, activated with mental energy, mobilised the power of heaven and earth to release magic…

“Is that not just an ordinary talisman?!”

Jie Ming looked down at his own palm, caught between laughter and tears. “Round and round… and in the end I am back at the simplest wizard artifacts and talismans after all.”

When he first developed the Talisman-Rune Artifact, Jie Ming had been full of confidence.

His aim had been perfectly clear: take the explosive force of the talisman, join it to the durability and stability of the wizard artifact, and create a fusion of two top-level civilizations’ technologies!

Yet back then, in order to stockpile his reworked magic, he had gone back to the original wizard artifacts.

And now, to carry attacking magic as extreme as the Great Annihilation Divine Light, he had been driven all the way back to the most primitive talisman.

“Heh, heh, heh, heh… hahahahahahaha!!!”

Jie Ming was silent for a moment, and then burst out laughing.

There was no medium in the vacuum, and yet his laughter set the elements around him ringing in resonance.

He laughed for a long while before he stopped, and could not help shaking his head. “I thought I had drawn out the strengths of both. I never expected to come full circle and end up back at the most primitive forms of the wizard artifact and the talisman.”

Lifting his head to the starlight glittering in the far distance, something came clear in Jie Ming’s heart. “…the Great Dao is simplicity itself, is it?”

Not far off, the elemental particles that had resonated a moment ago settled into stillness.

Floating there in space, Jie Ming suddenly felt as though he had caught hold of something.

It was an exceedingly subtle sensation, as though a door stood right before him and one step more would push it open.

Yet when he truly reached out to touch it, he grasped nothing at all.

He had understood something, and still could not say precisely what it was he had understood.

But Jie Ming did not press after it by force. He simply let himself relax and allowed that faint, half-present clarity to settle in his consciousness.

Within his spiritual sea, the Spiritual Qi Law, which had already been settling toward stability, took a small step forward without a sound.

At the same time his Dao Integration Realm grew firmer along with it, as though his perception of the “Dao” itself had become a great deal clearer.

Jie Ming knew what this meant: he had taken another step forward.