I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 938: The Truth

Jie Ming and Jack came to the metal door at the end of the corridor.

The face of the door was smooth and unmarked but for a single groove running right across it.

Jie Ming put out a hand, and his mental energy reached into the body of the door, travelling swiftly through the intricate protective program.

With his present computing power and the assistance of the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror, cracking encryption of this level would not take him many minutes.

The rune circuits inside the door rearranged themselves, and a great flow of energy poured from Jie Ming’s palm into the groove to power it, so that the metal door could slide open to either side.

Behind the door lay several enormous laboratories.

The space was open enough to be several skyscrapers hollowed out and stacked one on another, and the walls on all four sides were set full of instrument racks and storage compartments of every kind.

But most of the racks were bare, and the doors of the compartments stood open; whatever had been inside them had been taken away long ago.

Odds and ends of clutter and discarded documents lay scattered over the floor, and several metal tables leaned askew against one another, the marks of laboratory vessels still left on their surfaces.

“They were in something of a hurry when they withdrew.” Jie Ming looked around, his eyes passing over the bare racks and the open compartments. “The important things were all carried off, though.”

He walked over to one of the metal tables, on which stood a sealed strongbox that had long since lost its energy supply.

The lid was half open, a few paper documents lying loose inside.

He reached in, took the documents out and ran his eye over them quickly.

They were nothing but scattered data, with no complete research record.

By the look of it, the important material really had all been carried away.

Jie Ming did not linger there long.

He went to a corner of the laboratory, where a teleport device stood in the shape of a circular platform two metres across.

He laid a hand on the edge of the platform and fed energy into it.

The platform lit slowly, its glow shifting from pale blue to deep purple until it gathered above the platform into a half-transparent dome of light.

Jie Ming beckoned to Jack, and the two of them stepped into the dome.

The light flashed, and the scene around them changed in an instant.

They stood in another corridor.

Several metal doors lined each side of it, with thick walls between one door and the next.

“The core of these ruins should be a laboratory cluster,” Jie Ming said as he walked on. “Every laboratory is physically partitioned off and can only be entered by teleportation array. Add the observer effect of the building material, and without going down through the arrays of the shallow laboratories one layer at a time, it would be flatly impossible to slip in here.”

Jack nodded in admiration. “Put that way, it really is a quite formidable piece of anti-theft technology.”

Walking behind Jie Ming, Jack let his eyes travel over the veining on the walls.

He put out a hand to touch the wall, and Jie Ming raised an arm and stopped him.

“Do not touch it. The building material here is not the same as before; touching it rashly may set off some mechanism.”

“Yes… my apologies, Teacher.” Jack drew his hand back.

“No, keeping your curiosity is a good thing. Only remember to keep your caution as well. Even after all this time, some of the protective measures will not have died away entirely.”

At Jie Ming’s words Jack found himself thinking back to the black mist figure they had met, and nodded with the fright of it still on him.

The two of them soon came to a door at the end of the corridor.

Jie Ming cracked the protective program again and pushed the door open.

This laboratory was rather smaller than the last, but a good deal more had plainly been left behind in it.

A great many documents lay scattered over the tables; several drawers had not been closed in time, thick notebooks still stuffed inside them.

A few instruments standing in the corner had not been dismantled in time.

On the laboratory bench several test tubes still sat in their rack, the liquid in them long since dried up.

“Oh? They evacuated this place in more of a rush than the laboratories outside.” Jie Ming cast an eye over it, judging quickly which things had value.

He gathered up the notebooks and documents and put them into his inner world.

The instruments he left alone for the moment; they were connected to the floor, and he could not be sure whether some part of them lay buried, so the Black Giant priests would have to come and move them.

He went to the back of the laboratory and found another teleport platform.

The two of them stepped onto it and teleported onward.

With every layer deeper they went, the more had been left behind.

By the fifth layer there were even several large instruments still half dismantled, their parts scattered across the floor.

Research drawings lay spread open on the tables, the lines and annotations on them plainly legible.

“Looked at this way, the crisis must have broken out from the core.” Jie Ming picked up one of the drawings and studied it, his voice dropping lower. “There was no time to move the research data and the instruments of the deep laboratories out, so although the further in a laboratory lay the more important it was, the more was left behind in it instead.”

The two of them went on.

When they teleported down to the laboratory on the ninth layer, Jie Ming stopped suddenly in front of one of the laboratory doors.

“What is it?” Jack was on his guard at once, without thinking.

Jie Ming shook his head and signalled him to relax. “No need to worry. It is a good thing.”

Without any visible movement from him, inside the laboratory a strongbox locked by a sealing array that had long since lost its energy opened of itself, and the paper documents within flew out through the air and arranged themselves in front of Jie Ming.

Jie Ming glanced at them; although his mental energy had confirmed what they held long before, he could not help letting a touch of delighted surprise show on his face.

Because what these documents recorded was, of all things, research on the mushroom-men!

And the research went deep: not merely the study and recording of every kind of intelligence on the mushroom-men, but even the thinking and the further work that came after.

