I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 972: Difficulties

In the blink of an eye, a thousand years passed.

In a laboratory on the Infernal Sulfur Plane, Jie Ming looked at the experimental data before him and, for once, frowned.

“Failed again.”

As he withdrew the array, the energy cycle that had been running stably quickly lost its balance. The elemental power that had gathered scattered and escaped in every direction, leaving a patch of chaotic energy residue on the experiment platform.

This was already somewhere past the four hundredth experiment he had run recently.

And failures like it had happened countless times over the past thousand years.

Jie Ming saved the experimental data, then pulled up the progress records for the entire research program and took a fresh look at what he had achieved over these thousand years.

He had named this research “Leap Power.”

Jie Ming’s original conception of Leap Power had actually not been complicated: take the Information Plane’s entropy reduction cycle as the foundation, combine it with the cultivation system’s technique for mobilizing the power of heaven and earth, and build a universal system that would let a wizard use his own limited power to guide the vast energy of the outside world into battle.

If it succeeded, this technology could markedly raise a wizard’s efficiency in using energy, and in turn strengthen his ability to fight for sustained periods.

For a wizard civilization that had to deal with countless enemies at once, an improvement like that might even matter more than simply increasing the power of some attack magic.

And precisely because of this, Jie Ming had never intended from the start to make it a special technique that only he could use.

He hoped it could be adapted to different law systems, so that wizards of different levels and different specializations could all benefit from it, and that it would ultimately become a foundational technology that could be spread across the entire wizard civilization.

Yet only after the research truly began did he discover that the matter was nowhere near as simple as he had imagined.

The purely technical difficulties need no further elaboration. After he had worked out the initial version, all sorts of messy problems surfaced one after another as well.

It could be said that over the past thousand years, the schemes he had scrapped were already too many to count.

Of course, not all of the investment had gone without return.

In fact, Jie Ming’s gains were quite good.

With his deepening research into the entropy reduction cycle, the technique for mobilizing the power of heaven and earth, and all manner of law structures, his own mastery count in the Spiritual Qi Law had grown rapidly too. It now stood at over two hundred, leaping in one bound to the strongest bracket among all the laws he had mastered.

Judged purely by personal strength and theoretical reserves, his progress over these years had been somewhat slower, but it could by no means be called a waste.

The problem was that the Leap Power Jie Ming had originally set out to complete still had not been fully realized.

The biggest problem Jie Ming faced at this stage was that while the entropy reduction cycle could indeed make the surrounding energy structure more ordered, that did not mean all energy could be guided at will.

Different planes had different laws, which meant the elements of different planes differed in their properties as well.

Even with the same cycle structure, running it in different law systems and environments could produce completely different results.

Jie Ming pulled up the record of the experiment that had just failed, laid out the data on elemental flow, cycle stability, law conversion efficiency and the rest side by side, and compared them item by item.

A moment later, he finally found the direct cause of this failure.

The problem lay in the fit between the cycle structure and the external energy.

The structure he had originally designed assumed by default that external energy would enter the cycle according to preset rules, and under guidance be gradually converted into usable, ordered energy.

But reality was clearly not so simple.

There were differences between the elements, and different laws constrained energy in different ways.

Even if two kinds of energy resembled each other in certain surface features, their internal structures were not necessarily directly compatible.

Once the energy brought in failed to match the cycle structure, the runes that were meant to maintain order would come under strain.

At best that lowered efficiency; at worst it caused the whole cycle to lose stability.

“So what’s missing isn’t a more complex cycle. It’s a structure that can judge and adapt to the way external energy operates.”

Jie Ming leaned back in his chair and thought.

The conclusion was not hard to understand. What was truly difficult was how to turn it into a technology that could actually run.

In theory, he could design a separate cycle structure for every law and every element, then adjust each for different elemental environments.

That way, many of the problems could be solved.

But if he took that approach, Leap Power would turn into a vast and cumbersome collection of techniques.

Every law added would require a great deal of time for adaptation and testing.

And to spread it across the entire wizard civilization, an enormous number of corresponding schemes would have to be prepared in advance.

Doing so was not entirely without value, but it was a far cry from Jie Ming’s original goal.

What he wanted was a foundational technology that even ordinary wizards could master step by step.

“In that case, I’ll have to start from the most basic level, the four great elemental laws… What a pain.”

Jie Ming rubbed the spot between his brows and closed the experiment record.

The research of these years had already given him a clear understanding of the problem, but the deeper he went, the more unresolved details he could see within it.

He knew very well that he had underestimated the complexity of this technology at the outset.

If Leap Power had really been as simple as he had first imagined, someone would long since have completed research along similar lines.

“Even with the cultivation system’s technology as a reference, I’ve run into this many problems. No wonder the Information Plane has been conquered for so long and still nobody has heard of any impressive technology coming out of it.”

The wizards who had likewise obtained the entropy reduction cycle technology back then, if they had been willing to put in the effort, should have been able to derive some technique that gave themselves extra power.

