Once the moment of feeling had passed, Jie Ming sank his true body back into the inner world.
A true body that had grown so much stronger all at once set the inner world quaking, but fortunately, thanks to his years of intensive study, Jie Ming soon completed the process of sinking the true body into the inner world.
The space that the enormous body had squeezed into turbulence gradually settled back into calm as well.
Only after confirming that nothing had gone wrong with the inner world’s internal structure did Jie Ming let out a breath.
It was a good thing he had chosen to refine the Third Layer Dharma Form into his true body only after his research into the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art had made new progress.
Otherwise, with the pressure this two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometer body put on the inner world, he would most likely have had to go back to relying on the true body to move about in the outside world.
Jie Ming casually took a puppet out of his storage space and set it outside to go on acting in his place.
With all that done, Jie Ming returned to the laboratory and went on researching the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art.
The time that followed grew calm once more.
He refined the structure of the immortal art on one hand, while on the other, drawing on the Dao Integration state that the Great Ascension Realm had strengthened, he kept raising his mastery count in the Spiritual Qi Law.
In the blink of an eye, another few decades passed.
One day, Jie Ming finished a round of cultivation and casually pulled up his status records.
The data on the light screen had only just refreshed when he noticed the change.
His mastery count in the Spiritual Qi Law had crossed the required threshold, and the strength of his mental energy had long since met the standard.
As Jie Ming combed through the golden law threads in his spiritual sea once more, elite seventh-level wizard: achieved.
Feeling the change in the aura coming from his body, Jie Ming let a faint smile show on his face.
“A little faster than estimated, even.”
That was only normal; after all, the earlier estimate had been reached on the premise that he did no research at all himself and relied purely on the natural growth of the Dao Integration state.
But Jie Ming had been researching the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art the whole time, which in itself counted as an unconventional kind of research into the Spiritual Qi Law, so naturally it had come a good deal sooner than previously expected.
When Jie Ming formally stepped into the level of a seventh-level wizard, however, the whole process produced no unusual phenomena whatsoever.
Apart from the instruments in the laboratory detecting some rather faint external fluctuations, only Jie Ming himself knew that he had completed his advancement.
When he had advanced to the Great Ascension Realm, there had likewise been no obvious outward change.
The reasons behind the two, however, were not entirely the same.
The breakthrough to the Great Ascension Realm had chiefly been a matter of the dual cultivation of nature and life reaching a further perfection.
The improvement in his nature cultivation let him control his own power more perfectly, so the whole process had been entirely within Jie Ming’s grasp.
The realm of the seventh-level wizard, on the other hand, was by its nature something of an artificial division.
Looked at from the wizard civilization’s system of cultivation, there was no absolute boundary between a sixth-level wizard and an eighth-level wizard that could only be crossed by some special ritual.
The seventh level was more a stratum marked out, by mental power, accumulated knowledge and degree of law mastery, for wizards whose strength had reached the corresponding standard.
Meet the conditions, and one advanced.
Naturally, there would be no additional breakthrough phenomena either.
If one insisted on naming a difference, it was probably that, because the accumulation of knowledge had reached certain critical values, one could put the laws to further and broader application.
But even that was not certain. Take Viola: she had already completed most of her law expansion and deepening while still at the sixth level, and so had likewise been able to expand the application of her Law of Pain to every negative emotion, and even to every emotion whatsoever.
Moreover, not every seventh-level wizard’s expansion and deepening of a law worked on the “mechanism”; there were plenty of wizards whose exploration of the laws they had mastered was focused entirely on how to raise their own “values.”
Hence, apart from the strength of one’s aura revealing whether one had reached the seventh level, advancing to seventh-level wizard brought no other particularly special “ability.”
That the division of realms was artificial, however, did not mean the seventh level was worthless.
Quite the opposite: just how much destructive power a wizard could bring to bear once he released his power depended, to a great extent, on how much knowledge he had mastered, and on whether he could convert that knowledge into actual combat ability.
So being able to advance to seventh-level wizard meant, in itself, that one’s output multiplier for a given unit of element had been raised to a certain standard.
Jie Ming now had the dual cultivation of nature and life of the Great Ascension Realm, the sheer mass of the Third Layer true body, and the boost to his output multiplier that came with advancing to seventh-level wizard.
Working together, these powers had raised his overall strength markedly once again.
If he had not been quite sure before, Jie Ming could now confirm it completely: without counting the extra amplification Leap Power provided, relying on nothing but his existing means, he was already confident of standing against an ordinary eighth-level wizard head-on.
As for ninth-level creatures…
Jie Ming quickly tossed that thought aside.
He had not yet completed law fixation.
Even though his own power had risen greatly, he still lacked any effective means of dealing with a ninth-level creature’s “thought becomes reality.”
The other side could interfere with reality directly, and against that, Jie Ming had no answer at all.
So when facing a ninth-level existence, unless an eighth-level wizard was present to spread out law fixation and cancel the other side’s “thought becomes reality,” Jie Ming would still be killed in an instant by a single glare.
“At least I’m one step closer to the next stage.”
Jie Ming closed the status records. Rather than go on basking in the joy of his improved strength, he pulled the research materials for the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art back up.
Advancing to seventh-level wizard had been expected all along; his goal now was still to complete this immortal art.
…
…
Another few decades later, Jie Ming’s research hit a bottleneck.
Even with the help of the Dao Integration state strengthened by the Great Ascension Realm, he could only keep correcting details, and a breakthrough in the true sense was hard to achieve in any short time.
This rather surprised him.
Over the years just past, research into the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art had gone quite smoothly.
Although the immortal art itself was extremely complex, with his ever-growing golden law threads and his own understanding of the true body and the inner world, he had always been able to find a direction in which to push forward.
Jie Ming went back over his recent research records, and without thinking, his gaze turned to another technology: World Nesting Technology.
This technology had originally come from Jack’s plane, and was one of the important gains he had collected in the past.
In the course of researching the Mustard Seed Dao-Holding True Body Art, World Nesting Technology had been an enormous help, letting him understand from another angle the connections between different spatial structures, and the changes that might arise when an internal world and the external world were nested together.
But after so many years of digesting and applying it, Jie Ming had already studied the existing materials quite thoroughly.
At least in his current direction of research, this technology could offer no new help for the time being.
In other words, he had already mined the returns that his existing knowledge could yield to a considerable depth.
To push on any further, he would have to find a new source of knowledge.