I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 903: What Era Is This? Who Still Lures People In the Old-Fashioned Way?

The students’ expressions turned grave.

The teacher went on, “The band on your wrist can send a positioning signal directly to the Military Department. But if you use it to call for help, your score is halved on the spot.”

“Something else. If any of you really does use the band to call for help, remember one thing: a military rescue takes time.”

“So if you truly cannot hold out, then even when the rescue arrives, all it can do is collect your body.”

The air went quiet at once.

Only now did those students who a moment ago had still carried a trace of excitement realise how very close death stood to them.

The teacher’s eyes swept across their faces.

“Last. Teaming up is permitted, but the scoring drops according to the size of the team. The larger the team, the lower each person’s score. So…” His gaze settled on them all. “Know your limits.”

As his voice fell, the teachers began directing the students down off the trucks.

Jack and Sia quickly found two other classmates they were on good terms with. The four of them talked it over briefly and soon formed a temporary squad.

The team had only just entered the forest when they caught sight of that fifth-level apprentice.

He had not teamed up with anyone at all. With a spare tactical pack on his back, he set off alone along another route, and his figure soon vanished into the dense shadows of the trees.

“He really is impressive…” someone in the team sighed under their breath.

Another curled his lip. “What’s there to envy? All that is a level bought with his family background!”

Nobody answered him, because they all knew perfectly well that it was the truth.

But that likewise could not obscure the fact that he had already reached the final level of the apprentice stage, and one step further up would make him a true transcendent.

Jack drew his gaze back before long. “Let’s go. Water source first.”

The four had no particular objection. They checked the map, picked a direction, and entered the forest.

The canopy overhead was packed thick, blocking out almost all daylight.

Even though it was already daytime, the woods stayed dim as dusk.

“Left.” Jack stopped abruptly. “Something’s moving over there.”

The others immediately tightened their grips on their weapons.

Soon a mutant beast the size of a rabbit wriggled out of the undergrowth.

“It’s all right. It should only rate as a first-level apprentice.”

At the sight of it the four let out a breath, and then swiftly hunted it together by the methods their teacher had taught them in class.

In only a few minutes they had dealt with their first mutant beast.

The deeper they went, the more mutant beasts they met.

Over the course of several fights, the four began to work together more and more smoothly.

By evening they had taken the carcasses of several first-level mutant beasts.

“Looks like day one is going pretty well.” One of the classmates said it with a smile.

Sia let out a breath too. “See, I told you. How unlucky could we possibly get?”

They followed a clear stream onward and at last found a natural hollow at the foot of a rock face.

The ground here was higher, with the rock face at their backs and the stream running past in front, and most importantly, there were no obvious signs of large mutant beasts moving nearby.

“Let’s rest here tonight.” Jack made a circuit of the place and checked it over.

“Works for me.” The others had no objection either.

They quickly set about making a temporary camp, building a fire, dressing the kills and laying a simple perimeter line, and then took the night watch in turns, in the order they had agreed on beforehand.

“You sleep first.” Sia patted him on the shoulder. “There’s still time later.”

Jack did not stand on ceremony. He pulled out his basic sleeping bag and crawled in.

A day of running about had indeed left him tired, and once he lay down he soon fell into a deep sleep.

Until… a drop of warm liquid landed on Jack’s face.

Jack’s nostrils twitched, and his eyes snapped open.

The instant he woke, a smell of blood so thick it was almost sickening drove up into his nose.

Jack’s heart sank abruptly. “This is bad!”

The fire had long since gone out, and in the pitch-black night two familiar figures lay silently on the ground.

His two classmates were already dead. Their skulls had been burst by some terrible force, and their bodies lay in the pooling blood in postures that were entirely unnatural.

And not far off, Sia was being held by the throat by a tall black shadow, her feet hanging clear of the ground, both hands clawing desperately, unable to make the slightest sound.

“Ngh…” With great difficulty she turned her head, and her gaze crossed the darkness to fall on Jack.

Fear, despair, and one message driven through with all her strength: Run!

Jack’s mind went off like a thunderclap. “Sia!”

He hurled himself forward, all but howling, his short knife clearing its sheath in an instant.

And yet the other did not so much as look at him properly. The black shadow waved a hand at him in passing.

Swish!

Jack’s vision blurred for a moment, and the arm holding the knife had already lost all feeling.

Immediately after came the second blow.

Puchi!

Violent pain ran through his whole body in an instant. Jack looked down and saw that his entire body had been laid open on a slant from the shoulder by the other’s hand-blade, and blood came bursting out at once.

“Ngh…”

He opened his mouth, but the sound caught in his throat, and his body was smashed away by an enormous force.

Boom!

His body slammed into the rock face, and Jack’s vision went black.

The excessive blood loss and the shock to his head from striking the cliff meant that even when he forced his eyes open he could see only a blurred scene.

Puchi!

The black shadow’s palm punched straight through Sia’s chest, and the girl’s body stiffened abruptly.

Then the shadow let go, and Sia’s body dropped limply.

The shadow did not spare them another glance. It simply turned and left.

“Si… a…”

Jack lay face down on the ground, blood seeping steadily out from beneath his body.

