I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 932: The Indescribable

When the commotion died down, one of the phantoms spoke first. “Being from another world, which civilisation do you belong to? State your name.”

Jie Ming hovered above his legion and looked up at the phantom.

The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. His voice was not loud, yet it carried clearly across the whole sky:

“You don’t need to know. You only need to know one thing: you are about to become my spoils of war.”

A surge of fury burst from the phantom.

The foremost Holy Spirit King shook his tentacles violently, and his phantom burst apart, revealing his true body.

Gigantic tentacles thousands of metres long hung down from the clouds, their carapace covered in flowing rune patterns and giving off a heart-stopping dark purple glow.

Compound eyes turned slowly among the tentacles and locked firmly onto Jie Ming. “What arrogance from a lowly life form! What do you think it is you are facing?!”

He opened his mouthparts and issued a proclamation that shook heaven and earth:

“By My existence I proclaim: thou shalt not look upon Me! Thou shalt not hear Me! Thou shalt not know Me!”

The instant the voice fell silent, Jie Ming felt the scene before him begin to warp.

The clouds in the sky turned into vortices, the outlines of the buildings blurred, and the earth beneath his feet seemed to be melting.

An inexpressible sense of wrongness surged in from every direction, as though the entire world were rejecting his existence.

His senses were relaying chaotic signals; sight, hearing and touch had all lost their proper correspondence.

The signals clashed and contradicted one another, leaving his mind unable to build a stable model of the outside world.

Below, the Black Giant and dragonblood mushroom-man legions were caught by this warped perception field too. Their movements grew sluggish and their formations began to break up.

The vertical mouths in several Black Giants’ chests opened and closed unconsciously, as if trying to catch some scent that did not exist. The dragonblood mushroom-men, for their part, stopped in their tracks one after another and turned about blankly on the spot.

A Holy Spirit King watched the army’s reaction below and gave a cold laugh. “A lowly civilisation indeed. Not even the most basic perceptual defences.”

But just as he was about to make his next move, Jie Ming’s figure stepped out of the warped perception field in a single stride.

He raised his head and looked straight into the Holy Spirit King’s compound eyes, his gaze clear.

“I’ve been wanting to say this for a while now.” Jie Ming’s voice carried clearly out of the warped space. “You lot really do love your petty tricks.”

The phantoms of the dozen-odd Holy Spirit Kings shuddered at once.

The foremost Holy Spirit King’s compound eyes contracted sharply, and a ripple of terror burst through his mental fluctuations. “Impossible! You were clearly already…”

“…trapped in your perception field?” Jie Ming finished for him. “It really is a clever trick. Pity that once it’s seen through, it’s not much use.”

He hovered in the void, the light around him flowing steadily.

The invisible force field of the Return to Ruins Armor filtered out the warped perceptual signals one by one, leaving only the true information from the outside world.

His True-False Void-Piercing Pupil was at work as well, stripping the modulated energy fluctuations out of the environmental signals.

Under this double protection, the so-called “Indescribable” was peeled away with ease.

“When an advanced creature perceives the outside world, it is fundamentally using past experience as data, making predictions with its brain or some higher thinking organ, and finally projecting the content outward.” Jie Ming caught a wisp of the purple mist and explained calmly as he examined it.

“One of the core functions of external signals is to carry prediction error, which in turn drives the internal perceptual model to keep updating. When prediction and actual signal match, a creature feels familiarity and certainty. Once they don’t, it feels surprise, even fear.” (Note 1)

He looked at the uneasily writhing Holy Spirit Kings and went on, “The principle behind your trick is to keep adjusting the external stimulus so that the victim’s signals can never be matched to the outside world. Because this method essentially doesn’t need to act on the target at all, only to change subtle details of the surrounding environment, in theory this move could work on anyone.”

The fear in the Holy Spirit Kings’ mental fluctuations grew ever thicker.

“In theory, of course.” Jie Ming laughed coldly to himself. “In practice, a being like that only gets eighth-level wizards excited, and then it gets carved up and eaten. That civilisation with its indescribable deities, the one the wizard civilisation devoured long ago, is the best example.”

He raised a hand and casually cast the most basic of spells, summoning a gale that blew the purple mist around him away.

