I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 919: Withdrawal
Jack did not answer Jie Ming. He took a step backward instead, his spine coming up against the metal wall.
He stared fixedly at the being in front of him, every muscle in his body drawn tight.
“What exactly are you plotting?”
Jie Ming tilted his head, his expression even looking rather innocent. “Plotting? I have told you. I sincerely want to take you as my disciple.”
“What exactly are you?” Jack asked, his voice low.
“A wizard.” When Jie Ming said those words, his tone carried a pride that was almost instinctive. “One who levers power with knowledge, one who pursues knowledge. Your civilisation once had people of that sort as well; it was only that the catastrophe cut them off. Boy, the intelligence you have shown makes me think you are qualified to be my disciple.”
Jie Ming was not lying. Jack might not have displayed any great gift for research, but in other respects his intelligence was absolutely not wanting.
Jack sneered.
This fellow in front of him had been playing a part from the very beginning, moving him about like a chess piece, and now he talked about taking on a disciple?
“Or is it that you want to turn me into one of those twisted monsters as well?” Jack’s voice was forced out between his teeth, and his gaze swept over the corpses of the old people on the floor, the ones he had already killed.
“No.” Jie Ming shook his head. “You too belong to a human subspecies; your bodily structure is close enough to the standard humans of wizard civilisation. To put it simply, you do not need to become a monster. The way wizard civilisation treats human subspecies is no different in essence from the way you treat your own kind.”
Jack said with a cold laugh, “Be your disciple, become your puppet, and then let your people take over this world?”
Jie Ming looked at him, and suddenly laughed.
That smile looked very much as though it carried a measure of contempt. “We do intend to occupy this world, it is true, but the world itself is not nearly as important to me as you imagine. You must understand that wizard civilisation’s attitude toward human subspecies is not quite the same as those things in this world of yours.”
“If wizards ruled here, then apart from the rulers changing, for ordinary people those who farm would go on farming, those who go to work would go on going to work, and those who quarrel would go on quarrelling. If you are willing to be my disciple, I could even make you the ruler of this world for several hundred years. A true ruler, not the kind of hollow figurehead who rules in name alone.”
Jack frowned.
His reason told him this thing could not be trusted.
But the other had put it so extravagantly, so extravagantly that he found himself feeling, without meaning to, that it seemed genuinely credible.
He could feel that while Jie Ming was saying all this, there was no fluctuation in his mental energy.
As far as Jack could perceive, either Jie Ming was a master liar, or what he said was simply the truth.
Jie Ming suddenly turned his gaze in a certain direction, and his expression changed very slightly.
He turned back and put out a hand toward Jack.
“We have not introduced ourselves yet,” he said. “My name is Jie Ming.”
Jack looked at that hand, hesitated for a few seconds, and reached out to take it after all.
It felt warm to the touch, no different from an ordinary person’s.
“What are you going to do next?” Jack asked.
“Next, of course…” Jie Ming suddenly gave his hand a yank. “First of all, we run for our lives!”
Before Jack could react, the ground beneath his feet began to shake violently.
That tremor felt plainly wrong, as though some enormous beast had rolled over underneath them.
Jie Ming seized his arm and charged straight at the wall.
Jack instinctively tried to stop, but the wall in front of them suddenly split open to either side like a living thing, leaving a round hole just wide enough for the two of them to pass through side by side.
Once they were through the wall, the round hole closed up again behind them.
“What is going on?” Jack had barely opened his mouth to ask when he saw the thing surging up at the far end of the corridor.
It was tentacles, like a tide of the sea.
Countless tentacles of every thickness were squeezing out from deep inside the base, greyish white or half-transparent in colour, giving off a slimy sheen under the lights.
They moved very fast, smashing apart every piece of equipment in their way, and giving out a wet, slithering, scraping sound that made a man’s scalp crawl.
Several of the tentacles spotted them and at once changed direction and rushed in.
Jie Ming casually drew a few beams of light through the air, and the tentacles were sheared clean through, spraying out a dark red pulp.
“You old things in this base are far too bold with what you do not understand.” Jie Ming spoke as he flew, his tone carrying an undisguised distaste.
“That Holy Spirit had long since built the framework of a spatial teleportation gate in advance, and with this stretch of time to prepare, it was already ready to open. From the very beginning, that Holy Spirit never intended to let any of you live.”
Watching Jie Ming casually cut down another swathe of tentacles, Jack could not help asking, “You look very strong. Why run?”
“Because there is something even more troublesome further back, of course, and as I am now I cannot deal with it.” Jie Ming answered without turning his head. “Hold on tight. I am going to speed up.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth when the walls and the ceiling of the entire base blew apart at once.
A tentacle vast enough to blot out the sky stretched up out of the earth and overturned half the base outright.
The surface of that tentacle was covered in a layer of grey shell rather like rock, and across it were dense rune patterns, every line of them flickering with an uncanny light.
The pressure it gave off left Jack unable to draw breath in an instant, his chest crushed by an invisible force until it felt ready to burst.
But Jie Ming had already completed the spell formula.
Runes spread out beneath his feet, and space itself began to twist.
His expression remained as calm as ever; he even had the leisure to sigh over it. “Hah, the mental energy I can seep across is still too weak. It makes casting far too much trouble.”
The enormous tentacle came crashing down, and at the last instant the figures of Jie Ming and Jack vanished from where they had stood.
The tentacle struck empty air and smashed into the ground, blasting out a ring of shockwave visible to the naked eye.
Countless fragments of stone and metal sprayed outward, and the whole base split in two down the middle.
That giant tentacle howled amid the ruins, and more tentacles came pouring out of the rift and the gaps in the wreckage, spreading out in every direction.
And a thousand li away, a rift in space opened without a sound.
Jie Ming and Jack tumbled out of the rift and landed on a stretch of desolate, uninhabited open country.
Night hung low, and the wind blowing across the withered yellow grass carried a touch of cold.
Jack lay sprawled on the ground, gulping down great mouthfuls of air.
His heart was beating extremely fast, and his back was covered in cold sweat.
In that one instant just now, he had genuinely thought he was going to die.
Jie Ming stood beside him and brushed the dust from his sleeve.
He raised his head to look at the dark red glow that showed faintly along the skyline in the distance, the trail left behind as the tentacles surged away in all directions.
“The good news is…” said Jie Ming, “the spatial passage that Holy Spirit opened has not fully grown yet. With your world’s present defensive capability, at some cost you can still seal it up again.”
Jack raised his head and looked at this fellow who called himself a wizard, his gaze a complicated one.
“The bad news is.” Jie Ming looked down at him, a faint, half-smiling curve at the corner of his mouth. “Even if you do seal it up, the state of this world will only go on getting worse. And when that time comes, you will need me.”
Jack fell silent, and did not answer.