I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 937: Core Ruins

Jack followed a Black Giant priest across the busy excavation site.

In five years the whole forbidden zone had been changed past recognition.

The walls of the pit had been cut away vertically, laying bare stratum upon stratum of rock, and every layer was marked with rune signs in a different color: the index the Black Giant priests used to record the geological ages and the distribution of the ruins.

The ruined building complexes at the bottom of the pit were like an ants’ nest turned open to the sky, densely packed stone structures layer stacked upon layer, running from the rim towards the center.

The Black Giant priest led Jack down a temporary metal walkway, through layer after layer of ruins, and stopped at last before an enormous building covered over by a half-transparent dome of energy.

Jie Ming came out through the entrance of the building; by the look of him he had just finished an excavation, and his robe was covered all over in dust.

“Teacher, all the people of this plane have now been brought to safety.” Jack made a bow to Jie Ming.

“You are here.” Jie Ming nodded to him.

“The task was well done, and you have come at just the right time. The excavation of these core ruins has reached its last step. In another two days we can make the final exploration.”

“The core ruins?” Jack looked around him at the densely packed building complexes on every side. “These are not it?”

“These are only the outskirts.” Jie Ming raised a hand and pointed at the ground beneath their feet. “The true core lies deeper, underneath this building. Everything I have dug out so far has been surface ruins, and there was not much of use inside them. What really matters is all down at the deepest point.”

“When the time comes you will go in with me. Call it broadening your experience.”

Jack nodded without thinking. “Yes!”

Half a month later.

Jack walked behind Jie Ming along a metal passage the Black Giant priests had cleared out.

The walls of the passage were nothing like the stone structures of the earlier ruins; they had been cast out of some silver-grey alloy.

Jie Ming put out a hand and tapped a ball of light into being, and its soft white glow lit the whole corridor so that Jack could see rather more clearly.

“This is the ruins’ public transfer area.”

Jie Ming spoke as he walked, his voice echoing down the corridor. “We only cracked the operating principle a couple of days ago. Put plainly, it is a spatial teleport system, but the technical route is nothing at all like our wizards’ spatial teleportation. What they used was a kind of fixed-point transfer based on material resonance. It can only be used inside the ruins, but the advantage is that it is entirely unaffected by the spatial rules outside.”

Jack followed behind, his footsteps striking a crisp echo from the metal floor.

His eyes swept over the walls, where within the horizontal veining a faint fluorescence seemed to pulse gently as they advanced, as though answering some signal that could not be seen.

A moment of dizziness came over Jack, and with it a mass of black mist appeared abruptly in front of the two of them.

It seeped out of the darkness at the end of the corridor, swelling fast like a drop of thick ink falling into clear water, until it settled into the blurred outline of a human figure.

The figure had no features and no detail beyond its shape; it was nothing but a pure black silhouette.

But a chill ran instinctively up Jack’s spine. “What is that?!”

“It should be a guard system. I did not expect it to be still running properly after so many years.”

At the sight of the thing, Jie Ming raised a hand and loosed a Terminus Ray.

The blazing white beam ran through the black mist figure and blew a hole open in its chest.

But the hole filled in with black mist at once, and the figure drifted on towards them as though it had felt nothing at all.

Jie Ming thought for a moment, then lifted his hand, and several chains made of elements formed out of empty air and locked themselves about the shape; they passed straight through the black mist that composed it just the same, and held it back not at all.

“Energy immunity?” Jie Ming raised an eyebrow.

So when the black mist figure came close, he raised a fist without the least hesitation and drove it down at the figure’s head!

The fist carried a terrible force and went clean through the mist, but the feel of it was like striking a mass of cold damp air.

The black mist figure scattered away from around the fist and gathered together again behind it, still not harmed in the slightest, wholly indifferent to the wind of the blow that the force had raised about it.

“Physical immunity as well?” Jie Ming raised an eyebrow again.

While Jie Ming was still thinking, the black mist figure sprang at him.

Its body touched Jie Ming’s robe, and a strange power bored in towards his interior along the point of contact, trying to follow the mental link of the puppet body and invade his soul.

Jie Ming’s Body Forging Method turned of its own accord at the outer edge of his spiritual sea, and that layer of resistance, tempered over and over beyond counting, ground the invading power to nothing outright.

“I see.” Jie Ming took a step back, opening distance between himself and the black mist figure.

Feeling the nature of that power, he already understood what the thing was.

His True-False Void-Piercing Pupil turned, parsing the thing’s energy structure layer by layer:

“The guardian of these ruins is actually a curse. This thing is purely the visible expression of a whole mass of curses, an aggregate of curses… let me see. So that is it. So long as these ruins have not been destroyed, in theory it can be immune to every attack.”

He talked on while he went on fending off the black mist figure’s attacks.

The thing’s damage really was not low; every touch tried to invade the spiritual sea, and even standing well back Jack could feel the malice spreading out from it.

“This thing has quite respectable killing power. Injury on this level would in theory be enough to have an effect on a seventh-level wizard.”

At that his mouth curled upward. “…but only in theory.”

The black mist figure sprang at him again.

Jie Ming put out his right hand and tapped his forefinger lightly against the empty air.

Mental energy gathered at his fingertip into an exceedingly fine rune, and the rune flew into the core region of the black mist figure and burst there without a sound.

The black mist figure’s movements froze all at once, and then it scattered away into nothing like a soap bubble pricked through.

Jack looked blankly down the empty corridor. “That just now was…”

“I destroyed this curse’s basic elemental structure.” Jie Ming drew his hand back and began explaining it for Jack’s benefit. “Curses and the like may be very hard for the creatures of other civilisations to deal with, but for a wizard they are far too simple.”

“Wizards can command the elements, and everything in the world is composed of the four basic elements. A curse is no different. Its outward form may be black mist, or an illusion, or some uncanny phenomenon nobody can make sense of, but its underlying structure is elements just the same. Find that elemental structure and break it directly, and that is the end of it.”

He walked on ahead, and Jack hurried to keep up.

“The curse techniques wizard civilisation has now are basically all there to exploit either the concealment a curse carries in itself or its strong associative lethality against some particular class of thing. Beyond that, the more ornamental curses were weeded out long ago,” Jie Ming said as he walked.

“Because given enough time, no matter how complicated a curse is, break its basic elemental structure and it can be wiped away easily. The underlying structure of that guardian curse just now was more complex than most curses, but in essence there is no difference.”

“I… I see…”

Jack followed along behind, a deep shock in his eyes.