I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 893: Out of Control

Having found the true core, the five of them gathered around that silver-gray mechanical altar and set about a further analysis without a moment’s pause.

Unlike their earlier deductions, carried out across light-year-scale currents of chaotic elements, what they faced now was an entity they could genuinely touch, and the pace of the research rose sharply because of it.

Ed in particular moved over the altar’s surface almost without stopping, his mental energy probing into the seams between those geometric runes, tracing steadily downward along the internal energy circuits.

Set against the great mass of data they had accumulated beforehand, they were now very nearly able to confirm that although the altar’s structure was exceedingly complex, the regions actually responsible for regulating its operating state were in fact not many.

Certain interfaces even showed a clear division of function, which meant the designer had taken foolproof operation into account from the moment this thing was first built.

Which in turn meant that so long as the several of them found the correct control node, they could issue commands directly to the entire system.

“Still, to build foolproof operation into apparatus of this level… what a terrifying standard of civilization.” Jie Ming swept his eyes over the altar.

The more he studied it, the more frightening he found the information this thing reflected.

Foolproof operation was of course convenient, but a great deal of the time it was not that a designer did not want it; it was that he lacked the ability to provide it.

Turned around, then, being able to design foolproof operation into a construct that manufactured a singularity meant its makers had already studied every relevant branch of knowledge completely through.

“Found it!”

Just then Ed suddenly stopped, his mental energy tracing several rune-lights across the altar’s surface:

“This should be it. Judging by the direction of the energy flow, this is the node controlling the altar’s ‘elemental gravitation’ function. If we cut this section of the circuit briefly, in theory it will stop absorbing elements from outside…”

With that, Ed felt his way over it again, though his expression turned somewhat helpless. “I am not certain whether this thing has a backup mechanism, however.”

“Then try it!” Chloe decided on the spot.

She looked at the imperceptible singularity above the altar, her brows knitted tight. “We can hardly let it go on running like this. At the least we quiet it down first, and decide what follows according to the situation.”

Ed nodded. “Very well. I will try it, then.”

He raised his hand and pressed his palm to the altar, and dense chains of runes extended out from it, one after another.

Blue-silver light spread rapidly across the altar’s surface like countless fine chains, embedding themselves bit by bit into that control node.

Tori and Alma acted at the same moment, forcibly stabilizing the spacetime structure nearby, which had already begun to fluctuate.

Chloe and Jie Ming expanded their own Law Solidification Domains as well, great swaths of light-patterning spreading along the ground, using the counter-array they had worked out earlier to suppress the restlessly churning elemental currents around them for the time being.

As time passed, the altar began to shake.

The runes on it, stable until now, flickered one after another, and the pull of that formless singularity above the altar fell briefly into disorder.

It was only the slightest disorder, and yet the countless elemental torrents around them deflected at once, bringing cold sweat to the foreheads of Chloe and Jie Ming as they fought to hold those torrents steady.

“How much longer do you need?!” Chloe could not help asking.

Ed’s attention was fixed entirely on the mechanical altar. “Almost. Just a little more… it will stop any moment!”

All of his mental energy had been pressed down into the altar’s interior, and those complex circuits were being closed off one by one. All five of them could feel the altar gradually losing its capacity to operate.

But just then Alma’s body went violently rigid. Her habitually half-lidded eyes flew open, and her face turned ashen white in an instant.

Deep within her pupils, countless shattered threads of fate burst apart all at once!

“It has gone wrong! Run!”

The words had barely left her mouth when Ed’s expression beside her changed abruptly as well. “No! Part of the interior of this thing is damaged! The automatic protection mechanism has been triggered!”

Boom!

With no warning of any kind, the altar itself suddenly lit up, and an uncanny fluctuation spread outward with the altar at its center.

Hum…

It was as though a pause button had been pressed on the entire world in that instant.

Jie Ming’s pupils contracted sharply and he moved to defend himself without thinking, but it was already too late.

This power looked like a fluctuation spreading outward, yet in truth it had already covered the whole field in the instant it appeared, requiring no time to spread at all.

Even Tori, the most accomplished of them with time, had no chance whatsoever to react.

Crack!

Accompanied by a faint sound of crumbling, cracks appeared in the Law Solidification Domains of all five.

Then those cracks spread rapidly, as though countless pairs of invisible hands were tearing the domains outward from within all at once.

“How is this possible…”

Tori stared at his own palm, his face full of shock.

