I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 892: The Altar

Withdrawing his true body and letting the puppet out once more, Jie Ming passed on the information he had probed out.

Before very long, four teleportation lights appeared almost simultaneously on the coordinates marked out beside him.

Chloe dropped out of the teleportation array, and had barely steadied herself before she spoke, unable to wait a moment longer:

“You are certain? It really is an artificial construct?”

Jie Ming nodded. “Eight or nine parts out of ten.”

With that, he raised his right hand.

Hum…

The magical network terminal in his hand projected out a vast model of elemental currents, countless lines of light crossing lengthwise and crosswise, flowing slowly within it.

At first glance these elemental currents were as hopelessly chaotic as ever, but a closer look revealed a great many highly repetitive rhythms among them.

Even some of the seemingly random turbulence held to abnormally stable cycles.

Ed stepped up to it almost in the instant the model appeared, his gray-blue eyes fixed on those paths of light and blazing with astonishing brilliance.

“That is it! This kind of operating regularity… this was not naturally generated. Absolutely not!”

He raised a hand swiftly and traced out dozens of runes in the void one after another, overlaying them onto the elemental currents.

Immediately after, several key nodes within the model were rapidly magnified.

“Look here. This flow appears to have no regularity whatsoever, but in fact every cycle of its motion changes correspondingly with the operation of the flows around it. And here as well…”

He spoke faster and faster, his mood growing extraordinarily excited. “Elemental currents in nature cannot form a repeating sequence this highly logical of their own accord. Unless…”

“Someone designed it.” Jie Ming picked up the thread, his gaze falling on that vast Elemental Black Hole in the distance. “This is no natural disaster at all. It is an anomalous region formed after a piece of man-made apparatus went out of control under some set of circumstances.”

“Or else… it never went out of control,” Tori muttered under his breath.

In no more than an instant, Jie Ming sensed the change in the atmosphere.

Before this, when they had looked toward the Elemental Black Hole, there had still been gravity in their eyes, and wariness, and the caution owed to an unknown thing.

Now most of that had vanished, and something far more dangerous had taken its place.

It was greed!

The most primitive greed of a wizard laying eyes on unknown knowledge!

Tori stared at the Elemental Black Hole in the distance and licked his lips without thinking:

“If this really were a naturally formed Wonder, then once we went back we would likely have to organize dozens upon hundreds of symposia, invite those old fellows out one by one to appraise it, and finally spend eight or ten years coming up with a solution.”

His tone turned abruptly, and he smiled. “But if it is an artificial construct… then it is a ready-made technological sample.”

Chloe’s eyes were shining just as brightly, fixed unblinkingly on those elemental torrents.

“If we can resolve out its working principles, then this stops being simply a matter of cracking a Wonder.” Her breathing was growing short. “We may very well be making contact with an entirely new system of elemental engineering.”

Even Alma, who had been the coolest of them all along, opened her eyes somewhat at this.

In those habitually indifferent eyes there surfaced an unmistakable interest. “Worth investigating.”

“Very much worth it!” Ed had already made his decision. “We send word back to the Workshop first, and then we continue the investigation.”

“Agreed.” Chloe nodded at once.

It was not that they had to fear someone at the Workshop hearing the news and coming out to snatch the credit; after all, this was a benefit the investigation team was entitled to in the first place.

If anything, sending the particulars back meant that should something truly go wrong, they could call for support at any time.

Tori had already opened his magical network terminal. “I will send it.”

His fingers swiped rapidly, and in short order a report was drafted and done.

A moment later.

“Sent.” Tori put the terminal away.

Jie Ming raised his head and glanced at that huge black hole in the distance, devouring chaotic elements without cease.

“Then we go on as before. I take charge of opening the observation window and gathering information, and the rest of you handle the analysis.” He raised a hand and gestured toward the distant black hole. “So long as we can reverse out even part of its operating logic, we stand a chance of finding a way into the core.”

Ed nodded. “Then we start from the outer region and crack it layer by layer.”

Chloe nodded toward Jie Ming as well. “We will be troubling you for what comes next.”

“Each of us to our own duty, that is all.” Jie Ming raised a hand, and the silver light in his pupils lit once more. “If everyone is ready, then we begin.”

“No problem!”

For the next several days the five of them planted themselves wholly in the outer region of the Elemental Black Hole.

Having been through the actual operation once, Jie Ming was thoroughly at home with collecting the information now.

More importantly, at this stage he needed only to serve as a relay for information, transmitting the raw data he collected outward, with no need to analyze any of it himself, which spared him a great deal of vigor.

Chloe took charge of organizing the elemental data, breaking the vast mass of raw figures down into relations of combination, conversion and consumption among the different elements.

Ed concentrated on resolving those structures, while Tori was responsible for finding the temporal rhythms.

As for Alma, she stood at the outermost edge and remained silent throughout.

But her work counted as the most important of the four.

The only means of gathering information the group had now was the gap Jie Ming opened with the Void String, through which data was collected from the traces left by the elements’ movement.

