I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 902: The Beginning of Another World

Five thousand years ago, humanity had stood at a peak it had never reached before.

The humans of that age had long since ceased to be satisfied with the world beneath their feet; they crossed the barriers between worlds, stepped into one otherworld after another, and established colonies, cities and resource bases across countless planes.

That was humanity’s golden age.

Until the day that disaster came.

Because of that calamity, whose cause was never learned, the human powers of the main world were beaten into fragments, and their grip on the other worlds was weakened accordingly, which plunged the whole of human civilisation into civil war.

And yet humanity’s disaster was not over.

One day, every cross-world passage abruptly lost its stability.

The colonies, cut off from the main world’s support, had already fallen into chaos; to seize what limited energy, food and shelter remained, the surviving factions slaughtered one another.

Once the cross-world passages collapsed, more and more unknown worlds began to invade in the other direction, and humanity, its defensive lines gone, had no choice but to meet the creatures of those other realms in battle.

Beset from without and within, through one war after another, countless powerful figures fell, cities were reduced to ruins, and those still living could only struggle to survive among the rubble.

The once-glorious civilisation of humanity was dragged wholly down into the abyss.

Afterwards, people came to call those darkest of years by a single name… the “Disaster Era”!

“Agh!”

In the early morning, Jack’s eyes snapped open and he bolted upright in bed.

He was gasping in great mouthfuls, his forehead soaked with cold sweat.

It was a good while before he came back to himself out of that suffocating sensation, the one that felt like dying.

That dream again.

The scenes in it were still clear enough to drive a man to despair: the collapsed shelter, the roaring flames, the blood glaring up from the floor, and that mutant beast that had smashed through the alloy wall.

His father lying in a pool of blood, his mother desperately shielding him behind her.

And in the final moment, both his parents had turned their heads to look at him at once; the feeling in those eyes was something he still did not dare examine too closely.

Jack had a death grip on the bedsheet, his knuckles white with the force of it.

“Haaa…”

He closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, and only after a long while did he loosen his hand, bit by bit.

Five thousand years of disaster had long since accustomed humanity to death, but for Jack, that one day had never truly passed.

Because that was the day he lost his parents, and also the day he truly learned what fear was.

Jack lifted his head and looked around him.

The cramped room was as quiet as ever, a dilapidated room in an old residential block.

The ceiling had long been mottled with rust, mould crept over the corners of the walls, and several gaps in the window frame let the cold air in from outside.

Run-down as it was, it was already the last thing his parents had left him.

Seeing that the sky outside was still somewhat dim, Jack pressed the switch beside him.

Click.

The lighting panel overhead flickered a few times.

The light came on with an effort, a dim yellow that looked as though it might go out at any moment.

Jack looked at that lamp, and a faint bitter smile touched the corner of his mouth.

This was the human world as it now stood.

After the Disaster Era, the laws of other worlds had polluted the main world for so long that plants had mutated, animals had mutated, and even the air and the soil had undergone some irreversible change.

Under that assault by otherworldly laws, it was not only flora and fauna that had mutated; a great deal of human technology had also become unusable, because it was incompatible with the new laws.

Those high-technology devices that had once been the symbols of civilisation and prosperity had gradually turned into scrap iron over the long years.

Nowadays, merely keeping a crude house supplied with basic electricity was no longer a simple matter.

Jack rubbed his face to wake himself up a little more. “Just as well I’m up. I can’t be late today!”

Today was the graduation trial, which counted as the first step by which students like them formally entered society.

Jack rolled out of bed and grabbed a nutrition biscuit off the table as he passed.

Crunch.

He bit down, and the biscuit was as hard as a stone.

He frowned and swallowed it, then began checking his pack.

Purified water, a few nutrition biscuits, a folding knife, a basic medical kit, a flint, a portable sleeping bag…

There was not much, but every item was there to keep him alive.

Just as he was about to pull the zip shut, his gaze came to rest on the table.

Lying there was a small, unremarkable thing.

It was a necklace made of coarse hemp cord, with a black metal pendant tied at the bottom of it.

That block of black metal was no bigger than a thumb, perfectly square, and so utterly black all over that light falling on it seemed to be swallowed.

It was the keepsake his parents had left him.

Jack reached out and picked it up; for its size, the thing was unexpectedly heavy.

Jack had no idea what sort of metal it actually was. He knew only that it was unbelievably hard.

The mutant beast that had killed his parents back then had once bitten clean through the shelter’s alloy wall, yet when its fangs came down on this block of black metal, they had not left so much as a scratch.

Jack looked at it for a long time, and in the end he still slipped the hemp cord over his neck.

The black metal lay against his chest, and its cold touch slowly settled his mind.

