Naturally, Jack could not just sit by and watch this abnormality keep developing.
He made a special trip back to the plane ruin he had smashed, trying to find the source of the problem there.
On inspection, he found that it was a dead plane.
A so-called dead plane was one in which no intelligent life existed and the ecological structure had been severely damaged.
Judging from the information left in the ruins, this plane seemed to have had a civilization of its own long ago; but something unknown had happened, and in the end every living thing had died.
And deep within the ruins, something had once been sealed away.
Unfortunately, most of the ruins’ structure had been destroyed by Jack, and the relevant information was fragmentary.
He could only confirm that some kind of seal had once existed there; what exactly had been sealed, he could not determine.
In other words, the thing clinging to him was very likely whatever had been sealed.
Jack specially examined the remaining array structure for this, and also asked the other specialist wizards in the camp to help take a look.
But the result turned up nothing abnormal.
Whether a curse, mental interference, or the common sort of curse residue, no clear sign of any was detected.
Even Jack himself began to wonder whether the long campaigning had done something to his mind.
But he soon rejected that guess.
Because every time that black-robed figure appeared, he could feel an extremely distinct danger.
That could not possibly be a mental hallucination. It was something that really existed!
Jack did not like this feeling.
As a combat wizard, he could accept that his strength fell short, and he could accept dying to an enemy on the battlefield, but at the very least he wanted to know what it was he was facing.
Yet this black-robed figure was something he could not understand at all.
After completing yet another round of checks with nothing to show for it, Jack returned to his temporary quarters and took off his equipment.
Sitting in a chair, recalling that wizard’s earlier verdict of nothing abnormal, Jack shook his head and pulled up the data on the ruins he had saved before.
He stared at the fragmentary records, his brow furrowing tighter and tighter.
“What on earth is that thing…” he muttered to himself.
If it were only an ordinary curse, then however well it hid, it could not possibly evade every means of detection.
But if something really had escaped from the ruins, why did it target only him? And why could no one else detect its existence?
Just then, he suddenly sensed a trace of something strange behind him.
Jack’s body tensed in an instant.
He turned his head, and there was a black figure that had appeared behind him at some unknown moment.
It wore a black robe riddled with holes, and water dripped steadily from its hem.
The water fell on the floor but did not spread out at once; instead, like some viscous liquid, it slowly gathered together.
Jack could even smell a foul stench in the air.
The smell mingled rot and damp, as if a corpse that had soaked in water for a very long time had suddenly appeared in his quarters.
“You again!” Jack’s face darkened.
He released his magic without hesitation.
Several compressed beams of energy shot out at once and went straight through the black-robed figure’s body.
There was no sense of having hit a target.
The attacks passed through as if through a shadow that was not there, struck the wall behind it head-on, and were stopped by the protective array on the wall.
The black-robed figure slowly raised its head. No clear features could be seen beneath the black robe, only an unsettling patch of shadow.
Then it extended a hand.
The hand was abnormally long and thin. Its surface had none of the texture of normal skin; instead it looked as if it had been pieced together from countless sharp blades.
Every finger bent at an unnatural angle, its edges gleaming a wet, cold black.
It reached toward Jack, unhurried, and Jack immediately backed away.
He had tried too many times before, and knew that direct attacks, law lockdowns, and using spatial power to restrain it had all produced no effect whatsoever.
The black-robed figure was as if conjured out of his own imagination: whatever attack it took, it never changed in the slightest.
Yet Jack’s combat instincts kept sounding the alarm.
He must not let it touch him!
With his perception as a combat wizard, he could clearly tell that there was something extremely dangerous in that palm.
If it ever actually touched his body, something bad was certain to happen.
He tried to open up the distance.
But something eerie happened.
The black-robed figure plainly did not move, yet no matter which way Jack dodged, it was always directly in front of him.
That hand made of blades kept reaching slowly toward him.
Spatial transfer!
Jack vanished from where he stood in an instant.
The next moment he reappeared on the other side of the quarters, his face livid.
“Damn it, my spatial perception’s being interfered with too!”
When he raised his head, the black-robed figure was still standing there.
It still looked as if it had not moved, except that the hand was closer to him now.
Jack’s face was grim.
Although he knew it would do little good, he still instinctively mobilized his power, trying to build a protective structure around himself.
But without a doubt, against a black-robed figure that seemed a product of imagination, those defensive measures naturally could not block anything at all.
The black-robed figure’s palm drew closer and closer. Jack could even make out the black liquid dripping steadily from that hand, and the foul stench grew thicker and thicker.
Just as the hand came within a dozen or so centimeters of his body, Jack suddenly heard a noise from outside the quarters.
Someone seemed to be passing by.
His consciousness blurred for an instant, and when he came to, the black-robed figure before him was gone.
The room was quiet again.
Jack held his defensive stance for a long, long while before slowly lowering his arms.
…Gone again.
Just like before.
Every time the black-robed figure was about to touch him, it would suddenly vanish for one reason or another.
But that gave Jack no sense of relief.
On the contrary, his face was grimmer than before.
Because this had happened more than once already.
He slowly turned his head and looked at the spot where the black-robed figure had just been standing.
There were a few damp spots on the floor.
The liquid spread slowly along the grain of the floorboards, leaving faint water stains.
Jack stared at them for a moment, then crouched down and took out a detection device.
The result came quickly: just ordinary liquid water.
No obvious energy reaction was detected, and no special elemental residue was found.
He reached out and touched the water stain on the floor.
Ice-cold.
And a faint smell of rot.
This was absolutely not a mental hallucination!
Jack slowly stood up, drew a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down.
There was no point staying here any longer.
He had already examined the ruins and tried every kind of countermeasure, yet he still could not work out where the black-robed figure came from, much less stop it from appearing again and again.
What if, next time, that hand really did touch him?
Jack did not dare think any further.
“No good. I have to go to Mentor!”
He quickly packed up his equipment, bundled together all the relevant records and the data on the ruins, then took out his terminal and submitted an application to activate a teleportation, preparing to return to the Infernal Sulfur Plane.
If even the other wizards in the camp could not find the problem, then there was nothing for it but to go to his mentor.