I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 917: Help Me!

The ward was very quiet, white lamplight spilling down from the ceiling.

Jack sat at the bedside, holding Sia’s hand.

He felt the chill of her palm and stayed silent a long while, until at last his gaze came to rest on that block of black metal at his chest. “System, enhance Sia’s life!”

“Acknowledged. Executing basic life enhancement.”

That familiar, indifferent man’s voice answered almost at once.

Hum…

As strand after faint strand of light flowed down his hand and poured into Sia’s body, Jack could see clearly that the pallor of her face was beginning to recede.

Colour surfaced in it; the breathing that had been so weak steadied again, and her tightly knitted brows slowly smoothed out.

At the sight of it, the heart Jack had held clenched all this while finally eased.

A few minutes more, and Sia’s eyelashes trembled faintly, and then she opened her eyes.

“Jack…” Her voice was very small.

Jack broke into a smile. “Awake?”

Sia looked at him, then glanced down at her own body. “I…”

“You lived!” Jack gripped her hand tight.

The two of them looked at one another, and laughed at the same moment.

A month later, at the training base.

Jack slowly drew his fist back, his chest heaving, sweat running steadily down his cheeks.

He glanced at the testing equipment. The figures had climbed a little again.

Jack nodded, satisfied, and turned his head to see Sia standing at the door of the training hall with a towel and water in her hands.

“Here. You have worked hard.”

Jack took the towel and the cup, drank a mouthful while he was at it, and then could not help frowning. “Why have you come again? How long is it since your injuries healed? The doctors told you to keep off strenuous exercise.”

“I know my own body.” Sia patted her chest. “I am completely better!”

“You still need to rest a while longer.”

“I really am fine.” Sia drew closer, smiling.

Jack was about to say something further when his vision suddenly went black.

“Mm?!”

Crack!

His body seemed all at once to have lost every ounce of strength, and the cup in Jack’s hand fell to the floor and shattered.

“Jack?” Sia’s voice came from beside him.

Jack instinctively raised his head, straining to make out the person in front of him, but the world before his eyes had already begun to spin, and his body was entirely beyond his control.

The last thing he saw before he went down was Sia’s eyes, so cold that they were the eyes of a stranger.

“Sia…” Jack tried to speak, but no sound would come.

Then his consciousness sank into darkness.

He had no idea how long it was before Jack came round.

His first sensation was that he had been bound!

His eyes snapped open, and he found both his hands and both his feet fixed fast, silver-grey energy restraint bands wound about his four limbs, pale blue arcs of electricity flowing ceaselessly along a metal frame.

Jack tried to struggle, but a powerful current immediately ran through his body and robbed his muscles of their strength!

“What is going on?! System…”

Jack instinctively called out for the System, but there was no response of any kind.

His heart sank viciously. He looked down and found his chest empty. That block of metal he had always carried about with him was gone!

At the sight of it, a terror such as he had never known welled up in an instant.

Because nothing else he had on him had been taken except the System, which meant that the secret he had always thought his greatest was now known to these people!

It was just then that the sound of a metal door opening drew Jack’s attention.

He turned his head and saw a group of old people walking slowly in. They were extremely old, their hair every strand of it snow-white, and some of them could not even walk and had to rely on motorised chairs.

But as Jack took in these people his face grew steadily worse, because he recognised some of them.

Senior figures from the military, senior figures from the city government, the head of the energy system, the heads of the research institutions…

There were even several he had only ever seen in textbooks and on the news. These people, between them, took in very nearly all the highest power in the dozen-odd cities round about!

“What… what is this for?” Jack clenched his teeth.

The old man at the front smiled a little. “Do not be nervous. We have no intention of harming you. We only want to ask you about a few things… about that object you carry.”

Seeing Jack say nothing, the old man raised a hand, and the person beside him at once started up an enormous containment dome.

As the sealing metal plates rose slowly, a pale blue barrier came into view.

Jack’s pupils contracted, because lying quietly at the centre of the containment dome was a block of black metal, and it was his System!

The whole room fell quiet.

