I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 963: Observation Results

A few days later.

On a bustling grassland, Jie Ming looked at the creature in his hand, a rare trace of surprise showing on his face.

It was a creature nearly five meters tall, with long, slender legs, grayish-brown feathers covering its whole body, a long neck, and a circle of short crest feathers on top of its head.

At first glance, it was practically an ostrich scaled up several times over.

And the reason Jie Ming was surprised was that he recognized this creature.

Back when he had entered the Holy Spirit plane cluster, he had seen them in the plane controlled by the King of Spreading Fear.

There, these creatures were penned and raised as livestock, with almost nothing about them worth noticing.

Jie Ming had analyzed them before: these creatures had originally been highly intelligent beings.

But because they had been conquered by the Holy Spirit race and parasitized by its tendrils, their civilization had been destroyed, and even their original transcendent powers had vanished entirely, leaving them fit only to be the Holy Spirit race’s livestock and food.

Yet now, Jie Ming had found a population of them in the Central World.

Several hundred of these creatures were gathered in this area, and they had already formed a tribe of no small size.

They could build crude houses and make tools from stone and wood, and they had a simple division of labor.

The one Jie Ming had caught, for instance, was a “hunter” that went out to look for food.

“How to put it… the level of civilization these ostriches are at right now is pretty peculiar.” Jie Ming rubbed his chin, looking at the ostrich that was still trying over and over to attack him.

The spatial pressure in the Central World was too great; there was simply no way to send his mental energy out to probe.

The only reason he had found this population at all was that they had taken him for prey.

In other words, the ostrich population was still at the primitive hunting stage.

Compared with their kin penned up by the Holy Spirit race, their degree of civilization was already quite high; but measured against the civilization they had originally possessed, it was far too low.

Looking at the stone tool this ostrich carried, which bore obvious marks of knapping, Jie Ming shook his head.

The strongest individual here was no better than a third-level creature, and most of them did not even measure up to a first-level creature.

“As I thought. It looks like most of the animal populations here came from outside, and for some reason they all seem to have forgotten the past of their own kind.”

Putting this together with what he had observed along the way, he already had a rough guess in mind.

The races in the Central World were not life that this world had originally given birth to at all.

They very likely came from outside, had simply entered the Central World under some special circumstances, and had been lucky enough not to die.

Only, this “luck” seemed to carry a certain irony.

For they had not only lost their original power, but had even forgotten their own origins.

Over the long ages that followed, these outside races adapted to the Central World’s environment, multiplied and thrived here, and eventually developed civilizations of their own.

But they had long since stopped knowing where they came from, or what they had once possessed.

“If that’s really how it is, then this gets very interesting.”

Jie Ming looked at the creature in his hand, then stopped dwelling on it.

A guess was only ever a guess.

A wizard could accept the unknown, but would never accept an unverified conclusion.

Jie Ming decided to carry on with his earlier experiment.

He set his True-False Void-Piercing Pupil running and focused his attention on the ostrich.

To an ordinary wizard’s eyes it was nothing more than a body of flesh and blood, but under Jie Ming’s True-False Void-Piercing Pupil as it now was, its body had completely lost its original form.

The ostrich’s flesh, blood and soul were all made of vast numbers of runes.

It was just that these runes had not formed any very rigorous system among themselves.

They were linked to one another, yet seemed extremely chaotic.

Jie Ming observed for a while and soon found one key rune among them.

He raised a finger and tapped lightly.

That rune at once underwent an extremely subtle change.

The change looked insignificant, but it was like snipping a key thread in a finely made net.

The next moment, the change spread rapidly.

One rune was affected, which immediately pulled on the other runes around it, and those runes in turn affected still more structures.

The whole process lasted only a few short seconds.

The creature in his grip suddenly stopped struggling. Its body gave a faint shudder, and then it began to collapse from within.

Jie Ming showed no surprise at all; he simply went on observing the body, which no longer held any trace of life.

“Just as I thought,” he said quietly.

He had done a good deal of research over this period, even spending extra power to take some biological samples out of his inner world to observe.

The conclusion he had reached was this: in his present vision, unless a creature had modified itself, any creature that grew naturally had a relatively chaotic internal rune structure.

That was understandable, too. Evolution had never been about finding the optimal solution, only about “whatever works”, and more or less every creature that had evolved naturally carried its own heap of spaghetti code.

The reason wizards’ runes seemed to run so rigorously was that any wizard with a bit of ability would modify themselves.

In other words, whether it was that multi-armed creature or this ostrich, the way their runes behaved was actually the normal state.

But…

Jie Ming thoughtfully put down the corpse in his hand and turned to look at a plant beside him.

“If that’s the case, then this really does get interesting…”

The plant’s rune structure was completely different from that creature’s.

In Jie Ming’s eyes it was not a chaotic tangle of runes, but an extremely stable whole, with an extremely tight relationship between every one of its parts.

Jie Ming tried to find a weak point, but for a long while found none.

He observed a dozen-odd plants nearby one after another, and the results were almost exactly the same.

The rune structures of these plants were extremely complete.

One could even say they were a little too complete.

“Every plant I’ve seen on the way here has been like this. So in this world’s ecosystem, the plants and the animals have different origins?”

Jie Ming fell into deep thought.

This was certainly not normal.

But the question was… why?

If these animals were life that had entered the Central World from outside, then what were the plants here?

Life that the Central World itself had given birth to?

Then why would the life born of this Central World be so special?

For now, Jie Ming had no answer.

He stood where he was, thinking for a moment, and suddenly sensed an inexplicable pressure.

Jie Ming raised his head and found that, at some point, the sky overhead had changed.

A huge rift stretched across the heavens, and beyond it an unusual light glittered.

Jie Ming understood at once:

“The breach in the plane barrier is big enough now.”

The three plane wizards were beginning to enter the Central World.

With that thought, Jie Ming switched on his communicator.

“Senior Sister, I’m heading back.”

Viola’s voice soon came through. “Good timing. Augusta and I were about to come back too.”

“Then let’s meet up at our landing point.”

When the call ended, Jie Ming turned into a streak of light and swiftly headed back.

Before long, he was back at the spot where he had first come down into the Central World.