His arm had begun to disintegrate, and yet no blood flowed.

Because what was happening was that the connections between the elemental particles composing his body were being forcibly severed, the elements themselves forcibly drawn away.

Countless fine motes of light drifted off from the surface of his arm, and then the process spread rapidly to his whole body.

Jie Ming turned his head without thinking to look at the fate-type wizard beside him. “Alma!”

Only to find that the ever-composed fate-type wizard had already fallen into the same state.

Her body was turning to particles bit by bit, starting from her feet, and shock still lingered in those eyes, as though not even she had managed to see in advance the trajectory along which death would truly arrive.

Jie Ming felt his scalp go numb. “…Shit!”

In that one instant he understood the true nature of the power just now: it was the so-called elemental gravitation.

It was a power sharing the same root as the singularity above the altar, except that the singularity’s intensity was higher, while this gravitation’s range was greater.

Like the singularity, this gravitation was directed at the elements themselves, and anything composed of elements became its target.

Of course, although it was called gravitation, it had already surpassed the rules of spacetime, so within its range of influence its expansion required no time at all.

In the space of a single brief instant, the bodies and souls of the several wizards disintegrated entirely.

…

…

Crack!

In the outer region of the Wonder, within a comparatively stable patch of space, a faint sound of fracturing suddenly issued.

Immediately after, a humanoid puppet appeared abruptly in that place.

As the runes inside the puppet lit up, it opened its eyes.

“Hoo…”

Although the puppet itself had no need to breathe, Jie Ming still drew a great gasp without thinking, and even felt the daze of a man who had survived a calamity.

Turning his sight inward over his own body, he found his inner world in utter disarray, cracks running everywhere through its ramparts, great stretches of its space already on the verge of collapse.

Still, he was alive.

“The Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art…” Jie Ming murmured under his breath. “Worthy of an immortal art. It actually blocked an attack like that!”

The effect of that blow just now had indeed been astonishing, but fortunately the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art had played a part he had not expected.

Even under those conditions, the coordinates of Jie Ming’s true body had gone unaffected.

Even the damage to his inner world had come from a spatial storm rather than from the elemental gravitation itself: when he tore himself forcibly out of the gravitation’s range of influence, the speed of the movement had made his inner and outer coordinates overlap.

The Void Ash Return to Origin Hand unfolded, and time within his inner world rushed backward, the injuries healing swiftly.

And the magical network terminal, only just remade by that reversal of time, lit up at once, an urgent alarm ringing through the space.

Jie Ming answered immediately.

A light-screen unfurled, and the projection of Wizard Noren surfaced before him.

This eighth-level wizard ordinarily wore an air of unhurried composure at all times, but at this moment his brows were locked tight and his face was severe in a way it rarely was.

“Jie Ming? Good, you are still alive. What happened? The four wizards of the investigation team besides yourself were confirmed just now to have completed their revival at the Workshop.”

“We found this Wonder’s control core, but when we tried to stop it, damage inside that control core triggered a layer of automatic protection.”

Jie Ming drew a deep breath and quickly ran through everything that had just happened.

At the end of it, Jie Ming looked at the faint elemental gravitation still expanding outward at every sort of frequency above the Wonder in the distance, and his voice sank low:

“Judging by the present situation, I suspect this thing is now putting out a gravitational broadcast.”

“You are saying it is transmitting information?” Wizard Noren’s brows knitted deeper still.

“Yes! The main target of these elemental gravitational fluctuations very clearly is not us. They are being fired off toward the deeper reaches of the endless chaotic void, as though to draw something here.”

Jie Ming stared at the space around the Wonder, where ripples visible to the naked eye were surfacing out of the depths of the void, the sign of something initiating a spatial jump from an extreme distance.

“I need support. Any later and something else may reach this thing ahead of us!”

The other end of the communication fell briefly silent, and then Wizard Noren spoke. “Hold out for one minute! The spatial coordinates you laid down earlier in the Wonder’s outer region have all collapsed, and the faint elemental gravitation spread through that whole area is badly disrupting the stability of teleportation. I am reanalyzing the spatial structure nearby.”

“Once I teleport to the stable coordinate point nearest you and make my way over from there, it will take about a minute!”

“A minute?”

Jie Ming watched those spatial-jump fluctuations grow more and more pronounced, and his expression turned grim:

“Then you had better be quick about it. If some other fellow arrives first, whatever is inside this altar may well not end up ours!”