And Alma’s work was to assist Jie Ming at his side: using fate to mark certain elements and releasing them in the key regions, then tracking the trajectories of the fate lines to supplement the data on elemental motion.

At the very start there was still an obvious disjointedness to the five of them working together.

But as more and more data accumulated, their coordination grew more and more seamless.

In the end all the results converged, layer upon layer of models began to overlap, and a certain regularity gradually surfaced.

On the fifth day Chloe suddenly stopped what she was doing and stared hard at the model before her. “Wait.”

Ed raised his head at the very same moment, and the two exchanged a look. “You saw it too?”

“Yes. It seems we have done it.” There was an unmistakable trace of excitement in Chloe’s voice.

Ed pulled up an entire section of the model at once. “At last… we have found a periodic stable structure.”

Jie Ming looked over at them immediately.

“It worked?”

Ed reached out and tapped, and the elemental torrent at the model’s center was abruptly magnified.

“Yes. It is not complete yet, but part of its operating logic has been confirmed.”

“So long as we study this portion of the technology through, we can carry out a reverse analysis on it…”

“And deceive it?” Jie Ming frowned.

“Disguise ourselves, to put it precisely.” Ed nodded. “Disguised as elements that already belong to it, we can be sure of maintaining our own stability even after entering the Elemental Black Hole’s event horizon.”

A light flashed through Jie Ming’s eyes at once. “Which means we can go inside!”

“Correct!” Ed smiled. “In theory, at least.”

With that gain in hand, the five of them threw themselves wholly into constructing an array over the period that followed.

Some ten-odd days later, a special array at last slowly took shape.

“Activate.” Ed gave a low shout.

Hum…

The array lit up all at once, and the Law Solidification Domains of the five were rapidly covered over.

Their auras began to blur, the edges of their bodies seeming to melt into the elemental tides around them.

The once-distinct fluctuations of life gradually vanished, replaced by a rhythm identical in every respect to the elemental currents surrounding them.

Chloe released her mental energy toward the event horizon of the Elemental Black Hole in the distance.

Mental energy that would ordinarily have lost all contact the moment it entered the event horizon actually made a full circuit under the array’s protection and was drawn back again.

“It worked,” she said in a low voice.

“Let us go.” Jie Ming clenched his palm. “We take a look inside.”

Chloe took the lead, and the others followed close behind.

The Void String cut through the void once again.

Hiss!

A long, fine fissure was carved open in the event horizon, and the five of them, wrapped in the disguising array, stepped through without the slightest hesitation.

In the very instant they crossed that boundary layer, the world changed.

The void outside seemed to have been cut off entirely by an invisible barrier.

Because every light particle was absorbed and none could return, all any of them could see was pitch blackness.

What surprised them, though, was that although space and time here were likewise distorted, the degree of distortion was far smaller than outside.

“The spacetime environment here could even be called orderly…” Jie Ming sensed the surroundings for a moment, and a judgment had already formed in his mind.

Having entered, none of them had any intention of lingering.

They immediately followed the direction of the elemental flow, drawing closer to the true core of this Elemental Black Hole.

“Hold the rhythm.” Ed kept adjusting the array. “One adjustment a second. Do not let our elemental state drift out of true.”

Jie Ming nodded, opened the Great Void Step to cover the Law Solidification Domains of all five, and borrowing the space around them, made one short spatial jump after another toward the core region.

Tori and Alma took station on either flank of the group, their mental energy spread to its utmost, so that no abnormal fluctuation could escape their perception.

In this way the five of them pressed deeper bit by bit.

There was no judging by conventional distance how far in they had actually come; they could fix their direction only by the changes in the elemental currents.

And those elemental torrents were growing denser and denser, more and more ordered.

Until at a certain moment, Chloe abruptly stopped.

“Ahead.”

The word was carried to everyone’s ears through mental energy.

Jie Ming raised his head, and found that it had actually grown bright before him.

Because of the excess of elements converging here, there were always elements drifting about that had not yet been absorbed, and some of those photons could at last be taken in by the group’s eyes, forming path after path of light.

And where those countless paths of light converged, an altar stood silently.

The altar was silver-gray throughout. It bore no divine image, nor any of the ornament common to religious architecture, only line after line of exceedingly regular geometric runes spread across its surface.

These geometric runes meshed with one another and nested layer within layer, like the gears of a precision machine.

But very soon everyone’s gaze left the altar in spite of themselves, drawn to the space above it.

Something hung suspended there.

A “thing that could not be perceived.”

It had no substance and no color, and could not even be truly locked onto by mental energy.

Jie Ming had the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil wide open, and yet all he could see was a blank.

And yet everything around it proved that there was something there!

Vast quantities of elements were drawn in from every direction, converging slowly along some invisible path upon that “point,” and vanishing as though into thin air.

Jie Ming needed only one glance to understand: this was the thing they were looking for!

Alma, beside him, spoke abruptly. “That is right. That is the singularity!”

Everyone looked toward her.

“I have found the starting point of fate here, which proves this thing is the singularity we came looking for!”