I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 905: Escape and Recharge

Four bands losing function at the same moment could not possibly be coincidence.

“Which is to say, someone has tampered with them…”

Jack had no idea whether the other side had jammed the bands’ signal outright or had simply destroyed every one of them.

But whichever it turned out to be, it meant one thing: that black figure was certainly not merely some vagrant or raider who happened to be passing by.

After all, a lone man would have no need to go to such lengths… and still less the ability to jam communications across an entire area.

Which is to say…

“This is an organised operation!” Jack let out a breath.

Only an organised, prepared enemy would set a thing like that up in advance.

At that thought, Jack’s eyes turned cold by degrees.

Which is to say, the whole graduation trial had very likely been marked out by someone already!

At that thought, Jack’s heart went cold.

He slapped himself hard across the face and forced himself calm. “No… the disappearance of the signal is itself a piece of information.”

If it were purely a matter of jamming the signal, the Military Department ought to notice the anomaly quickly. An entire area’s distress bands going silent at once could not possibly escape attention.

But the question was… what if the other side had done more than jam them?

Judging by how cleanly and decisively that black figure had left at the end, they were hunting students like him to some purpose.

Jack certainly did not think he and the others were in any way more special than anyone else. An operation on such a scale was bound to make a considerable disturbance, and if the other side had some purpose in mind, they would certainly want to drag things out as long as they could.

And as matters looked now, an operation this wide-ranging that also meant to buy as much time as possible… there were very likely spies planted by the other side in the school, in the Military Department, even among the personnel responsible for clearing the outer perimeter.

As for the bands’ signals, the other side had probably faked those too.

The more Jack thought, the more dangerous it looked. “No good. In that case I absolutely cannot go out now!”

Putting himself in their place: if it were him, he would certainly have men disguised as teachers or Military Department personnel patrolling the perimeter, to sweep up every student who tried to flee in one net!

So… at the very least, he could not go out now!

Jack glanced up instinctively at the pitch-dark forest. As for pressing deeper in, that was far too dangerous, and he rejected it out of hand.

Looked at that way, staying where he was seemed the more suitable choice.

After all, this area had only just been “cleared,” so the other side ought not to pay it much attention.

But it had its dangers too.

He had no way of knowing what the other side was after. If they raised too great a commotion, the area he was in now stood a good chance of being caught up in it.

In that case, only one road remained.

“Pull back a little way first, but don’t leave the forest straight away. Move somewhere concealed enough and hide there.”

That way, if anything happened inside the forest, he could withdraw quickly.

Jack made up his mind: unless a genuine main force of the Military Department entered the forest, he would make contact with no “rescue personnel” whatsoever.

“Make sure you stay alive first. As long as you’re alive, there’s still a chance.” Jack clenched his fists.

The decision made, Jack acted without hesitation.

He forced himself upright. His body was still weak from the healing earlier, and his vision even went black for a moment.

But he made himself walk over to Sia and carefully helped her to one side.

Just as he was about to hoist her onto his shoulder, Jack’s eyes fell on the two corpses on the ground nearby, and he fell silent again.

He looked at the stone wall he had crashed into a short while ago, and at the blood staining it, was silent for a few seconds, and in the end crouched back down.

“I’m sorry…”

Choking down the nausea rising in him, Jack took up his short knife, dismembered the two bodies, and then scattered the blood and the broken remains across the places that bore traces of the fight.

Then he rearranged the camping traces he and Sia had left earlier and packed up two sets of gear, doing his best to create the impression that only two people had ever rested in this area.

Jack did all this to keep any enemy who came back on patrol from noticing anything out of place here.

He was not certain it would do any good, but he had already pushed it as far as he possibly could in his present state.

Even if it bought only a little more time, that would be enough.

Sometimes a little more time was precisely the chance to live.

His body had been extremely weak to begin with, and by the time all this was done Jack was so exhausted that his vision blackened, every breath feeling as though a block of lead were pressing on his chest.

He glanced at Sia in her deep sleep, gritted his teeth, forced up what strength he had, bent down and got her onto his back, then caught up their gear.

“It isn’t over yet!”

And so Jack set off with stumbling steps in the direction that led out of the forest, stopping to rest almost every few metres.

Before long, carrying the unconscious Sia and dragging their gear, he staggered off into deeper woods.

Soon the two of them had vanished altogether, leaving behind only that deliberately falsified campsite.

…

…

How long it took he could not say, but Jack finally found a hollow in the hills, hidden deep away.

The branches of towering ancient trees thrust out sideways in mid-air and wove together with the vines tangled along the ground into a natural barrier, screening the recess in the hillside completely.

