I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 906: System, Enhance!

Jack gripped the block of black metal at his chest hard, his palm trembling faintly from the sheer force of it.

“Looking” at the several options surfacing in his mind, he drew a deep breath and quickly made up his mind.

“Enhance my body.”

As the words fell, that indifferent voice sounded in his mind once more.

“Beginning basic somatic enhancement. Please remain conscious.”

“What do you mean, remain conscious…” An uneasy feeling flashed instinctively through Jack’s heart.

As a warm current of power poured in through Jack’s chest and into his body, he understood at once what the words had meant.

“Nngh!”

It was as though countless needles of the finest gauge were driving into his flesh inch by inch, starting from his chest, and as though countless thin currents of electricity were wandering slowly beneath his skin.

The fear of giving himself away made Jack stifle the sound into a low grunt, and he barely kept himself from screaming aloud.

Then he felt his own body beginning to change.

At the same moment, an endless distance away, on the Infernal Sulfur Plane.

Jie Ming sat quietly in his laboratory, his consciousness descending slowly along that newly widened mental energy channel and into the black medium.

Because the channel through which he could deliver power was so narrow, he had no surplus strength to squander, and so Jie Ming could only accomplish the body enhancement by rather artful means.

Jie Ming spread out his mental energy bit by bit and, following the structure of Jack’s body, slowly combed through the life force still lingering in his bones, his muscles, and even deep within his cells.

He squeezed that life force out, then arranged it anew, and while he was about it he combed through every kind of tissue and cell in Jack’s body as well.

Jie Ming was extremely careful throughout the process. It was like taking a stalk of grass and slowly nudging at a heap of gravel: a little too much force and the whole structure might collapse outright.

There was no help for it. At this stage there was not much he could do beyond wringing out as much of Jack’s own remaining potential as he possibly could.

“Not bad.” The work finished, Jie Ming was well pleased with his own handling of it. “Judging by the combat strength the little fellow’s enemies have shown, this much enhancement ought to serve for now.”

On the other side, Jack could plainly feel it growing more and more unbearable.

His bones began to itch, his muscles quivered faintly, and his limbs, gone cold from the loss of so much blood, were actually recovering their warmth by degrees.

His heart beat with steadily greater force, blood flowed back into his limbs, and even his breathing grew deeper.

Jack even had the illusion that he was being taken apart piece by piece and then reassembled.

His body no longer hurt, and yet the wretchedness of it had climbed another storey higher!

He clenched his teeth and forced himself to stay conscious.

And it was just then that the power suddenly began to weaken.

“Energy depleted. Please recharge as soon as possible…”

Hearing the System’s voice, Jack blanked for a moment.

Before he could think it through properly, a terrible hunger swept through his whole body without the least warning.

“Grrr…”

His stomach let out an enormous noise.

Jack felt as though the inside of his body had suddenly been hollowed out, as though a ball of burning fire had been stuffed into his stomach.

“So hungry…” Jack murmured, and then flung himself bodily at the gear beside him.

Clatter!

The few packs that remained were wrenched open in one motion.

Compressed rations, dried meat, nutrient blocks… anything at all that could be eaten he clawed out in a frenzy and crammed into his mouth.

The military compressed rations crumbled easily between his teeth. The stuff was normally hard enough to chip a tooth, yet to Jack it felt, once in his mouth, as crisp and light as a biscuit.

Jack had no time to chew properly. He wolfed it down, his throat working without pause, crumbs of food smeared across the corners of his mouth.

Only when he had swallowed the greater part of the food in their gear did he finally stop.

“Haah…”

Jack leaned against a tree root, breathing in great gulps, his forehead covered in cold sweat.

The hunger was still there, but it had come down from the pitch that could tear reason to shreds into a range he could bear.

He raised a hand to wipe the corner of his mouth, and the motion stopped abruptly.

Jack looked down at his own arm.

No! This was no illusion of his!

The arm, which injury and blood loss had left looking rather thin and wasted, was now visibly a whole size thicker.

And with the body’s stored energy so heavily spent, the lines of muscle stood out beneath the skin more clearly than before.

Jack instinctively made a fist.

Crack.

His knuckles gave a light, brittle report, and an abundant strength surged from his palm up into his arm.

Jack stood stunned for a few seconds, then sprang up and stretched himself out, feeling the strength run along his shoulders, his waist and belly, and on down into his legs, as though his whole body had suddenly been fitted with a new power system.

He threw a hard punch at the air.

Crack!

The wind of the punch actually let out a muffled, indistinct report in the narrow hollow, startling even Jack himself.

“This…”

He carefully tried two more punches in succession.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

His fists cut through the air, drawing a distinct sound of wind behind them.

“So strong…” he murmured.

Then, as though something had occurred to him, he crouched down at once and ran his hands over his own body to check it.

No pain in the bones, no tearing in the muscles, and the weakness his injuries had left behind was fading fast.

Set against what it had been, his body had made an outright leap!

The more Jack took it in, the fiercer the light in his eyes burned.

By the basic standard for transcendents taught at school, the strength of his body now might even have reached the physical level of a fifth-level apprentice.

“How is that possible…” Jack found it hard to believe.

A single enhancement, and his body had improved by that much?

The reason he judged himself to be only a fifth-level apprentice and not a first-stage transcendent was that, by what Jack had learned at school, however strong the body became, that did not amount to being a true transcendent.

A true transcendent had to awaken an “extraordinary ability” of his own.

And as he was now, he still had no extraordinary ability.

But even so, the change in his body was extravagant enough!

Jack’s heart beat faster and faster, and an excitement such as he had never known began to spread through his chest.

“On nothing but that little scrap of energy,” he said, looking down at his own two hands, “it can carry me straight across two stages?”

The System really could make him stronger!

So long as he kept going, he could have power.

With power he could stay alive, could protect Sia, and could also… take revenge.

That black figure…

Jack slowly clenched his fists, his gaze hardening by degrees.

“I will find you!”

At the same moment, in that far-distant laboratory, Jie Ming watched the scene quietly.

“That will about do.”

Converted to the standards of wizard civilisation, Jack as he stood now was roughly the equal of an ordinary apprentice who had just stepped into the first-level wizard apprentice stratum and had undergone no special bodily modification.

As for what level that amounted to in the world Jack lived in, there was no judging it accurately for the time being.

He had far too little information about that world in hand.

After all, the medium had only just established its connection, and the transcendent samples he could come into contact with were pitifully few.

The only sample that even resembled a transcendent was the man who had killed Jack.

Still, he was in no hurry to pin down that world’s system of power, nor in any hurry to gather information.

“Let the boy get himself running first. The rest of the information can wait.”