I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 936: Ruins

Jie Ming handed the task of clearing up the aftermath to the Black Giant priests, leaving them to take the legions on and go on sweeping the battlefield and taking prisoners into custody.

Then he nodded to Carl, signalling him to lead the way.

While the other wizards had been fighting just now, Jie Ming had taken the chance to question Carl, and on learning that he knew the locations of several specific ruins, had decided he wanted to go and explore them.

Carl walked in front, and quite fast at that; if he had not been accommodating Jack’s pace, he could probably have gone a good deal faster still.

Jack kept to Jie Ming’s side, his eyes sweeping now and then over the hills shaved flat by the aftershocks of the battle and the valleys split open around them.

After the fighting just past, even the aftershocks alone had been enough to change the terrain of this forbidden zone enormously.

The three of them crossed a waste scorched black by energy and came at last to an unremarkable mountain hollow.

Deep in the hollow, a mouth dug at a downward slant showed in the rock face.

The opening was not large, wide enough for two men abreast; clear marks of artificial cutting remained along its edge, though wind-blown sand and vegetation had covered most of them over.

Carl stopped before the opening and looked back at Jie Ming.

“This is the largest of the ruins I know of. But as I said before, do not get your hopes up. After all these years, even taking only a little away each time, the place has basically been emptied out.”

Jie Ming did not answer; he bent down and ducked in through the opening.

As the passage ran on downward, the cut marks on its walls shaded from rough to fine, and the substance of the walls passed from ordinary mountain rock into some kind of polished dark grey stone.

At the end of the passage was an open underground space of several hundred square metres, its ceiling vaulted, fitted together out of stone slabs of even size.

A great deal of rubble and dust lay scattered over the floor, and rows of neat grooves and bracket marks remained on the walls.

By those marks, the place must once have held a great many racks, or equipment of one kind or another.

Jack looked around him and felt some disappointment. “It really has been emptied out.”

Carl nodded. “In fact, when we first found these ruins, a fair amount was already gone. It may have been taken away when the last civilisation withdrew, or destroyed later by the strange beasts.”

“In any case, there was very little of value, and by now we have essentially scraped all of it out. Anything that could be studied has been studied.”

Jie Ming, however, said nothing.

He walked over to one of the walls, crouched down, and ran a finger lightly across the stone slab.

The True-False Void-Piercing Pupil turned slowly in the depths of his eyes, parsing the microscopic structure of the slab piece by piece.

Then the corner of his mouth lifted slightly.

“You say you studied everything that could be studied?” he asked without turning his head.

“That is right.” Carl came over to stand beside him. “These stones included. The researchers went over them many times in the past. The slabs are ordinary sedimentary rock; their composition matches the surrounding strata exactly, and there is nothing special about them at all. We even scanned them by every means of detection we have, and there was nothing special there either.”

“To someone who is observing the thing, it really does have nothing special about it. It is just an ordinary stone.” Jie Ming stood up and turned to look at the two of them.

Both of them could clearly feel the excitement in Jie Ming’s eyes. “Looked at that way, the structure of these slabs really is not complicated. But they do have one very interesting property.”

“What property?” Carl could not help frowning.

Jie Ming raised a hand and pressed it to the stone wall, grey light spreading out from his palm. “Explaining it in words is too much trouble. I will run an experiment; watch.”

With that, Jie Ming released the Ash Return to Origin Hand.

Grey-white radiance covered the wall in front of him, and everywhere it swept the shattered slabs fitted themselves back together and the cracks vanished.

A few breaths later, that wall had been restored whole.

But when Jie Ming turned and walked into the room next door, the walls there were still broken, rubble scattered across the floor.

“Do you see?” Jie Ming said. “The power I released just now was enough to return this entire ruin to an intact state. Yet only the one wall I observed was restored; the rest stayed broken as before. Because nobody is observing those walls, they hold to the state they were in after they were destroyed. This one, I observed, and so it answered my power.”

“That is what is special about these stones. So long as nobody observes them, they hold to the state they were in when they were built, unchanging for ever. And if nobody is observing them, no indirect physical means of detection can find them at all.”

Jack was stunned, and Carl frowned as well.

“You mean to say…” Carl began, “that these building materials themselves have some sort of observer effect?”

“Yes.”

Carl and Jack exchanged a glance, and each saw his own shock in the other’s eyes.

To have turned up a find this good straight away put a good deal of lightness into Jie Ming’s voice. “Which also means there must be any number of important ruins still undiscovered. Because so long as nobody physically locates them, they stay permanently in an unobserved state, and no means of detection can pick them up.”

“That… the ruins we have found were indeed all down to the changes in terrain caused when the strange beasts fought.”

Carl rubbed his chin, thinking back. “But there was nothing to be done about that. The density of strange beasts in this region used to be far too high, and the energy here too tangled; some of the conventional search methods simply could not be used.”

“And since what we did find in the ruins was never worth very much, we eased off on excavating this area later on.”

“But even if we are certain there are a great many ruins here, how are we supposed to find them?” Jack asked. “If detection cannot pick them up, we can hardly dig blindly and trust to luck.”

Jie Ming laughed.

“Simple enough. We use the stupidest method there is,” Jie Ming said. “Dig away the entire surface, bit by bit.”

“?”

Jack did not witness the whole of what followed with his own eyes.

Because he and Carl had received a new assignment: to go on gathering up the humans still surviving in Jack’s plane and concentrating them in safe zones.

Jie Ming, for his part, stayed on in the forbidden zone, summoning fresh Black Giant legions and dragonblood mushroom-man legions in an unbroken stream.

The whole forbidden zone turned into one enormous construction site.

The Black Giants smashed the surface apart with their fists, the dragonblood mushroom-men hauled the rubble away into the distance, and even the Tentacle Tree fleet, which had never yet had its moment on stage, was put to work as a removal crew.

Five years later, Carl and Jack finally completed the task of gathering in every last human.

When Jack stood on the high ground at the edge of the forbidden zone and looked at the scene in front of him, he froze.

The forbidden zone before him no longer bore any resemblance to the place he remembered; it had become an immense basin.

The rim of the basin was as neat as though it had been cut out with a giant knife, its walls vertical, its depth a good several thousand metres.

With Jack’s eyesight he could make out, in certain areas deep in the basin, densely packed ruins of building complexes like an ants’ nest turned open to the sky, layer stacked upon layer, running from the rim all the way to the centre.

“…Holy shit!”