I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 901: New Magic and a New Reaction

The call ended.

Jie Ming leaned back against his chair and slowly let out a breath.

Now that this stretch of busy work was behind him, the injuries on his body had healed up to seven or eight parts in ten.

In truth the injuries to his body had closed long ago; it was the trauma at the level of the soul that was the more serious.

Given his present condition, though, even a wounded soul healed completely after a little rest.

Jie Ming could even feel that, having been crushed to the verge of collapse by that ninth-level pressure, his soul had grown a good deal more resilient again.

The adaptive evolution of the Body Forging Method was altering his essential nature bit by bit.

He was still nowhere near able to contend with a ninth-level existence, but at least he would no longer be as he had been before, driven to the brink of death by the mere backwash without even the standing to look at one.

“A few more experiences like that and I should at least not be unable to bear the backwash of the pressure,” Jie Ming thought, with a touch of self-mockery. “By then, even a ninth-level existence would have to actually look at me before it could kill me in a blink.”

After feeling out the changes in himself for a while, Jie Ming began to review the problems this battle had exposed.

The first was that the Black Giant legion was falling somewhat behind the pace of his growth.

In fighting at the seventh level and below, the Black Giants could still serve a purpose; but the moment the enemy rose to the eighth-level plane, a legion composed mainly of sixth-level Black Giants could only buy time by self-detonating.

A gap like that was hard to make up by piling on numbers alone; he would have to speed up research into a route by which the Black Giants could advance to the seventh level or higher.

“Note that down. I shall have to push the people below along.”

Then there was the matter of attack.

Through this battle Jie Ming felt that his mobility end and his defensive end were already quite good; it was the attacking end, the one he had been full of confidence in, that had turned up problems after all.

The Great Annihilation Divine Light was strong, but its attack range was too short.

Fifteen hundred kilometers, for a Dharma Form two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers tall, was not far removed from a bare-handed brawl.

He needed a means of attack that could cover a large enough area while still carrying destructive force enough.

On this battlefield, several times over, his attack range had simply not reached, and he had been able only to watch as the enemy fleet laid down covering fire from beyond it.

“So the attacking end still needs long-range, wide-area methods added to it.” Jie Ming reckoned it over in his mind, and his thinking quickly grew clear.

Up to now he had separately mastered the reworked magics answering to the three elements of water, wind and fire.

The earth element alone still had no magic to answer to it.

What the earth element represented was precisely matter and the four fundamental forces, so if he could learn a magic founded upon the law of the earth element, that would complete the elemental cycle.

The Great Annihilation Divine Light, however, had already touched the limit of his present realm.

To satisfy both long range and wide area by relying on the energy output of his current level alone was plainly unrealistic.

The new magic would therefore most likely have to borrow external strength, and it would have to hook into concepts such as the earth element, matter, and the four fundamental forces.

He closed his eyes and sank into the Great Dao Book Pavilion in the depths of his consciousness.

In the darkness the white jade pavilion still stood silently, a soft mist of light spreading out from between the pages.

Countless jade slips whirled and sorted themselves before his eyes, screened and eliminated according to the movement of his thoughts.

At last a jade slip suffused with an earthen-yellow halo flew out from the depths of the pavilion and settled steadily into his palm.

Jie Ming fixed his attention upon it. Four characters in an archaic hand were written across it: Breathing Soil Creation.

Strictly speaking, Breathing Soil Creation was not a combat-type magic; it did not even count as a means of attack in the traditional sense.

It was classed among the resource-manufacturing magics, in the same broad category as the arrays that refine gold into Essence Gold, or the alchemy of wizard civilization.

Its effect was likewise very direct: to manufacture the conceptual material “Breathing Soil.”

Breathing Soil was an exceptionally special sort of conceptual material within cultivation civilization.

Its core concept was “bearing.”

The refining of magical treasures, the planting of spirit medicines, the laying of grand arrays, even the manufacture of certain special puppets: none of them could do without it as a foundation.

It could serve as an “adhesive” between other materials, letting laws that were originally incompatible run stably within a single system.

Breathing Soil’s own destructive power was very nearly zero; its greatest characteristic was probably that it grew when it met the wind, so that a mere speck of it could be used to make a continent.

But without it, a great many profound things simply could not take form.

It was for exactly this reason that Breathing Soil was worth a great deal in cultivation civilization.

Matching that worth, though, the difficulty of refining it was likewise astonishing.

Breathing Soil’s raw material was very ordinary: land that living beings had dwelt upon.

Even a single farm field in the mortal world, or the ruins of one city, would satisfy the requirement.

But the losses in the refining were downright absurd.

An ordinary life-bearing planet (a world roughly the size of Earth, that is) would yield about a pinpoint’s worth of Breathing Soil.

And that was under the most generous reckoning; in actual practice the failure rate was higher still.

Breathing Soil Creation, then, would more accurately be called an “engineering-type magic.”

The greatest characteristic of engineering-type magics was that they were naturally suited to combining with external power.

Such a magic did not require the user to carve their own spiritual power into various attack forms with fine precision; instead it could amplify its own effect by laying out a large array and connecting that array to an external energy source.

To put it another way, the most formidable thing about this magic lay not in how strong it was in itself, but in how much external power it could lever.

This was exactly the point Jie Ming had his eye on.

After so many years of building it up, his Incense Fire Divine Dao had reached into every corner of the Infernal Sulfur Plane, and the whole plane had been forged as tight as an iron barrel.

But the power of the Incense Fire Divine Dao had always leaned toward defense and internal circulation, and the part it could play in a campaign abroad was extremely limited.

The only two things about it of much use on a foreign campaign were the cross-space energy transmission system and that portion of the Dao Soldier System dealing with the recovery of Dao soldiers.

The Dao soldiers Jie Ming had made with such care, for instance, could only serve as door gods when it came to fighting, since nobody had ever dared come to his door.

Breathing Soil Creation, however, could serve perfectly well as a central interface, linking up the vast store of power the Incense Fire Divine Dao had accumulated and projecting it outward.

And although Breathing Soil Creation was a resource-manufacturing magic, that did not mean it had no killing power.

Much as the As-You-Wish Gold-Banded Cudgel had originally been nothing but an instrument for measuring water, and yet in the hands of a certain monkey it killed whatever it touched and wounded whatever it grazed.

Or as a utility pole was never manufactured to be a weapon in the first place, but should you actually meet someone able to swing the thing like a staff, then whoever thought of coming close would have to weigh it carefully.

Set against the regular combat-type magics it might not be nimble enough, but in the department of raw force this magic would certainly not come up short.

Faced with targets at long range and over a wide area, this magic would absolutely be enough.

Having settled on the magic, Jie Ming did not rush to cultivate it; instead he first opened his magical network terminal and began buying materials in bulk.

This was the trouble with engineering magics: they called for a large array to be laid out at the drop of a hat.

The advantage was just as obvious, though. Once the array was built and could be fused with the Creation System of the Incense Fire Divine Dao, he could draw on it at will thereafter.

Jie Ming meant to integrate the array of Breathing Soil Creation into the Incense Fire Divine Dao system, so that afterward he could borrow its strength and cast the magic directly.

Jie Ming counted as a major customer these days, and materials of every kind arrived very quickly.

Just as he had his hands entirely full, directing the Black Giant priests in the construction of the array, an anomalous mental fluctuation came suddenly from the Fate Subsystem.

“Hm?”

Jie Ming was startled for a moment, then realized what it was.

Those were the media he had once had Augusta help him send out toward the mushroom-men’s primitive plane; one of them had finally produced a reaction.