I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 918: Descent

The Holy Spirit was the first to react.

That ball of tentacles coiled inside Gavin’s skull cavity contracted violently, and then let out a shrill burst of mental resonance. “No! Kill him, quickly! Destroy that block of metal!”

Its voice was full of terror, and the tiny suckers at the ends of its tentacles twitched beyond its control.

But those white-haired old people turned a deaf ear to it.

They glanced at one another, and something close to displeasure even surfaced on their faces.

Destroy the block of metal?

What a joke. Think how much trouble they had gone to in order to get the thing into their hands, and all of it in order to study the method of extending life that lay inside it.

To their minds, that shout of Jack’s a moment ago was nothing more than a cornered beast’s last struggle. The metal block was sealed away behind layer upon layer of protective barriers, so that not the faintest ripple of energy could be detected from it. How could it possibly still be in contact with him?

“Your Excellency the Holy Spirit, you worry too much.” The old man at the front waved a hand, his tone quite immovable. “That thing has been completely shielded.”

But Jack laughed.

That indifferent man’s voice in his mind spoke up again, and unlike the wholly emotionless voice of every enhancement before it, this time it carried a clear trace of laughter.

“Good.”

Seeing that persuasion was useless, the Holy Spirit suddenly curled itself into a ball, its eight tentacles retracting frantically out of Gavin’s skull cavity in an attempt to flee.

But it had barely got half of itself out when a force that came out of nowhere pressed it down and held it fast.

That force had neither shape nor substance, and it pinned the whole mass of it inside Gavin’s skull so that it could not stir.

At the same moment, Gavin’s body, which by rights should have crumpled to the floor, did not fall.

His leg braced backward, and he stood there steadily.

The enormous opening in his head, and the old scars left on his body from the battle, healed at a rate visible to the naked eye, and the contours of the bone in his face began slowly to change.

The cheekbones rose a little higher, the line of the jaw grew cleaner, the formerly roundish shape of the face gradually drew longer, and even the distance between the eyes adjusted subtly to another proportion.

In no more than a few breaths, that face had changed utterly.

It was a face Jack had never seen before.

Height, frame, the proportion of muscle were all adjusting in step, and even the set of military dress he wore fitted him as though it had been cut afresh.

Through the whole of this process, that black block of metal never gave off any light at all.

Which stood to reason, since all those effects of light and shadow Jack had seen at every previous enhancement and recharge had been put on deliberately by Jie Ming for him to see.

The true use of power had no need whatever for that kind of showy outward display.

Light and vibration spill out only when the control of energy is not fine enough; truly precise operation is silent and without a trace.

After this whole series of upheavals, the old people, too, realised something was wrong.

Several of them instinctively backed away, and a group of security personnel in black at once drew their weapons and blocked the way in front.

The old man at the front changed colour, and his first reaction was to reach for the destruct button beside him.

That was the self-destruct device used to execute a restrained target in an emergency.

A flash of dark golden light passed.

The skulls of every security man who had drawn a weapon were run through in the same instant, and they slumped to the ground before they could so much as scream.

And the old man who had pressed the destruct button discovered, to his horror, that the button had failed.

No matter how he pressed it, how he slapped at it, Jack’s restraints showed not the slightest response.

The energy restraint bands were even losing their lustre one ring after another, as though they had been drained of energy.

Having severed the restraint apparatus’s energy connections with alchemy, Jie Ming worked his neck a little and took the measure of the power he had projected into this world.

Jack’s physical constitution was equivalent to that of a second-level formal wizard whose body had not been specially enhanced, and so the mental energy he could project across and steep it in came to only about the standard of a first-level formal wizard.

“It will do…”

Weak as the mental energy he could project across might be, his combat experience, his store of knowledge and his comprehension of the Laws were all of them present.

A wizard’s fighting strength derives chiefly from knowledge; mental energy merely sets a ceiling on output. In Jie Ming’s present condition he could just about manage to bring out the power of a fifth-level formal wizard.

Set in this world, that came to the equivalent of a thirteenth- to fourteenth-stage transcendent, and against a group of staff who had not even reached the eighth stage, it was a wholly one-sided slaughter.

Looking at Jack, who had already broken free of his bonds and come down off the frame, Jie Ming pointed at the old people, and then pointed at Sia, standing in the corner with her face drained of colour.

“These I leave to you. It is for you to decide how you want to deal with them.”

