I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 933: Breathing Soil Creation

The war was over soon enough.

The Holy Spirit race’s resistance collapsed entirely once Jie Ming had shattered that dozen-odd eighth-level Holy Spirit Kings.

Of the low-level Holy Spirits that remained, some surrendered and some tried to flee, but the Black Giant and dragonblood mushroom-man legions ran them down and took them one by one.

The batfolk were simpler still. Even with the Holy Spirits defeated, they were still being driven into the attack.

But to Jie Ming’s army the fighting strength of such creatures was hardly worth mentioning; a few squads casually detached from the main force dealt with them without the least effort.

Jie Ming hovered above the Holy City, looking down at the scene below. With the mist gone, the plain beneath the Holy City lay exposed: a stretch of barren, earth-yellow land with scarcely any vegetation to be seen.

He had, in fact, seen plenty of scenes like it on the march: rivers run dry, hills stripped bare, not a trace of life between one city and the next.

Apart from the batfolk the Holy Spirit race had enslaved, the whole world was a wasteland.

Jie Ming shook his head with some regret. “There is nothing of value left in this plane.”

The Holy Spirit race had held the place too long. They had scraped away the overwhelming majority of its resources, and the native inhabitants had been brought wholly under the control of the biological tentacles.

This springboard world, one might say, looked to the wizards like a fruit squeezed dry of its juice.

Some return could still be had by means such as extracting the Plane Origin, but the greatest returns had already run dry.

“Never mind. It is as good a chance as any to try out my new magic.”

After a moment’s thought, Jie Ming issued the Black Giant priests a task: to seal up the spatial passage he had blocked off earlier.

Before long a Black Giant priest brought over a fist-sized ball of light wrapped in layer upon layer of runes.

Jie Ming stowed the ball of light in his inner world, then gave the order: once the legions had gathered up every prisoner, they were to withdraw at once and return to Jack’s plane!

The journey here had taken a little over a day, but going back was nowhere near as much trouble.

Working from the recorded spatial coordinates, the entire legion teleported away in short order, leaving Jie Ming alone in the place.

He flew upward, passed through the thin atmosphere, and came to rest beneath the plane barrier.

This plane’s barrier was every bit as pitifully thin. Under the Holy Spirit race’s long extraction, even the plane’s own power had withered away by more than half.

Jie Ming raised a hand and touched the barrier. Dark golden light wrapped his palm, and he cut the barrier open along a single slit.

He flew out through the rip and hung suspended in the void.

Below him was an earth-yellow continental plane.

The plane’s whole form was like a flat disc, its surface covered over with greyish-brown rift valleys and dried-out basins, with only a few smears of dark green still lingering at the edges.

Jie Ming could feel it clearly: the balance of the plane’s power had already been broken, the elements that composed it were slowly bleeding away, and the whole plane gave off the decaying aura of something about to die.

“Good timing. Then show me the last of your worth!” Jie Ming spread both hands wide.

Dark golden light surged out of his body and spread through the void into an enormous array.

The array’s patterning was extraordinarily precise and intricate, layer upon layer of runes interweaving in the void into a vast net that covered the entire plane.

It was the first time he had ever cast an engineering technique of this level.

[Breathing Soil Creation].

As the array began to turn, the dark golden light gathered from its rim toward its centre, shrouding the whole earth-yellow plane within it.

The plane’s edges began to contract, and the broken rock and dust scattered through the void drifted slowly back down toward its surface, as though drawn by something.

Then the entire disc-shaped plane was slowly shrinking, like a lump of clay being kneaded by an invisible hand.

“Good. Start-up went smoothly. This trial is already half a success.”

Jie Ming held his mental energy steady as he regulated the process. At his will, the seventh-level large-scale elemental pool on the Infernal Sulfur Plane began raising its output, and the array’s light grew stronger still.

The plane contracted faster. Several of the outer rift valleys closed up under the pressure, and the dark green regions along the edges vanished into the contraction, drawn back inside the plane.

The whole plane collapsed inward from its edges, the disc’s diameter visibly shrinking.

Jie Ming could feel the last of the plane’s residual energy being compressed to its limit, the elements that made up the world smelted down under the array’s working until the most fundamental concept of all had been stripped out of them: “bearing”.

The plane’s structure was collapsing, but even as it collapsed, something new was being created.

At last the entire plane vanished utterly into the centre of the array.

All that remained there was a single grain of sand the size of a pinpoint, hanging in the void, quietly giving off a faint earth-yellow glow.

Jie Ming withdrew the array, reached out both hands, and cupped the grain of sand carefully in his palm.

The instant it touched his hand, he felt what made Breathing Soil special.

Heavy.

Extraordinarily heavy.

In theory there was neither gravity nor inertia in the endless chaotic void, so no matter how heavy a thing was, it should have made no difference at all.

Yet in the instant of contact Jie Ming felt that weight quite distinctly all the same.

The grain of sand seemed to bear the whole weight of an entire world; the merest touch of his mental energy against it was crushed out of shape.

Beyond that, there was also a curious sense of gentleness to it.

That was precisely Breathing Soil’s most important quality as a conceptual material: bearing.

The core concept that could hold anything and bear anything.

“Lucky that for all the elemental turbulence in the endless chaotic void, none of it forms into real matter or energy. Otherwise collecting this stuff would be a real nuisance.”

Sealing the grain of Breathing Soil away in Essence Gold with the greatest care, Jie Ming let out a breath.

Every refining of Breathing Soil had to consume an entire world, and not only because the stuff was so troublesome to refine in itself; there was another important reason, which was that it grew when it met the wind and thickened when it met water.

Put simply, Breathing Soil needed only to sense matter and energy to expand rapidly into ordinary soil.

And that would mean squandering such a precious material for nothing.

So even in the cultivation world, refining the stuff meant refining a whole planet outright, to keep the freshly produced Breathing Soil from coming into contact with matter and energy.

There were only a handful of substances or energies that could actually be used to seal Breathing Soil away, and the most suitable of them was, naturally, Essence Gold.

After checking it over carefully and making sure the Essence Gold vessel had no gaps anywhere, Jie Ming put it away, satisfied.

A material like Breathing Soil had no substitute whatsoever in wizard civilisation; its bearing property made it an indispensable core material for a great many of the cultivation system’s high-level creations.

With enough Breathing Soil to work with, the stability of the All-Heavens Star Grand Array could be raised at least one more step.

The trial complete, Jie Ming teleported back to Jack’s plane using the spatial passage coordinates he had recorded earlier.

He had only just stepped out of the spatial passage, with no time yet to think about his next move, when a message came through to his magical network terminal.

He opened it and looked. It was from Jack.

“Teacher, requesting support!”

At the sight of it Jie Ming could not help frowning.

Before leaving he had split off half the legion for Jack and Carl, and with Carl’s own fighting strength on top of that, all they were doing was recovering ordinary humans on this plane. Surely they could not have run into anything all that dangerous?

Thinking this, Jie Ming simply took the legion that had finished forming up behind him back into his inner world, then opened a spatial teleport using the coordinates recorded in the message.

After a slight delay, silver light flashed and Jie Ming’s figure vanished from where he had stood.