Jack looked at it for a long moment. “How did you…”

The old man smiled kindly. “How did we find out?”

Jack made no sound, but the old man went on explaining all the same.

“The truth is that at the beginning we did not know. Only, somebody told us that there existed in you a power of some kind capable of altering the state of life itself, and so we looked into you. And what we found in the end was that when you and Sia were brought back from the graduation trial all those years ago, the circumstances were most peculiar. Sia above all. The degree of damage to the clothing she wore did not match the state of her body.”

“Afterwards we looked into your growth records as well. You had deliberately concealed them, but with certain specialised equipment we were still able to detect that the rate at which your life force was rising far exceeded any normal level. And there was your performance in the various battles before this, and also…”

The old man looked towards the block of black metal inside the containment dome. “…that peculiar short blade.”

Jack fell silent. Only now did he understand how much more he had given away than he had imagined.

“And so we ran an experiment. Using Sia.”

At those words Jack’s head jerked up.

The old man’s expression stayed calm, and he explained on at the same unhurried pace.

“The result proved our judgement correct. You possess a special power capable of intervening directly in the substance of life enhancement. That is precious, and precious to the whole of human civilisation!”

At this point a shade of gravity came into the old man’s face. “And so we hope you will hand over the method of controlling it, and use this power for the good of humanity!”

Jack looked at them, and then laughed, coldly. “For the good of humanity? Very prettily put. You tie me up, you take my property, and then you tell me… you want to save humanity?”

The old man sighed. “What we have done is indeed less than decent, but we mean you no ill will either. With your combat strength, after all, if the negotiation broke down, these few old bones of ours would not stand up to it.”

Jack went on sneering. “Then find someone strong enough to hold me down and negotiate! Instead of resorting to methods like this!”

“Or is it that you pack of old things went to all this trouble to tie me up because you want something else? Something like… longer life!”

The room was quiet for an instant. Several of the old people glanced at one another, and none of them contradicted him. The old man at the front even laughed.

“What a clever little fellow. It is true, we do have that much selfishness in us, since after all…” He stroked his white hair. “Who does not want to live a little longer? But that does not mean we have no wish to see humanity grow stronger.”

“You are right. We are selfish, and that is why we have banded together. But we also genuinely hope that humanity can go on living in this world.”

He looked at Jack, his eyes earnest. “If you are willing to work with us, we can build the whole thing around you. Every research result can be shared with you. You could even direct the entire project yourself!”

Jack fell silent, with no sign of answering.

Seeing it, the old man pressed his case further. “You should know as well as anyone how much in the way of resources you can obtain on your own. But if we work together, the whole of the northern district becomes your backing. Our lifespans will be in your hands, and you will naturally come to hold absolute control…”

At that point another familiar voice spoke up. “Jack.”

Sia came out from the side. Jack looked at her and said nothing.

Sia was still exactly as she was in Jack’s memory. “They are not wrong. If this thing really can help humanity, then it ought to be put to use. We have lived side by side all this time. Do you truly not want this world to become a better place?”

Jack looked at her for a long while without speaking. It came to him suddenly that he no longer knew the girl in front of him.

Or rather, that this was the first time he had seen her clearly.

Her looks had not changed, nor her expression, and yet the thing in those eyes had turned into something Jack found at once familiar and strange.

It was the look those so-called relatives had worn, back when his parents died and they were fighting over the inheritance.

Concern in their mouths, all of it for his sake, and nothing in their eyes but their own advantage.

Looking at a gaze like that, Jack very nearly wanted to laugh.

He felt, all at once, rather tired.

Think it over, and the old man was not wrong either. Hand over the System, and he would obtain more resources; and with more resources, he would grow stronger himself.

What was more, with his mastery of the System, he would easily become the dominant party in the arrangement. Look at it from any angle and both sides won.

Paying no attention to Sia beside him, Jack turned his head to the old man. “Then, one last thing. Who told you? Who was it that told you there was a special power in me?”

The old people all went still at once and glanced at one another. In the end, the one at the front pressed the communicator beside him. “Come in.”

