Cultivating in the Wizard World

The shadowless lamp above the operating table went out.

Eric opened his eyes to a silver-white ceiling. Those fine Runes slowly faded in the lingering glow of the light.

He lay there for a few seconds, then sat up, lowered his head to look at his own hands, and felt no difference from before the surgery.

He clenched his fists, then relaxed them, rolled his wrists and shoulders, confirming there was no abnormal sensation.

He even felt a bit hungry.

"It seems like… nothing's changed." He touched his chest. That location was the core node of the Fifth Seal. The skin was smooth, without any bulge or scar.

Jeming was standing beside the workbench, putting away the surgical instruments.

"Inside you, there were already four Strange Things." Jeming's voice came from the workbench, his pace steady. "Flesh, Soul, Life Energy, Mental—those are the four you're most familiar with. You've already used the first two rounds so skillfully when treating patients: Flesh Mutation lets you perceive and repair physical trauma; Soul Resonance lets you touch and mend fissures in the Soul. You've used the Life Energy and Mental Strange Things less, but you've mastered the basic operations."

Eric nodded.

Flesh Mutation and Soul Resonance were his signature skills as the attending physician of the Noren Clinic.

Without those two Strange Things, he could never have secured a foothold in the Association's physician group.

"The Fifth Strange Thing sealed in your body now," Jeming set down the instruments in his hand and turned to look at him, "is specifically there to coordinate those four Strange Things."

He walked to the operating table, took a palm-sized mirror from the shelf, and handed it to Eric.

Eric took the mirror and finally noticed what was different about himself.

His eyes looked a bit deeper; his pupils had shifted from light gray to dark gray, and in the whites there was a faint, almost invisible dark-golden sheen.

"Its name doesn't matter," Jeming said. "What matters is its property: dispatching. It's not the strongest, not even the second strongest. Without it, those four Strange Things in you can still operate on their own. But conflicts will arise between them, like four musicians each with their own ideas trying to play together without a conductor. The rhythm will go off, the pitch will drift; over time your Soul will be torn open by their disharmony."

"With it, those four Strange Things can work like a team. But this thing isn't a conductor either; it's just… a harmonizer. Keep that in mind."

Jeming took the mirror from Eric's hand, put it back on the shelf, then leaned against the operating table, arms crossed, his gaze calmly resting on him.

"The sealing of your Strange Things is basically complete. Each has its role. From now on, it mainly depends on how you yourself develop and wield these Strange abilities. You need to learn to understand, Fuse, and then recreate the power of the Strange Things inside you. Treat the power of those five Strange Things in your body as pigments—you're the one painting. Don't let them smear the canvas on their own."

Eric hopped down from the operating table. When his feet touched the ground, his knees bent slightly as he tested his body's weight and balance.

Everything was normal—more than normal, even.

He felt as if he'd just had a good sleep: mind clear, body light, every joint moving freely.

"Teacher." He raised his head and looked at Jeming. "Ordinary Spiritualists would never seal five Strange Things into themselves, right? That's basically suicide."

Jeming gave him a glance.

That glance was tranquil, but Eric felt enormous pressure in it.

Jeming didn't speak; he just gave a short hum.

That soft hum was as clear in the silent underground laboratory as a glass bead dropping onto a Metal tabletop, and in its aftersound there was an undisguised, even deliberate, mockery.

Realizing he'd asked a stupid question, Eric shut his mouth obediently.

He climbed back onto the operating table, sat cross-legged, placed his hands on his knees, closed his eyes, and began to use his consciousness to sense the existence of the five Strange Things inside him.

They were like five stars of different colors, suspended deep within his Soul, each radiating Energy fluctuations of a different frequency.

Eric took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.

He understood his teacher's idea.

After all, starting a few years ago, Jeming had been infiltrating this idea into him bit by bit.

Through those ever-deepening theory classes on Strange Things, through those research topics that drew closer and closer to the essence, he also understood what he was doing.

The technique to achieve perfect Fusion between humans and Strange Things was far more difficult than Jeming had initially anticipated.

It wasn't that Strange Things were too hard to control; it was that human Souls were too fragile.

No matter how well controlled, once a Strange Thing collided with a human Soul, the human Soul would inevitably be assimilated by the Strange Thing over time.

Of course, if you completely isolated them, you could naturally avoid this problem.

But if the human Soul and the Strange Thing were completely isolated, then there'd be no point at all.

So, to complete this technique, one would first have to alter the Souls of ordinary people.

After studying all the data the Professor had left behind, Jeming reached one conclusion: the Professor's direction was correct, but the technical path was wrong.

The Professor had always tried to improve the "compatibility" between Strange Things and humans, modifying Seal structures, adjusting Energy frequencies, and optimizing Fusion procedures.

But that path had a ceiling, and the Professor had already reached the end of it.

So Jeming chose a completely different path.

He decided to combine the Strange Fusion theories he had discovered with the technical layer of Sealing.

Let the Strange Things first adapt to one another, forming a stable, self-consistent, self-regulating system, and then integrate this system as a whole into the human Soul.

Eric was the first "test subject" for this idea.

From tens of thousands of Strange samples, Jeming specifically selected three Strange Things related to Essence, Qi, and Spirit, and then additionally chose two Strange Things related to the Mental and to coordination ability.