His sight grew more and more blurred, and his chest burned as though a block of red-hot iron were searing it.

Rage, refusal to accept it, despair… countless feelings churned wildly in the depths of his heart like magma.

But his body could no longer move. Even lifting a single finger had become unbearably hard.

“I… won’t…”

He gritted his teeth and tried desperately to crawl over, but his body would not obey him at all.

The world before his eyes began to darken bit by bit, and his consciousness was sinking fast.

Just as the last thread of clarity was about to go out…

Click.

An odd warmth suddenly came from his chest.

That block of black metal which had lain against his chest all along had actually lit up with a faint point of light.

A calm male voice, wholly without feeling, sounded inside his mind.

“Beep. Host emotional fluctuation has reached threshold. System starting. Insufficient power. Use life force to charge?”

Jack no longer had the strength to think, and had not even caught what those words actually meant. Like a drowning man clutching at straw, he answered without thinking. “Yes…”

“Command confirmed. Life force extraction beginning.”

In the next instant, a weakness too strong to describe swept through his whole body.

Jack’s eyes flew wide. He could feel that something most fundamental inside his body was being torn wildly out of him.

His face paled visibly, and his hair lost its colour at an astonishing speed.

“Wait…” Jack realised something was wrong. “Stop…”

But it was already too late.

His life force poured wildly into that block of black metal at his chest, like floodwater through a broken dyke, and the consciousness that had flared up in him one last time swiftly faded.

And yet at the final moment, when every trace of Jack’s awareness had entirely dispersed…

“Host detected in a near-death state. Initiating emergency repair procedure.”

Hmmm…

A warm power spread rapidly outward from Jack’s chest through his whole body.

Broken bones returned to their places of their own accord, shattered flesh grew afresh, and great quantities of new tissue filled in the wounds at a speed the eye could follow.

That terrible gash, which had all but cut his entire body open on the diagonal, was restored to its original state in the space of a few breaths.

Jack suddenly opened his eyes and stared blankly at his newly regrown arm.

“This…”

Before he had time to think about what on earth had happened, he immediately realised there was another problem.

“Sia!”

He all but crawled as he threw himself towards the girl.

Sia lay there, a great deal of blood still on her chest, her body cold.

Jack stretched out a trembling hand, then pulled it back again as though he had touched a live wire.

“Save her!” He tore the black metal from his chest. “Use my life! Take my life force! Save her!”

Then the cold mechanical voice sounded once again.

“Command accepted. Life force extraction beginning…”

Hmmm…

Jack’s body shuddered. That familiar sense of emptiness came over him again, only this time far more fiercely than before.

His life force rushed unceasingly towards the block of metal, like a river through an opened sluice gate.

Just as Jack was beginning to suspect he would be drained to death, the metal block’s absorption finally stopped, and it turned instead to releasing an unknown power, which it poured into Sia.

The wound on Sia’s chest began to close, and even her shattered heart grew anew.

Thump, thump, thump, thump…

As her heart resumed beating, Sia’s breathing, which had been so faint as to be almost non-existent, slowly steadied.

On the other side, meanwhile, Jack’s body grew weaker and weaker.

His hair whitened rapidly and his skin turned aged; a boy of barely more than ten years seemed, in the space of a few breaths, to have crossed several decades.

But he only stared fixedly at Sia, unwilling to blink, until he had confirmed that the girl’s chest was rising and falling once more.

Only then did Jack finally let out a breath.

He slumped down in the pool of blood, and tears ran down beyond his control, mingling with the blood on his face.

“Alive… as long as she’s alive…”

His mouth split open, weeping and laughing at once, and that smile was dreadful to look at.

And just as Jack was steeped in the joy of having come through alive, in a place unimaginably far away, a pair of eyes was watching this scene calmly across an endless distance.

The Infernal Sulfur Plane. A laboratory.

Jie Ming withdrew that thread of attention he had attached to his mental energy, and the corner of his mouth curved slightly.

“The opening was not exactly smooth, but it was not bad either.”

That piece of black metal was not any so-called “System” at all.

It was merely a medium that Jie Ming had sent down through the Augusta family’s special channels.

Under ordinary circumstances, the operation by which wizards used a medium to induce the natives into opening a portal and transmitting coordinates was in fact much the same as what the devils did.

But for Jie Ming, who had read all sorts of novels in his previous life, luring people in the way the devils did was already out of date!

“People will doubt an order. They will doubt fear. They will even doubt devils and gods.” Jie Ming shook his head. “But very few people will doubt a hope they have received with their own eyes.”

Especially a hope that could bring the dead back to life; a “System” that could appear at the moment of deepest despair, and answer when it was called.

Through that thread of mental energy he had barely managed to send across, Jie Ming watched Jack, his gaze so calm that not a ripple stirred in it.

“Whatever will make a person believe, that is what you give them. If you want him to believe a System exists, then give him a System that can genuinely raise the dead.”

As for the price? Naturally it would not be free.

Life force, emotion, desire, and… the door that would open at the end.

Jie Ming leaned lightly back against his chair.

“Jack, oh Jack. There is no need to hurry. Take your time. We have time in plenty. This story has only just begun.”