I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 913: Muddy Waters

What became of the leader of the men in black in the end, Jie Ming, on the other side, no longer had any interest in knowing.

After seeing the state of the camp through Jack, there remained only one thing that truly held Jie Ming’s attention: that spatial passage array.

On the face of it, the thing was crude to the point of absurdity.

The runes were not exactly disordered in their carving, but they could by no means be called neat; the energy lines had not been arranged in the most rational way; and a great quantity of high-level materials had simply been welded crudely together.

If a genuine high-level array were likened to an instrument precise in the extreme, then what these men in black had thrown together was as though someone had taken an expensive alchemical core apart and then forced it back into place with a hammer and a welding torch.

“A criminal waste of good material!” Jie Ming, looking at the array before him through his mental energy, could not help shaking his head.

He said so because his mental energy had passed through those outer shells and seen the construction deep within the array’s core.

“Now this is interesting…”

He beckoned with one hand, and a great mass of runes was projected into the air.

Jie Ming stripped away the useless surface structures one after another, until at last the true core hidden in the depths lay exposed.

Once he had analysed these things and understood them, the ease went entirely out of Jie Ming’s face. “This thing… is anything but simple.”

It had been built in a thorough mess, but that was owing to the poor workmanship of those men in black.

Its innermost theoretical framework remained plainly visible.

“What a frightening level of technique…”

The depth of its theory had reached a considerable height; and though it was wholly unlike the system of wizard civilisation, it was without question just as efficient!

Jie Ming could confirm it beyond any doubt: whoever had designed this array surpassed him in the matter of spatial knowledge!

He could accomplish the same thing himself, certainly, but in the matter of the core framework he was nowhere near as refined as the other.

It was as though, working the same mathematics problem, Jie Ming had filled most of a sheet with his working and forced out the answer by brute differentiation, while the other party had written “observe that”, and then set down the answer in no more than two or three lines.

Which of the two was the stronger was clear at a glance.

“Interesting…” Jie Ming stroked his chin.

Earlier, Jie Ming had obtained part of the information on the scene through Jack’s point of view, and before the array core was drained dry by the System he had also intercepted a good deal of precious operational data.

At first, he had been rather disappointed in this plane.

By the intelligence from every quarter, the human civilisation of this plane was no longer the advanced civilisation that had once created the mushroom-men and then been able to exile them.

The human civilisation here had suffered a complete break in its lineage, its technology all but destroyed by the world’s upheaval.

Jie Ming had even thought that when he came down into this world hereafter, he might genuinely have to rely on archaeological excavation to obtain the technology he wanted.

Yet now, in the hands of this obscure and motley organisation, spatial passage technology of such high quality had appeared.

After analysing it closely, he discovered a fact more surprising still.

This array was not a short-range link between planes at all, but an ultra-long-range spatial transmission array pointed at some place exceedingly far off.

Which was to say that what this band of men in black were trying to open was very likely a gate leading to other plane clusters, or even to some still more distant structure of space and time.

“This plane may well have a higher civilisation than that watching it from the dark.” Jie Ming narrowed his eyes.

He hesitated no longer, but contacted Berta Vera Augusta directly through his magic net terminal and sent over his findings and his judgement.

A moment later the light screen lit, and Augusta’s cool, exquisite face appeared on the other side.

She seemed to be sorting through a new batch of reconnaissance intelligence; behind her a number of rune instruments of peculiar style could be seen.

“I was about to contact you as well,” Augusta said. “The medium I sent across has made new discoveries too.”

So saying, she transmitted a body of material across.

Jie Ming received it and opened it to look. What it recorded was the social structure of a birdman race, together with imagery relating to their Sky Cities.

He spread out the light screen and watched the video intelligence recorded within.

A few glances in, his brows drew together.

To judge by the social forms of these birdmen alone, they ought still to have been at a fairly primitive stage of development.

Details of every kind indicated that the birdmen were in all likelihood still at the feudal slave-society stage, and had probably not even completed the most basic industrial system.

The trouble was that a race of just this sort nonetheless possessed floating cities suspended above the clouds.

On the light screen, one enormous city after another drifting above the cloud layer swept past; on the platforms beneath them were countless intricate mechanical structures and power installations.

Set in an ordinary plane, technology of this kind, even with several thousand years of civilisational accumulation behind it, could never have been achieved by birdmen who had not so much as established an industrial system.

If these Sky Cities were kept aloft by extraordinary power it would not have mattered; such things did happen within extraordinary systems.

But it was quite plain that what these Sky Cities relied upon was not extraordinary power alone.

Which meant that behind the birdmen there lay some other source of technology.

What was more, judging by the styles of the various arrays on those sky cities, the source of technology behind the birdmen was wholly different from the array system behind these men in black.

“So it seems… there is another civilisation backing these birdmen?” Jie Ming asked.

“The evidence is conclusive.” Augusta nodded. “Unfortunately my medium had only just sent this information back; before it could go any deeper it was found by one of the birdmen’s strong ones and destroyed. What can be confirmed, though, is that the style of that technology is unlike the spatial array you are looking at, and it is not the wizard system either.”

Jie Ming drew a deep breath.

He had supposed that this plane cluster still in the process of forming was merely a crowd of civilisations brawling at random.

As it appeared now, there were not only the civilisations of different planes colliding here, but at least two or even more outside advanced civilisations laying their plans in the dark.

Add themselves, the wizards, to that, and the whole place looked for all the world like a chessboard being carved up among several parties at once.

“Heh heh. It seems the waters of this plane cluster run deeper than I thought,” said Jie Ming.

“Which is why my advice is that even though you have finished your preliminary preparations, you had better not be in a hurry to go across,” said Augusta. “You know how matters stand with my family. I can go and contact my grandfather, and have him and several other seventh-level wizards he is on good terms with prepare in advance. Then, when the moment is right, we go in together.”

Jie Ming nodded.

It was undeniably the prudent course.

With his present strength, dealing with an ordinary eighth-level was well enough; but no one could say how many further cards those civilisations behind the scenes still had buried.

If he could bring along enough seventh-level wizards to hold the line, it would be a great deal safer.

“We’ll do as you say,” said Jie Ming.