To ensure the experiment's success rate, Jeming deliberately picked the lowest tier of Dangerous Level Strange Things, ones that were extremely weak even among Dangerous Level Strange Things.

With Essence, Qi, and Spirit as the foundation, the Mental as the commander, and coordination as the "adhesive," the Strange Thing ultimately born would have an extremely high affinity with the human Soul!

In terms of the final result, Jeming's idea worked quite well.

The reason Eric could become the kind of doctor he was now was not only his Talent and diligence, but also those five Strange Things within him.

Especially Resonance with Flesh Mutation and Soul, through day?after?day use, had already fused with him to a depth far beyond that of ordinary Spiritualists.

"Teacher." Eric opened his eyes, his expression serious. "I think I more or less understand now. Once I can fully control these five weird powers, use their abilities with ease, make them coordinate and fuse with one another… at that point, my own Life form should also be able to undergo Transformation."

He paused, his voice dropping a little:

"I will become the first human to achieve perfect Fusion with a weird power."

Jeming shook his head:

"In theory, yes. But the distance between theory and practice, you know that yourself."

"Besides… even if you succeed, that would only mean you, this one special case. If we really want to complete the perfect Fusion between humans and weird powers, there are still quite a few steps left to take."

After thinking for a moment, Jeming added, "However, once you truly complete your Life form's Transformation, then using you as the base, extracting weird power from your body and fusing it into other humans would be much simpler."

"If we don't consider the strength of the power obtained after Fusion, or the limitation in sample numbers, then the weird power extracted with you as the base should be the most suitable material for completing the research topic of human–weird Fusion."

Eric fell silent. In this kind of atmosphere, he suddenly thought of a question—one that had nothing to do with the serious academic discussion at all.

And so his mouth opened before his brain did:

"Teacher, by the way… ever since I mastered that Flesh Mutation weird power, my appearance hasn't really changed. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I feel like there's almost no difference from myself five years ago. Will I end up like you in the future, with my looks never changing?"

He looked at Jeming's face—that face was exactly the same as ten years ago, time hadn't left any traces on it.

Jeming glanced at him, the mockery in his eyes a little deeper than in that earlier snort.

"This just shows that your Control Power over Flesh Mutation, as well as your grasp of the relevant knowledge, is still lacking." Jeming's tone was still that unhurried one. "Otherwise, you could completely manipulate your own Flesh, changing into all sorts of forms at will. Not just your features—height, build, skin color, hair color, even sex…"

He didn't finish the sentence.

Jeming's expression suddenly changed.

His pupils shrank in an instant, then abruptly dilated, dark?gold light exploding deep within them.

His body, without any conscious thought, leapt straight up and smashed through the ceiling of the underground lab.

The silver?white Metal panels above his head tore apart like paper, while fragments of concrete and brick sprayed to both sides along his ascent.

His whole body turned into a streak of light, shooting up from underground into the first?floor bookstore, then smashing through the bookstore roof and rushing into the murky sky.

Eric froze for a split second, then followed him on instinct.

His body reacted faster than his brain.

The Flesh Mutation weird power inside him went into full output in that instant, pushing the strength of his muscles and bones to the limit in a fraction of a second.

His legs bent slightly, then kicked off the ground hard, his body shooting upward along the passage Jeming had blasted open like an arrow leaving the bowstring.

Gravel and dust struck his face, and his skin hardened automatically, blocking all impact from the outside.

As he shot upward, his hands stretched forward, grabbed the edge of the hole in the bookstore roof, and with a twist of his body he landed steadily on the ridge of the roof.

Jeming was hovering in the air roughly fifty meters above the bookstore, his robes snapping in the wind.

His head was tilted back, his gaze fixed straight on the sky.

Eric followed his line of sight, and his expression likewise grew ugly.

Because the sky had changed.

The sky over Wudu had never been blue.

For decades, aside from that one day when Jeming punched it open, at all other times, whether it was "clear" or overcast, it had been gray?white.

Eric and the residents of Wudu had long grown used to that gray, the way one is used to breathing and a heartbeat.

But now, the gray was gone.

In its place was an exceedingly bizarre, obviously unnatural dark purple.

This dark purple was evenly distributed; it didn't look natural at all, more like someone had draped a gigantic purple canvas over the entire sky.

Threaded through the purple were tiny black lines, and those lines were slowly writhing, at a glance looking like the blood vessels of some enormous creature.

"This is…" Eric's voice was a little dry.

He stared at that dark?purple sky, feeling as though he were looking at something that shouldn't exist in this world.

Jeming continued hovering in the air without landing.

His gaze pulled back from the sky and dropped to the ordinary people walking along the streets.

The bakery owner's wife was wiping down the counter at the door, moving as leisurely as usual.

Two children were chasing each other in the alley, their laughter clear and bright.

A man in a gray coat walked along the cobblestone street, a cloth bag in his hand and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Apart from the handful of people drawn by the noise of Jeming bursting through the building just now, the overwhelming majority of residents looked completely normal. No one had any reaction to the sky's color.

This meant they could not see the weird change in the sky.

In other words, only high?perception groups like Spiritualists or Wizards could sense this kind of anomaly.

"Teacher." Eric heard his own voice squeeze out of his throat, hoarse to the point of not sounding like him. "What is this?"

Jeming did not answer.

He hovered in the air, eyes slightly narrowed, as if he had sensed something.