“Dad. Mum.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I’m going.”

Jack shouldered his pack and pushed the door open.

Out on the street, a thin grey mist lay over the whole settlement, and the air carried a mingled smell of rusting metal and damp earth.

Through the mist he could just make out, far off, an abandoned high-rise reduced to half a skeleton, with several black birds of abnormal size perched on its roof, letting out hoarse cries.

This was a city after the Disaster Era.

Jack set off along the familiar road, and before he had gone far a clear girl’s voice reached him from up ahead.

“Jack…”

He raised his head and saw a familiar figure standing at the mouth of the street.

The girl had an old pack on her back about the same size as his own, and her short black hair swayed lightly in the morning wind.

Sia, his childhood friend.

And beside Sia stood another person.

That was her father. He had only one leg; the other had been lost years ago in a mutant beast attack, and he now got through life leaning on a crutch welded together out of rebar.

Seeing Jack, the man merely nodded.

“Uncle.” Jack greeted him politely.

“Mm.” The man’s voice was low. “Be careful out there.”

“I will.”

Sia could not wait any longer. She trotted over to Jack’s side and then turned and waved.

“Dad, I’m off!”

The man said nothing more, only nodded again, and his eyes stayed on the backs of the two of them until they disappeared at the end of the street.

The two walked side by side towards the school, and Sia clenched her fist. “We’ve got to place well today. The graduation trial decides what kind of team we can get into later on. If our results are too bad, forget hunting squads; we won’t even get into a halfway stable patrol!”

“Mm.” Jack nodded, then let out a helpless sigh. “A pity we’re only third-level apprentices. I hear the top student in our class is already at the fifth level.”

Sia curled her lip, unwilling to concede. “That’s because his family has money. All the beast meat he can eat, all the evolution serum he can drink. What are we supposed to compete with?”

As she spoke, Sia swung her fist again, as though putting heart into herself. “But level isn’t everything. What really matters in the trial is coming out alive!”

“Exactly!” Jack laughed.

Talking as they went, the two of them soon arrived at the school.

Several enormous transport trucks were already parked at the school gate.

The trucks were wrapped in heavy alloy armour, with spikes welded thickly over their bodies, and their fat tyres stood half a man high; each one looked like a steel behemoth crouched on the ground.

These were the vehicles humanity had rebuilt during the Disaster Era, which pursued no comfort at all, only one thing: safety!

Out on the field, the students had all assembled, and the teachers were calling the roll one by one.

The students had gathered by class of their own accord, and every face carried some degree of nervousness.

After today, they would no longer be merely students at a school; they would be truly entering this cruel world.

“Jack!”

“Here!”

…

“Good, looks like everyone’s present.” The roll call ended, and the teacher closed the register.

“Everyone board!”

The students filed into the transport trucks one after another. The seats were narrow, and they could only crowd in together.

Some chatted excitedly in low voices, some checked their weapons over and over, and some had gone pale in the face, plainly nervous to the limit.

Jack found a seat near Sia and sat down. His gaze swept the compartment, and he soon noticed the fifth-level apprentice from his class.

The boy sat alone in the corner, holding a finely made alloy short knife, its blade giving off a cold gleam.

His expression was flat, and there was no telling at all what he was thinking

Sia followed Jack’s line of sight and could not help curling her lip.

“What are you looking at? Jealous?”

Jack withdrew his gaze and shook his head without thinking. “It’s nothing. I’m just… a bit uneasy.”

Hearing that, Sia unconsciously tightened her grip on the knife in her hand, but she still put on a cheerful front and said with a smile,

“Tch! Looking as relaxed as that, I thought you really weren’t nervous. Don’t be scared. When it counts, Big Sis Sia can help you out!”

Jack laughed too. “Then I’ll be counting on Big Sis Sia when the time comes!”

“Oh ho! You do know how to read the room!”

The transport trucks drove steadily outward, and the city was gradually left behind.

Four hours later, the trucks braked hard.

The huge bodies gave out a grinding of metal, and at last they came to a stop.

“We’re here.” The teacher’s voice came from up front, and the doors opened slowly.

Whoosh…

A cold wind carrying a thick, raw stench rushed into their faces, and every student unconsciously tensed.

Ahead lay a vast black forest with no end in sight, tall mutant trees thrusting up into the sky, and on the air one could faintly smell the rank odour some wild beast had left behind.

The teacher stood beside the truck door and looked round at all the students, his expression severe.

“Listen. I will say this once more. This forest has been cleared in advance by the Military Department, but cleared has never meant absolutely safe.”

“This graduation trial lasts five days. Once you enter the forest, every one of you must survive independently. Food, water, places to rest, and mutant beasts… all of it you will have to handle yourselves!”