Had he not, while carrying Sia, blundered into a few clumps of shrubs and pushed them aside by chance, he would never have discovered that such a place was hidden here at all.

He knelt on one knee, set Sia down gently, pulled up a few handfuls of dry grass to cushion her, and only then braced himself against a tree trunk and lowered himself slowly to sit.

His legs were so weak and aching that he had almost no feeling in them, and his vision blacked out from time to time.

He had not dared stop along the way, half running and half scrambling clear across the better part of the area, and naturally he had left a good many traces.

If the enemy realised they were there and tried to track them, the two of them would be found easily enough.

Jack knew that perfectly well, but he was long past being able to do anything about it.

Never mind covering his tracks. Right now even standing was an effort.

Sia had still not woken. Her breathing was steady, but her brows stayed drawn together.

Jack took her hand and pressed it, and only when he had confirmed there was warmth in it still did he feel a little easier.

He leaned against the rock wall and drew several ragged breaths. Once he had recovered a little, he knew that in the state the two of them were in, there was nothing else left to rely on.

Jack lowered his head towards the bloodstained block of black metal at his chest.

“System.” He called out to it inwardly.

An indifferent male voice rose slowly in his mind. “System power insufficient. Please charge as soon as possible.”

Hearing the System’s voice, Jack let out a breath at last, and then, without thinking, felt at his own chest.

He had little enough life force left as it was. Another draw and, never mind Sia, he would be the one to die here first. “This is a problem. There isn’t much life force left in me…”

Just as a bitter look crossed Jack’s face, a message came through into his mind.

Jack blanked for a moment, then his eyes went wide.

The message had naturally been sent to him by the System, and in it was an explanation: the energy the System required was not limited to life force.

High-energy substances of every kind, electrical power, energy crystals, even the transcendent power of living creatures would all do.

In short, so long as the energy density was high enough, anything at all could be used to charge it.

Jack lowered his head and thought, and suddenly his eyes lit up.

He opened his pack and pulled out several pieces of metal wreckage, smashed past recognition.

They were his and Sia’s distress bands.

Earlier, uncertain whether the bands were being used by the enemy to track them, he had simply taken both off and smashed the components inside one by one with a stone.

Jack’s original idea had been to rest a while, then find an opportunity to walk off in the opposite direction and discard them, to see whether he could draw the enemy away.

Among those fragments, a metal sphere the size of a fingertip stood out conspicuously.

The thing was wrapped in several layers of protective casing, with only a tiny crystal showing through a gap he had deliberately opened.

This was the band’s power unit, a standard energy crystal, certainly a match for the System’s charging requirements.

He rummaged through the baggage again and drew out half a broken horn.

It came from the head of a first-level mutant beast his squad had hunted earlier, and had been meant to go back to town and be traded for supplies.

He remembered his textbook saying that such horns were where mutant beasts stored surplus energy, and that they usually held no small amount of it.

Jack did not hesitate. He took off the black metal block and set the metal sphere and the broken horn down beside it.

Then, following the information the System had pushed into his mind, he traced it out stroke by stroke in the mud with a twig.

Before long he had drawn several symbols of simple shape.

The symbols enclosed a ring that took in the black metal block and the two objects at its center.

“System, begin absorbing energy.” He gave the order inwardly.

As the words fell, that ring of symbols lit with the very faintest glimmer.

Jie Ming had already turned his attention over the moment Jack gave the order. “Ha! The little fellow moves fast.”

At the moment Jack gave the order, Jie Ming used his mental energy to activate the array built out of that crude set of symbols Jack had drawn.

Under the array’s working, the meager energy held in the three energy bodies within it flowed into the interior of the medium.

Jie Ming took the chance to use that energy to work alchemy, widening slightly a few of the most fundamental nodes in the cross-space mental transmission array.

Unfortunately there was not much energy, so the scale of the upgrade was small.

But even so slight a change was enough to double the mental energy Jie Ming could transmit across.

“Good. That gives me a great deal more room to work with.” Jie Ming nodded slightly.

On Jack’s side, seeing the glimmer on the black block gradually fade and the energy crystal and beast horn beside it crumble apart, he realised the charging must be complete.

He gripped the block of black metal tensely and asked the System, “Now… what can it do?”

The System’s voice sounded again. “Enhancement may be performed upon organisms or objects.”

Jack froze. Several simple enhancement options had appeared in his consciousness: body enhancement, weapon enhancement, item enhancement…

He stared blankly at the information surfacing in his mind, and after a few seconds an elation he could hardly contain welled up across his face.

“At last… there’s hope!”