I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 921: Education and a Sudden Turn

A month later.

In the Northwestern War Zone, inside the surviving base code-named “Anvil.”

Jack was slumped over a metal desk dug out of the ruins, a thick stack of paper scrolls spread open in front of him, covered close with formulas and symbols of every kind.

His expression was that of a man who had just swallowed a live insect, every feature of his face screwed together.

“I think this counts as mistreating a prisoner of war.” Jack raised his head, his gaze turning “aggrieved” upon Jie Ming, who stood by the window.

Jie Ming had his back to him, looking out over the rolling waste beyond the base perimeter, and did not even turn his head at the words. “Since when were you a prisoner of war? Keep working the problems. I want to see how much you have improved lately.”

“I have been at it for three hours already.” Jack jabbed the tip of his pen at a rune structure diagram on the scroll. “These things are ten times more complicated than the notes of the researchers back in our base. Are you sure you are not making fun of me?”

“For a wizard, knowledge is power.” Jie Ming turned round at last, a trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Did you not complain before that the enhancements the System gave you came too easily? Now that you are gaining power with your own hands, why are you unwilling again?”

Jack rolled his eyes and lowered his head to go on wrestling with the scrolls.

He complained with his mouth, but his pen did not move slowly, and seeing it Jie Ming said nothing more.

Taking this base had been far simpler than expected.

On the day they arrived, the base was under siege by a mass of otherworldly creatures pouring in from the north.

Those creatures looked like crocodiles with six legs, their bodies sheathed in thick bone plating, and every one of them had the strength of a fifth-stage transcendent.

The base’s surviving garrison had already fallen back to its last line of defence, and it was on the point of being broken through.

Jie Ming loosed a few degraded versions of the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light from far off, and within a few breaths several hundred six-legged crocodiles had become a field of charred black corpses.

The survivors inside the base, who had thought themselves certain to die, watched it from behind the wall and very nearly went to their knees on the spot.

What followed came as a matter of course.

With the overwhelming combat power he had displayed at his back, Jie Ming swiftly took over the base’s chain of command.

He sent several squads out to search for survivors, and at the same time set up simple defensive arrays inside the base.

Then he began the systematic cultivation of Jack.

Strengthen the body, wait for it to adapt, strengthen it again, adapt again.

After each enhancement Jack’s body would reach a new height within a short time.

And in the intervals while his body adapted to its new strength, Jie Ming set about educating him.

What he taught was chiefly basic runic principles, the underlying logic of energy circulation, and the topological transformation of spatial structures.

Making Jack learn these things was meant to lay a foundation before he was converted into a wizard.

In Jack’s view, however, it was nothing short of murder!

“That rune structure is wrong,” Jie Ming said suddenly. “The energy flow at the third node should run the other way. You copied the direction wrongly from the original diagram.”

Jack looked down, and the corner of his mouth twitched. He picked up his pen again to correct it, muttering, “I had not even finished writing it out… have you installed surveillance inside my head?”

“I can indeed monitor the fluctuations of your mental energy,” Jie Ming admitted. “You were plainly letting your mind wander while you worked. Do it again and I shall double today’s training load.”

Jack shut his mouth obediently.

On the surface, Jie Ming was standing at the window supervising Jack’s work.

In fact another portion of his mental energy had already reached into every corner of the base and was dealing with all manner of business at speed.

Repairing communications equipment, allocating supplies, planning patrol routes, analysing intelligence from the outer perimeter, assessing the base’s defensive weak points…

Every one of them he handled, one by one, with the highest efficiency.

“Judging by what I have gathered these past few days,” he said, as though to himself, tapping his fingers lightly on the window frame, “the most troublesome thing here should be a group of insect-men.”

Jack raised his head. “Insect-men?”

“Mm. Far stronger than the treemen and slime-men and the like that you have met before.”

Jie Ming turned round at the window and produced a report that had just come in. “This base was originally guarded by a dozen or more transcendents of the tenth stage and above. Every one of them was broken by that swarm of insect-men. They are not merely strong in combat; their numbers are absurdly large, and they appear to possess a collective consciousness.”

As he spoke, he suddenly paused.

“Keep working the problems.” He threw the words out behind him. “I am going out for a while.”

Before Jack could ask anything, Jie Ming had vanished from in front of him.

The next second, a muffled boom came from the sky above the base.

Jack ran to the window just in time to see a figure trailing a white cloud of sonic boom, flying north at a speed the naked eye could barely follow.

Jie Ming flew at full speed high in the air, the heat of his body’s friction against it drawing a long trail out behind him.

His perception spread open, and the airspace for a thousand kilometres around fell within his view.

Very soon he had locked on to his target.

Ahead of him was a flock of birdmen.

More than fifty of them, flying from the north toward the base.

They were close to ordinary humans in build, with a pair of wings covered in grey feathers growing from their backs, and faces that were a mixture of a bird’s beak and human features.

Jie Ming could feel clearly the energy fluctuations coming off them: most lay between the sixth and the eighth stage, while the one at their head was already close to the tenth.

The sound of Jie Ming’s sonic boom brought every head in the flock up at once.

Seeing a human figure closing at an unbelievable speed, they broke formation at once and tried to surround him.

The tenth-stage birdman at their head let out a piercing shriek and beat its wings violently; dozens of wind blades formed out of empty air and came slashing down at Jie Ming’s head and face.

Jie Ming showed no intention of slowing at all. The wind blades struck his robe and shattered like raindrops against a wall. He raised a hand and drew a dark golden beam, and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light ran through the chests of several birdmen.

The rest were frightened into scattering, but with the gap in strength between the two sides more than half were cut down within a few breaths.

Having cleared these enemies away quickly, Jie Ming deliberately left the one at their head alive, and under its terrified gaze reached out and seized it by the throat.

Mental energy poured roughly into the birdman’s consciousness.

Relying on the Soul Search spell, Jie Ming leafed rapidly through its memories.

And the most important memory in this birdman’s mind was this… the insect-men were hunting humans on a massive scale.

Their purpose was to widen the spatial passage by blood sacrifice, but by the birdmen’s reckoning their aim absolutely did not stop there.

The birdmen believed that the insect-men meant to use the traits of their own race: once the spatial passage had widened to a certain degree, they would parasitise the core of this plane directly and draw out the Plane Origin.

And these birdmen had been sent out to obstruct the insect-men.

They too were hunting humans, in order to slow the progress of the insect-men’s blood sacrifice and at the same time speed the strengthening of their own spatial passage.

Jie Ming let go, and the birdman turned to a mass of ash amid its own screams and was blown apart by the wind.

Hanging high in the air, Jie Ming turned the matter over in his mind.

“The movements of these worlds and civilisations, are they not growing more and more urgent?”

The earlier invasions had all been small probing actions; the occasional large move had been the act of a single civilisation.

But now the insect-men and the birdmen had gone into action at the same time, and on top of that there was the Holy Spirit race, which had suddenly burst into a great move not long ago…

Could it be that some sudden turn had taken place that he had not perceived?

“Troublesome… I shall have to find some way to get new intelligence.”

Jie Ming stayed where he was a moment longer, drew his mental energy in, and turned to fly back toward the base.