Jie Ming swept a hand out, and the documents before him gathered themselves together, fell into his palm and vanished:

“So it seems that after the human civilisation of this world exiled the mushroom-men, the fighting strength the mushroom-man race had shown was still too much for them, and they could not resist carrying out further research.”

That was understandable enough. The mushroom-men really were too well suited to serving as combat units, and to a certain extent they even broke through the problem of higher life forms being difficult to breed.

A pity that, because of this accident, the research data set down in the documents was not complete.

Still, the experimental data now in his hands counted as a very fair haul on its own.

And judging by the identification numbers on the experimental documents, this should be the second deepest laboratory, which meant the next would be the deepest layer of all: the very core of this laboratory cluster.

“Come along. Let us see what good things are in the innermost laboratory after all.”

To have made a haul this good without even sorting through the place carefully had Jie Ming chuckling as he led Jack towards the teleportation array.

But in the instant they teleported into the deepest laboratory, Jie Ming’s expression changed.

Hum!

The moment he came through, the unseen force field of the Return to Ruins Armor on him shuddered violently, like a drumhead struck by a great hammer.

The shock came without any warning, as though pressing in from every side at once, and for an instant his mental energy fell briefly into disorder.

And this was his Return to Ruins Armor after reinforcement, able to take several rounds head-on even against the attacks of an eighth-level creature.

Yet now merely being exposed to this environment set it shuddering like that?!

He turned his head to Jack and found the Return to Ruins Armor on him shuddering too, and a good deal more violently than his own.

Jie Ming did not hesitate; he shoved Jack back onto the teleport platform and fed energy into it.

“Go back first!” Jie Ming’s voice reached him before the teleport completed.

The light rose, and Jack’s figure vanished from the centre of the platform.

With Jack gone, Jie Ming stood alone in the laboratory.

First he unfolded a fresh layer of Return to Ruins Armor to replace the old shield, whose fluctuations were growing worse and worse.

And in the instant the two force fields changed over, he felt out carefully what lay around him.

The spatial structure here was unlike anywhere they had been.

If he had to put it into words, the difference was something like “density,” or “air pressure”… although in theory space itself has neither concept.

The “density” of this space itself was abnormally high, as though some force had compressed it from outside.

The space itself was stable, extremely stable, one might even say.

But that excessive “density” meant a creature inside it was like a creature gone down into the deep sea, bearing an enormous pressure at every moment, unable even to send its mental energy out.

He looked around him.

Here too a great many documents and the wreckage of instruments lay scattered across the floor.

A metal table lay toppled at his feet, its top as thin as a cicada’s wing, yet still holding its whole shape.

Its four legs were as fine as hairs, and yet the height and the spacing between them were no different from a normal table’s.

“This is…”

There was no doubt about it: the structure of this table was highly abnormal.

Jie Ming crouched down and scanned the table carefully with the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil.

The metal elements of the tabletop had been compressed to the utmost, the spacing between atoms reduced to the theoretical limit.

Had the physical rules of this plane not forbidden degenerate matter to exist, the table would long since have collapsed into a black hole.

“This method of compression…” Jie Ming rubbed his chin.

If it had been shrunk within space, it should have shrunk in proportion, or else had its original form destroyed.

But although the tabletop in front of him had become thinner and its legs finer, the height and the length had not changed at all.

It was as though someone had applied a one-directional compressive force to the table from outside, compressing along its thickness alone and leaving its other dimensions untouched.

He went on searching through the documents scattered over the floor.

These too had been compressed, the paper grown exceedingly thin, though fortunately the writing on them was still clear and legible.

It was as well that the important research material had all been set down in writing directly on paper documents; otherwise the mere reading of the data would have been a serious nuisance.

Jie Ming leafed through them quickly, and what they contained interested him more and more.

What the documents set down was a research record under the name of “world nesting technology”; taken broadly, it was a technique for compressing one plane inside another.

Unlike the expanded spaces or artificial planes common in wizard civilisation, the aim of this technology was to compress a complete plane inside another plane while still preserving a complete system of laws and a complete ecological cycle.

In wizard civilisation, even Jie Ming’s seventh-level large-scale elemental pool was in essence no more than an artificial elemental plane “hung” alongside the Infernal Sulfur Plane; no attempt had ever been made to compress it inside a plane.

It could not be said that wizard civilisation had no such technology, but this did show how difficult that technology was.

The evidence in the laboratory showed that the previous human civilisation had indeed been researching it.

And they had already made substantial progress.

Jie Ming went on searching.

Among a heap of mechanical files ruined by the compression, he found at last a paper experiment log.

The cover was marked “Nesting Experiment — Phase Seven”.

He opened the log and skimmed through it.

The log recorded the various problems the experimental team had run into while attempting to compress one plane inside the main plane.

At the last page the record broke off abruptly.

Jie Ming closed the log, thoughtful.

“So it seems… the loss of control over this technology must have been what set off the upheaval in this plane.”