The metal door opened again, and a familiar figure walked through.

The instant Jack saw the man’s face clearly, he went utterly rigid. “…Gavin?!”

The newcomer raised a hand with a smile. “Hi. Long time no see, Jack.”

Jack stared fixedly at him, his pupils shaking. “No. You are not Gavin!”

Across from him “Gavin” went blank for a moment, and then wore a look of interest. “Mm? It seems I underestimated you after all. I had thought you merely had a rather strong life force. I had not expected your spiritual perception to be this sharp as well.”

“Who exactly are you?!” Jack’s voice came out all but forced through the gaps in his teeth.

The man before him had Gavin’s appearance and Gavin’s voice, and even certain habitual gestures were identical.

Yet Jack’s spirit could feel it clearly. The other was no human being at all!

After a moment’s thought, “Gavin” turned to face Jack, and the flesh at the back of his neck suddenly split open.

Several short transparent tentacles bored out from under the skin, and then more of them opened up the back of “Gavin’s” skull the way one opens a door.

Jack stared blankly at the thing inside.

There was no brain in there any longer, only a mass of transparent tentacles densely tangled together with one another, forming a spherical structure.

The spherical structure squirmed faintly and gave out a low resonant sound. “Allow me to introduce myself. We come from the Holy Spirit race. You may understand me as a higher order of intelligent life.”

Ignoring the murderous look in Jack’s eyes, the Holy Spirit went on. “We came here to guide the evolution of humanity. The thing in your hands is very dangerous, but if you work with us, you will receive a considerable improvement.”

Jack showed no sign at all of speaking, and the old man beside him opened his mouth to help explain. “Ever since that battle at the northern energy crystal field, Gavin has been dead of wounds too severe to survive. This Holy Spirit was hidden inside his body at the time, and afterwards took the body over.”

“He did not conceal his identity, though. On the contrary, he explained everything to us of his own accord, which we take as his expression of good faith.”

“Our world is under ceaseless invasion now from the civilisations of other spaces, and you must have seen it for yourself. Those newly appeared races are not all of them fighting alone. Behind a great many of them are other civilisations supplying technology, and that is precisely why we humans find it harder and harder to resist.”

The old man looked at Jack, his expression earnest. “If those races can look for partners, then why can humanity not? Humanity no longer has the standing to cling to the pride of the past. We must borrow outside strength, or sooner or later we will be swallowed whole by some other world!”

At that Jack lowered his head and sank into silence.

Seeing it, the old man nodded, gratified. “Jack, what you possess, together with the resources we possess, and the higher stage of technology that the Holy Spirit race must have… this is an opportunity. Work with us, and humanity can meet with a fresh evolution.”

“So long as it goes smoothly, we humans can stand at the summit of the world once more!” Saying it, the old man had worked himself into excitement.

The silence went on for a long time. Jack still said nothing, and his expression grew steadily darker, so dark that nothing of his feeling could be read from it.

Then, suddenly…

“Heh…”

With that one light laugh of Jack’s, the air in the room changed abruptly.

Several of the old people were instantly on their guard, and the Holy Spirit stopped the resonance of its tentacles.

The old man at the front went so far as to glance instinctively at the black metal inside the containment dome.

But seeing that the thing was already sealed away under layer upon layer, and that Jack was locked down by the energy restraint apparatus and could hardly have the capacity to resist, he relaxed again.

The old man asked, “Well? Have you made up your mind?”

Jack raised his head and suddenly laughed. “You are right.”

Hearing that, the expressions of the old people turned to satisfaction.

But Jack looked at them, his voice rising bit by bit. “If working with people from other worlds is the way to save humanity, then why can I not work with someone too?”

“What?”

The old people present were dumbfounded, and for a moment could make nothing of it.

“Do you mean to say…”

Jack showed no sign of explaining. He only drew a deep breath, then raised his head and roared with every ounce of strength in his body. “I know you have been watching me all this time! I am willing to work with you! Help me!!!”

…

…

In another world, Jie Ming heard that last line of Jack’s and could not help laughing.

“The boy really is clever!”