I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 904: The Next Step

Jie Ming spent a little more time and manufactured a secondary control crystal.

Beside the laboratory bench, Jie Ming gave the secondary control crystal a light flick.

The crystal was black through and through, yet within it a single exceedingly fine thread of mental-energy light drifted slowly about.

The far end of that thread connected to the “System” medium ten thousand li away.

A screen of light hung suspended before Jie Ming, and in it every movement Jack made was clearly visible.

With this thing to help him keep watch, Jie Ming began to go back over the test once more.

The problem with the medium was in fact quite obvious: chiefly, its capacity was too low.

More precisely, the allowance it could grant his mental energy for seeping across space was too small.

After all, when he had designed the medium in the first place, Jie Ming had never intended to make it into anything like an auxiliary intelligence in the true sense of the term.

It was only an inducer and a filter, a simple interface that let him project his influence into another world.

And by Augusta’s reminder, a thing like a medium had to be not merely sturdy enough in construction, but as spare as possible in function.

So under Jie Ming’s design the medium as a whole retained only two functions of the first importance: absorbing the emotional energy the host produced, and carrying out cross-space transmission of mental energy.

Even those two arrays lay in deep dormancy most of the time.

Only when the host produced a negative mental fluctuation of sufficient intensity would they truly wake.

This was not done out of stinginess on Jie Ming’s part, but for safety.

After all, the place where he had dropped the medium was no wilderness entirely devoid of high-level life.

The more strongly the medium performed, the more easily it would be exposed.

As for the activation energy, Jie Ming had settled on “negative emotion.”

Such emotions would be collected automatically by the medium, then converted by a particular method into the activation energy that could rouse the arrays.

This technique for converting negative emotion into energy came out of a research result he had traded from Viola a very long time ago, and it suited a situation like this admirably.

“It did meet the expected target completely, at least,” Jie Ming murmured to himself.

What was more, a design of this kind could also be used to screen.

A person whose emotions were too weak would not serve as a host.

Because weak emotion generally meant weak desire and weak obsession. Once such a person became a “System host,” reality would grind their edges smooth bit by bit, and guiding them would only be more trouble for Jie Ming.

Yet an individual whose emotions were too strong would not do either.

The intensity of emotion was bound up with mental energy and with strength of soul, and the emotional energy an ordinary person could release had its limits.

If the emotional energy someone could release was too high, it meant they very likely possessed enormous transcendent power in their own right, or had even already drawn the notice of some higher existence.

Should he meet with a case like that, Jie Ming would simply let the medium go on playing dead.

What Jie Ming truly wanted was a person somewhere in the middle.

Someone with hatred, with attachments, with grievance, with desire, but in essence still no more than a mortal.

Such people were the easiest to draw with hope, and the readiest, at the last extremity, to seize on a straw that looked like salvation.

Jack fitted the conditions exactly.

Jie Ming’s gaze fell back to the screen of light.

The medium itself had only those two functions, so the so-called “healing” was of course no miracle native to the System. It was merely him working alchemy by remote control.

That thread of mental energy seeping across space was exceedingly faint, yet under Jie Ming’s precise control it could still complete a few of the most basic alchemical operations.

It was by directing alchemy that Jie Ming had remade the structure of Jack’s body, and then, by the same method, repaired Sia’s heart and the injuries to her chest cavity.

The technique was in fact the easy part; the real trouble was the energy source.

Alchemy had never been a matter of conjuring miracles out of nothing. On the contrary, it laid particular stress on equivalent exchange.

A bodily reconstruction of that order could not possibly be completed on the strength of that trickle of mental energy alone.

The mental energy Jie Ming could push through space was far too little. It was barely enough to construct even the most basic first-level apprentice spell, and that he could work alchemy at all was purely the fruit of consummate technical skill.

For that, Jie Ming had had no choice but to take his materials from what lay to hand.

And the nearest material at the time was naturally Jack’s life force, all the more so since life force was itself the easiest energy to call upon.

In the instant Jack answered the System, the two of them had, in the terms of mysticism, concluded a contract. So Jie Ming could draw his life force out directly through the medium and use that power to drive the alchemy.

Jie Ming rapped the desktop helplessly. “All in all, the reason it turned into such a business is still that there is too little power to project across.”

Merely running the alchemy through two cycles had come close to draining Jack dry.

Jack’s hair might be grey now and his face aged, but that was already the result of Jie Ming restraining himself with all his might.

Jie Ming had even taken the trouble, in passing, to put the circulation of his life force in order, which was the only reason Jack could still move about now rather than lying sprawled on the ground like a cripple from spending too much of it.

But all of this already stood at the very limit of what the power he could project at this stage was able to do, and beyond it. To go on and do anything more, the medium would have to be upgraded.

“The main thing is still expanding the capacity. Everything else is manageable enough. So long as sufficient mental energy can cross over, I can do a great deal more.” Jie Ming stroked his chin and thought.

Yet clearly, as things stood, this was not something he could do himself. He could only let Jack find the materials and lay out the array on his own.

“A pretext is easy enough to find. The medium is short of power to begin with. So given a sufficient supply of energy materials, it stands to reason that the System can be upgraded, doesn’t it?”

At that thought Jie Ming leaned back into his chair, in no particular hurry.

After all, judging by the intelligence his mental energy had gathered earlier, that little fellow on the other side had no shortage of reasons to need him.

“Slowly, then. If there is one thing a wizard is never short of, it is time.”

…

…

Meanwhile, deep in the forest.

Jack leaned against the cold rock face, watching Sia quietly a short way off.

The girl’s wounds had closed, but she had not woken. Mercifully, her breathing, though weak, was perfectly steady.

Jack sat there, chest rising and falling without pause, that attack still replaying over and over in his mind.

Every time he recalled how narrowly he had escaped being killed, his heart gave a violent lurch.

But he soon forced the feeling down, because now was not the time for grief.

Once he had collected himself, the first thing Jack did was glance at the distress band on his wrist, meaning to call for help.

“Hm?”

He pressed the emergency button twice, and froze.

Because the band gave no response whatsoever. Not even the indicator light came on.

“Broken?”

He frowned, and after checking it over again and again to no avail, went at once to look at Sia’s band and those of the other two classmates.

The result was the same. Every one of them had failed.

At that, a film of cold sweat sprang out across Jack’s back.