But quite clearly, such techniques bore the stamp of personal style so strongly that there was no point at all in spreading them.

As he was thinking this, the magic network terminal beside him lit up.

“Jie Ming, I’m here!” Viola’s voice was as breezy as ever. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost track of time in the lab again?!”

Jie Ming glanced at the record without thinking; he really had been working without a break for a very long time. “No. Come in.”

Teleportation light flared, and Viola arrived inside the laboratory.

Her eyes swept around the laboratory, then settled on Jie Ming. “Looks like you’ve been at your research for a good while again.”

She walked over to the experiment bench, her gaze passing over the array beside it that had just stopped running, and her eyebrow rose. “Failed again?”

“Mm.” Jie Ming was quite unbothered; over these years he had grown used to failure.

Viola shook her head and took a recording crystal from her storage space, setting it on the experiment bench. “Fine. I don’t really know what it is you’re researching anyway. I’m here to deliver the payment we agreed on.”

Jie Ming glanced at the recording crystal and nodded.

Earlier he had lent Viola that ninth-level creation with its limitless energy, so that she could study the special power involved in it. When the two of them signed the contract, they had clearly agreed that as payment, Viola would report her research progress to him once every hundred years.

This time, what she had brought was precisely the research summary for the past hundred years.

Jie Ming picked up the crystal. “Time really does fly…”

“That’s because you’re too buried in your research!”

Viola rolled her eyes at him and, with practiced ease, pulled a chair out from the side and sat down. “Still, this past hundred years did produce some results. I’ve basically confirmed the changes in its internal structure and part of its energy flow paths…”

Jie Ming opened the recording crystal, reading the data while he listened to her account.

Viola’s research report was quite valuable; she was, after all, a genius second only to Mentor Clark.

Although she was still a very long way from fully cracking the core technology, the data inside was still quite valuable to Jie Ming.

Especially at this stage, when he was stuck precisely on questions concerning the operating structure of the elements.

After skimming through one part of it, Jie Ming nodded. “This data of yours is really quite good. It’s useful for my current research too.”

“Good, as long as it’s useful.”

Viola’s voice came from beside him, and Jie Ming instinctively looked up at her, because he had not heard her usual cheerfulness in it just now.

Sure enough, at some point Viola’s expression had become unusually serious.

Viola looked at Jie Ming and was silent for a moment. “Would you consider changing your strategy for a while?”

Jie Ming was taken aback. “What’s this about?”

“Because the war is getting closer and closer.” Viola’s expression was grave.

“I know you love research, but as I see it, your gains in personal strength over this past thousand years haven’t met expectations.”

At this point she hesitated, as if weighing her words. “Mentor Clark and Teacher Kastilla have asked after you these past years too. They’re worried you’ve been putting too much time and energy into this research, and that it’s holding back your own growth instead.”

Jie Ming looked at her and fell silent.

He understood why Viola, his Mentor and the others would have such a worry.

After brewing for all these years, the coming war had long since ceased to be the secret of a few.

At least among the high-level wizards, many had already realized that a war was imminent.

In such circumstances, for Jie Ming to keep pouring enormous energy into a research project that had not succeeded did, from an outsider’s point of view, look somewhat risky.

“Of course, I’m not telling you to stop altogether,” Viola explained.

“But the situation now is special. Time is getting tighter and tighter, the war could descend at any moment, and everyone is working hard to raise their strength. So if you’re stuck on some problem right now, I think you could switch direction for a while, or research something less complicated. You might make new discoveries that way instead… At the very least, you shouldn’t keep yourself in this state indefinitely.”

Jie Ming knew there was sense in what Viola said. Even in the wizard civilization, research that ran on for a thousand years straight counted as a very complex experiment.

If Jie Ming had not had another civilization’s technology as a reference, he would not have had the confidence to keep researching either.

Jie Ming was silent for a moment, then spoke to reassure her:

“Senior Sister, don’t worry. I haven’t neglected my own cultivation, and my other research has been moving forward all along. It’s just that this technology has hit a bit of difficulty at the moment, and there’s been no obvious progress in the short term. That doesn’t mean I’ve walked into a dead end.”

“In that case, I won’t say any more.”

Viola sighed softly. “But promise me one thing at least.”

“What?”

“Don’t rush the progress so hard that you leave yourself no time even to rest. You’re not fighting alone now. Mentor Clark and Teacher Kastilla have been keeping an eye on how you’re doing all along. If you run into a problem you truly can’t solve, you can go and discuss it with them.”

With that, a little of her usual smile returned.

“Of course, I can help too. I wouldn’t claim I can solve all your problems, but my talent isn’t bad either.”

Jie Ming smiled. “Of course!”

“Then I’ll be going,” Viola said. “At the next report, what I hope to see is good news from you.”

He raised his head and gave her a smile. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

Viola stared at him for a few seconds, and in the end did not press him further.

With Jie Ming’s temperament, something he had truly decided on rarely changed completely because of a few words of advice.

She could only hope that Jie Ming really had, as he himself said, thought through clearly how to proceed from here.