I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 982: Is That Skill Build Even Legal?

Jie Ming returned to his laboratory, closed his eyes, sank his consciousness into his own sea of consciousness, and entered the Great Dao Book Pavilion.

In the mental space of the Great Dao Book Pavilion, Jie Ming sat cross-legged in the void, a set of notes of ancient and simple design floating before him.

This was a special document he had found among the many classics while sorting through his cultivation materials some time ago.

What the notes recorded was quite direct, even what one might call plain talk.

But it was precisely a few passages in them on the dual cultivation of nature and life that had given Jie Ming a new understanding of what the Great Ascension Realm truly meant.

The content was blunt: what was called Great Ascension was not simply a matter of pushing one’s own power to some limit. It required the practitioner to complete the dual cultivation of nature and life, so that he reached perfection on both levels, power and temperament.

When Jie Ming first read this passage, he had not thought it anything special.

After all, practitioners within the cultivation system had long known the importance of the dual cultivation of nature and life.

Many classics stressed that cultivation had to cultivate nature and cultivate life both, and that neither could be dispensed with.

Yet as his research deepened, he found that the overwhelming majority of cultivators’ understanding of the dual cultivation of nature and life was in fact skewed.

Many rogue cultivators, and even cultivators from some small sects, took the dual cultivation of nature and life to mean simply raising the body and the soul at the same time.

But strictly speaking, the three treasures of essence, qi, and spirit all fell within the scope of life cultivation.

Whether it was bodily strength, vitality, energy reserves or mental power, so long as it was still built on raising one’s own life and power, it could only count as life cultivation.

Nature cultivation, by contrast, chiefly concerned the fundamental state of one’s temperament and spirit.

The practice of nature was centered on illuminating the mind to see one’s true nature, and on steadying the mind.

It let the practitioner truly understand himself, clearly recognize his own thoughts, desires and will, and keep his mind always in a relatively stable state.

Naturally, the cultivation of mental and soul power often fostered the growth of temperament to some degree as well, which was why so many cultivators conflated the two.

But they were not the same thing.

Growing stronger did not mean that a person’s command of himself grew along with it.

Likewise, mental power strong enough did not mean that a person could bring every last bit of his own power to bear.

Jie Ming had never felt this especially deeply before.

In his understanding, since a Dharma Form could keep growing with one’s understanding of the Dao, a cultivator only needed to keep accumulating power and mastering more laws, and pair that with a sufficiently mature system of magic, to push himself step by step toward higher levels.

As for nature cultivation, it seemed more like a supplement.

It could help a practitioner keep his mind steady and make the process of cultivation go more smoothly, but it would not necessarily raise combat power directly.

At least, that was what he had thought when he first encountered these theories.

But the notes before him had completely overturned that idea.

Jie Ming looked again at one passage in particular.

It used a very intuitive analogy to explain the difference between nature cultivation and life cultivation.

Suppose a living being were regarded as an iron ball. Life cultivation, then, was continually increasing the ball’s volume or density, so that it held more matter and more power.

Nature cultivation, on the other hand, was raising the efficiency with which the matter inside was used, as far as possible, while keeping the ball’s form intact.

An ordinary cultivator could perhaps mobilize only ten or twenty percent of the “metal” inside the ball.

Even if they made the ball bigger, the proportion of power that could actually be used in battle still would not rise, because the structure of a larger ball had to be maintained.

But as one’s realm in nature cultivation rose, a practitioner could gradually mobilize more of the metal within.

At first, it meant extracting more usable power from inside the ball while keeping the outer structure stable.

Later, it meant going further and adjusting the way one’s own power was organized, bringing the parts that could not previously be called upon fully under control.

At still more advanced realms, the iron ball could even be turned into a hollow sphere supported by only a few key structures, or an approximate sphere assembled from a few iron rings.

The outward form looked as complete as ever, but inside, a fundamental change had taken place.

All the power that had once been wasted, bound up or impossible to use effectively could be brought to bear in full.

Staring at this passage, Jie Ming’s breathing gradually grew heavy.

He had read it more than once before, but every time he came back to this point, an excitement he could hardly contain rose in him.

Back when he had been no more than a low-level wizard, he had already concluded that the wizard civilization’s overall level of technology fell half a step below the cultivation civilization’s.

The basis for that conclusion, besides the two civilizations’ differences in accumulated technology, systematic organization and the application of knowledge, was in large part the description of the Great Ascension Realm.

The essence of a wizard’s strength was using knowledge to lever a single unit of power into an effect thousands or tens of thousands of times greater.

And the cultivation system likewise had a mechanism for mobilizing the power of heaven and earth, using a single unit of one’s own power to guide thousands or tens of thousands of units of external power into one’s own service.

And when a cultivator’s cultivation reached the Great Ascension Realm and he completed the true dual cultivation of nature and life, he could go a step further and raise the efficiency with which he used every unit of power under his control!

That meant a cultivator, besides being able to magnify his own power with the power of heaven and earth, could also achieve something like a wizard’s effect through nature cultivation.

One only had to look at how outrageously Leap Power had raised the wizard civilization to understand how terrifying nature cultivation was.

More importantly, Jie Ming’s Leap Power was still imperfect at this stage; at most it could raise its user’s combat power fivefold.

And an increase of that size had already been enough for the technology to change the way high-level wizards fought.

Yet the boost nature cultivation gave a cultivator was far, far higher than the multiplier of Jie Ming’s immature Leap Power!

To put it in gamer terms, nature cultivation was another “independent multiplier zone”, separate from both the leverage of knowledge and the mobilization of the power of heaven and earth!

The whole point was that these three kinds of amplification were entirely different!

Then… if he could complete the dual cultivation of nature and life, a single unit of his power, besides mobilizing the power of heaven and earth through the cultivation system and levering knowledge through the wizard system, would gain the amplification of nature cultivation on top!

At the thought, Jie Ming’s eyes lit up.

If he could complete the dual cultivation of nature and life and advance to the Great Ascension Realm, his power would enter an entirely new level!

The corners of Jie Ming’s mouth slowly lifted. “If this can really be done, the boost is downright brutal… but I like it!”

With his goal set, in the days that followed Jie Ming continued to master more laws according to the plan Felix had drawn up, perfecting his own Spiritual Qi Law.

On the other side, he would use the materials in the Great Dao Book Pavilion to study the theory of nature cultivation systematically, and work out exactly what changes had to be completed to step from the Dao Integration Realm into the Great Ascension Realm.

To that end, he called up every record in the Great Dao Book Pavilion relating to the practice of nature, the cultivation of temperament and the Great Ascension Realm, and began sifting and sorting through them one by one.

This was no simple job either, for the volume of material was enormous, and a good deal of it contradicted itself.

What was more troublesome, each of these supposedly contradictory items was correct within its own theoretical framework.

So Jie Ming did not accept the knowledge in the books wholesale. Instead, he meant to start from the most basic theory and build a fresh research framework, one that corresponded to his own system of power.