Watching his legion swiftly return to normal, Jie Ming shook his head in exasperation. “Even cruder than I expected. So you really can only pull it off with the help of this mist? Boring!”

When the Holy Spirit Kings saw that Jie Ming really had broken their “Indescribable”, they attacked on reflex, dozens of giant tentacles lashing at Jie Ming at once.

But the tentacles were flung back the instant they touched the force field on his body; the Return to Ruins Armor did not so much as ripple.

“Leaving a sample of yourselves behind, and still daring to take on the wizards,” Jie Ming mocked under his breath. “That really takes courage.”

The sample left behind when that Holy Spirit King had severed his own tentacles had been studied in minute detail by the wizards while they waited for the spatial passage to open.

With the help of two super-geniuses like Clark and Kastilla, it had taken only a few hours for the Holy Spirit race’s most fundamental elemental structure to be completely deciphered, and targeted countermeasures had been developed along with it.

So in the face of these eighth-level creatures, Jie Ming did not even need to manifest his Dharma Form.

Once adjusted, the Return to Ruins Armor was already enough to block all of their attacks.

As for striking back, he had no wish to use something like the Great Annihilation Divine Light, which would waste the spoils.

He raised his right hand, and several streaks of incandescent white light lit up at his fingertips.

Modulated specifically for the task, the Terminus Ray tore through the defences of every Holy Spirit King as easily as snapping dry twigs.

These eighth-level creatures had never been suited to head-on clashes in the first place, and against this incandescent white beam their defences were as flimsy as paper. The beams pierced their carapaces, burst out of their backs, and exploded in the clouds as several bursts of residual energy.

The dozen-odd Holy Spirit Kings were all routed within a few breaths.

Their tentacles drooped limply, and the light in their compound eyes rapidly dimmed.

“How… is this possible?!!”

“Monster! He’s a monster!!”

The ordinary seventh-level Holy Spirits below had witnessed the whole thing, and unsurprisingly they fell into disarray, their mental fluctuations filled with uncontrollable fear.

Jie Ming gave a wave of his hand and issued orders to his legion: “Clear out any enemies who resist, and make sure to collect the spoils.”

The Black Giant and dragonblood mushroom-man legions recovered from the perceptual distortion and let out an earth-shaking war cry.

They charged into every corner of the Holy City, crushing the remaining resistance one pocket at a time.

And amid the chaos of the battlefield, a Holy Spirit King whose tentacles had all been severed wrapped himself in mental energy and, by warping the minds of the creatures around him, quietly slipped away from the battle.

He flew deep into the Holy City and slipped into a hidden spatial passage.

The passage’s light flashed and was gone, and his figure vanished within it.

Jie Ming glanced in that direction, the corner of his mouth lifting in a faint smile, and did not give chase.

As soon as the Holy Spirit King had left, he raised his hand at once and recorded the spatial coordinates of that passage, along with their corresponding parameters, in full.

Dark golden runes poured from his fingertips and condensed into a thin seal around the spatial passage, to stop the other side from destroying it.

Author’s Note:

Note 1: This theory may sound contrary to common sense, but I didn’t make it up. It comes from a psychology paper Andy Clark published in in 2013. Known as predictive processing theory, it is fairly cutting-edge psychological research.

The core of the theory, roughly, is that the brain is not what people usually imagine, something that waits for external stimuli and information to come in. Quite the opposite: it is predicting ceaselessly, at every moment drawing on your past experience to predict and generate the experience of what you will see, hear and feel next. The perception humans experience is in fact the prediction process itself.

Later, Karl Friston proposed a mathematical framework called the “free energy principle”, a unified theory “of the self-organisation of all biological systems” that can be described with partial differential equations. It argues mathematically that any biological system that wants to maintain its own existence must continually minimise its prediction error about its environment.

This theory neatly explains many psychological disorders. Auditory hallucinations or schizophrenia, for example, happen because the brain’s predictive ability is too strong: even with no external stimulus at all, it can perfectly simulate another person.

Of course, precisely because it is so cutting-edge, the theory has quite a few contentious points, and there are even different schools within the theory itself, so don’t take it as gospel.