“That’s roughly how things stand.”
Jack finished recounting what had happened, then looked at Jie Ming somewhat uneasily.
“Did you find anything, Mentor?”
Jie Ming did not answer at once. Instead he walked a circle around him, looking him over carefully several times.
“Interesting…” Jie Ming stopped in front of Jack, a faint puzzlement on his face.
By the ordinary means of perception available to a wizard, there really was nothing abnormal about Jack.
Whether in his mental fluctuations, his life structure, or the operation of the laws within his body, there was no sign of any outside force having intruded.
And yet Jie Ming could sense a certain discomfort coming from Jack.
If there was one great difference between Jie Ming and other wizards, it was that besides the wizard system, he also had the power of the cultivation system.
Especially since his advancement to the Great Ascension Realm, his Dao Integration state had been greatly strengthened, and his sense of the connection between himself and the outside world had improved as well.
Jie Ming closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a silver star vortex glittered in them.
True-False Void-Piercing Pupil, open!
And then he “saw” it: an unmistakable malice.
It was an extremely pure “malice,” as if someone were radiating ill will at Jack every moment of every day.
But the problem was that in this laboratory, apart from Jie Ming and Jack, there should not have been a third living thing.
“So that’s it.”
In Jie Ming’s field of view, a dense black shadow coiled around Jack’s body.
It had no fixed form; every so often it extended long, thin limbs made of mist, which turned into countless sharp blades.
Those black limbs kept pressing closer to Jack, yet never actually merged into his body.
And deep within the shadow, faintly, there was some extremely feeble spirituality.
Jie Ming’s gaze sharpened slightly. “This thing…”
He observed it carefully for a moment and at last confirmed its nature.
It was actually a naturally born conceptual entity of malice, one that had developed a spirituality of its own!
To put it more precisely: the concept of malice, which should have been intangible and insubstantial, had under the influence of some special condition actually developed a spirituality of its own, and in the end had formed a life capable of acting independently!
Jie Ming understood at once why Jack and the other wizards in the camp had been unable to detect its existence no matter what methods they used.
Because, setting aside that spirituality, this thing was nothing but a mass of the “concept” of malice.
Although the wizard civilization had begun to touch on power at the conceptual level, its use of it as a whole was still at a rather rudimentary stage.
It was very hard for an ordinary wizard to truly observe a concept itself, let alone directly affect a conceptual entity.
Unless an eighth-level wizard deployed a law fixation domain regardless of the cost and interfered indiscriminately with the surroundings through large-scale law fixation, most wizards faced with a thing like this probably would not even know where it was.
But for Jie Ming, the situation was entirely different.
In the use of concepts, the cultivation civilization was far, far ahead of the wizard civilization.
In the cultivation system, a concept was not merely an abstraction used to describe some phenomenon; it could take a direct part in the construction of matter, and could even produce materials with real physical properties.
Purple Qi of the East, one of the most basic conceptual materials, was something a cultivator could produce as early as the second layer of Qi Refinement.
By comparison, a conceptual entity of malice that could act independently, like the one before him, was not actually anything so hard to deal with.
Jie Ming raised a hand, and under his control, spiritual power swept out to envelop the thing.
The black shadow seemed to sense danger. It shrank back at once, trying to flee from Jack’s side.
But the moment it stirred, it felt the space around it seemingly sealed off completely by some force.
Jie Ming’s five fingers curled slightly. “Come here.”
As if seized by an enormous invisible hand, the black shadow was torn away from Jack’s body in an instant.
It struggled frantically, countless blade-like limbs stretching outward again and again, but it could not shake Jie Ming’s power in the slightest.
In the blink of an eye the black shadow had been compressed to the size of a fist and dropped into Jie Ming’s palm.
Jie Ming closed his hand casually, and layer upon layer of runes sealed it away for the time being.
And the instant the black shadow left his body, Jack distinctly felt his mind relax.
The sense of oppression that had lasted for months vanished abruptly, as if a heavy load he had carried for a long time had finally been set down.
He could not even help letting out a long breath, and his shoulders, tense until now, loosened.
“It’s really gone.” Jack first lowered his head to check his own body, and only then looked at the black substance in Jie Ming’s hand.
“Mentor, is this the thing that’s been clinging to me all this time?”
“That’s right.”
Jie Ming studied the black mist in his palm with keen interest.
The thing still seemed to have some capacity to move. It kept trying to change its form, and now and then it extended a few long, thin black tendrils, trying to break through the lockdown Jie Ming had laid down.
But its struggles were meaningless.
“This is not something you see often.”
There was an unmistakable excitement in Jie Ming’s tone.
Although the cultivation civilization’s use of concepts was quite mature, a conceptual entity that acquired an independent spirituality was still an extremely rare thing.
According to the records in the classics he had read in the Great Dao Book Pavilion, even across the long history of the cultivation civilization, the conceptual entities that had truly developed spiritual intelligence on their own and could act independently could be counted on one hand.
And that was only because the cultivation world possessed spiritual power, a special force that could foster the awakening of all things and help certain special things develop spirituality.
In the wizard world, by contrast, concepts themselves were extremely hard for ordinary wizards even to perceive, let alone for them to give birth to wisdom naturally.
It was as if, in the ordinary world of Jie Ming’s previous life, the laws of thermodynamics or the concept of mathematics had one day suddenly developed self-awareness.
The very thought of such a thing was incredible.
Jie Ming looked down at the black mist in his hand for a while, then suddenly thought of something.
“Right, you said just now that you ran into it in a ruin?”
“Yes.” Jack nodded.
“These abnormalities only started after I smashed the place. I went back to the ruins to check once afterward. Most of the structure was already destroyed, but a few things were still left.”
As he spoke, he took a batch of stone tablets out of his storage space.
The tablets were of various sizes, their surfaces covered with carved writing and diagrams of every kind.
Some already showed obvious cracks, and the edges even bore the marks of damage done during the fighting.
“This is all that’s left in the ruins. The rest was pretty much all smashed during the fight, and I’ve only translated part of it…”
Jie Ming took the tablets and examined them carefully. “It’s enough.”
He raised a hand, floated the tablets up into midair, and swept his mental energy rapidly over the writing and symbols on them.
The script these records used did not belong to any of the common systems of the wizard civilization, and some of the symbols differed markedly even from the structure of a conventional language.
But Jie Ming’s store of knowledge was by now enormous, and the tablets had diagrams to help besides, so deciphering writing of this level was not difficult.
After only a little while, he had found a way in.
The translated content gradually appeared on the light screen.
At first Jie Ming was only skimming at random, but as he read on, his expression gradually grew serious. “Interesting…”