With that he paid Jack no further attention, turning instead to the ball of Holy Spirit tentacles held bound in midair by his mental energy.

He put out his right hand, the five fingers half closed, and the mass of tentacles curled up like a cat gripped by the scruff of its neck and floated into his palm.

Jie Ming narrowed his eyes, running the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil carefully over the structure of its tissue, and a look of interest came gradually into them.

“A fine parasitic organism.” He turned the ball of tentacles over and over as he examined it. “Look at this construction. It doubles as life-remoulding and as a replacement for the nervous system, and it actually matches the human nervous system so closely. Was it evolved to order on the spot…”

Though the Holy Spirit had no eyes, the fear in its mental energy was by now so thick that it was all but spilling over.

It could feel that scrutiny in Jie Ming’s mental energy, looking down at it from above, and that gaze of a higher creature taking it for granted that it stood over a lower one.

It tried to steady its own mental fluctuations, and with the last of its nerve it uttered a threat. “You… you have no idea how strong we of the Holy Spirit race are. This world will be ours sooner or later. Offend me now, and afterward…”

“Merely a foodstuff.” Jie Ming gave a grim little laugh.

Feeling the terror that came across to it from Jie Ming’s mental energy, the Holy Spirit’s mental fluctuations collapsed altogether.

It began to struggle violently, its tentacles contracting and stretching wildly, but that layer of light in Jie Ming’s palm held it down fast.

Jie Ming casually balled it up and stuffed it into a side pocket like a man pocketing a ball, meaning to study it at leisure once he was back.

All this done, he turned his head to look at Jack.

Things at Jack’s end were already finished.

The old people all lay on the floor, every one of them killed with a single blow, clean and efficient.

And Sia knelt among them, her face ghastly white, her lips trembling, and when she raised her head the look she turned on Jack was full of pleading.

“Jack… for the sake of our growing up together since we were children… I beg you…”

Jack looked down at her, his expression very calm.

“Perhaps the girl you were back then died long ago.” Jack crouched down, put out a hand, and touched her cheek lightly.

That was the last tenderness he had in him.

Then his palm passed through her chest without the least resistance, in almost exactly the motion of that black shadow which had run Sia through all those years ago.

Sia’s body went rigid.

Her eyes were opened very wide, and in them were tears, and fear, and a greed and a regret that had not had time to fade.

Jack drew out his blood-covered hand, laid her body gently flat on the floor, and reached over to close her eyes for her.

Then he stood up and looked warily at Jie Ming, who had been standing to one side all this while without doing anything much.

Jie Ming stood a few metres off, watching him at his ease.

Only now did Jack have the leisure to take in Jie Ming’s appearance.

The contours of his features were too exquisite to belong to a real person: fair skin, black hair and black eyes, cheekbones slightly high, the line of the jaw soft but not lacking in strength.

This body had already been enhanced by Jie Ming with alchemy to a really rather good standard, enough at least to bear the projection of his first-level formal wizard’s mental energy, and its appearance had been changed completely into his own.

If Jack had not watched with his own eyes as this body changed, he could never have connected this person with the Gavin of a moment ago, parasitised by tentacles.

“Do not be so hostile.” Jie Ming spread his hands. “You were the one who asked me to help you, were you not?”

Jack looked at him coldly. “So this appearance of yours now, is it that you have taken the lesson of those Holy Spirits and disguised yourself in our shape? Then I must say, the looks are certainly not bad.”

Jie Ming smoothed his hair back, smiling in great satisfaction. “I shall take that as a compliment.”

“What exactly are you?” Jack asked.

“I am your System.” Jie Ming answered as though it were a matter of course.

“No System has intelligence like yours.” Jack’s voice turned colder still. “Back at the very beginning, when it was first activated, that voice was not lacking in intelligence either. That was when I began to feel something was not right.”

Jie Ming sighed regretfully. “It could not be helped. Your situation at the time was far too dangerous, so I was a little more flexible about how I handled it.”

Jie Ming thought for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “So that stretch of time when you slacked off because your surroundings were comfortable, and did not do much to improve yourself, that was deliberate?”

Jack nodded without the slightest reserve. “Yes. I do not trust you!”

Jie Ming looked at Jack, who had been staring at him warily the whole time, as though hunting for any opening or any chance to run, and suddenly laughed.

“Little fellow,” his tone changed all at once, turning gentle, and carrying even a trace of appreciation, “how would you like to be my disciple?”

Jack’s expression froze.

“What?”