The light of the teleportation array slowly faded in the main laboratory of the Infernal Sulfur Plane.
Familiar elemental fluctuations, mingled with the faint sandalwood scent of the Incense Faith Path, rushed into his nostrils.
The cold blue lighting still steadily spread over the work and array screens, casting the entire laboratory in a somewhat chilly light.
Jie Ming stepped out of the teleportation array and raised a hand to stretch his neck.
His joints gave a soft crack, and his body, which had been tense to the extreme, gradually relaxed from deep within his bones.
As for the intelligence on the Octopus People captives and the coordinates of the Multiracial Alliance outposts, Viola was still looking for suitable buyers.
Selling the whole package directly to the Star Ring Federation military could certainly earn a considerable amount of military merit, but she clearly did not intend to sell it off so hastily. With rare intelligence like this, shopping around always allowed one to squeeze out a few more percentage points of profit.
Jie Ming had no objection.
After all, the share he was supposed to receive had already been agreed upon.
He had already received the reward of five billion low-level military merit in advance; whatever price Viola could fetch later was her business. Before leaving, they had also agreed that once she found a buyer, she would directly transfer the share to his magic network terminal.
As soon as he returned, Jie Ming first went to the cultivation area next to the laboratory.
That independent cultivation chamber had already been adjusted according to the environmental parameters of Viola's plane.
Stellar illumination with a light purple spectrum, relatively high air humidity, weakly acidic soil rich in trace elements... every indicator had been calibrated by Jie Ming to the exact specifications.
Then, from his Inner World, he took out several sealed test tubes containing active ganglion samples collected from the corpses of the plant people, and carefully placed them into the culture medium.
A pale green liquid flowed slowly through the circulation pipes, like a quiet stream of life.
The active tissue gradually unfurled its coiled tendrils, began to adapt to the new environment, and slowly proliferated.
Jie Ming separated a small portion of the active tissue and placed it into a specialized culture tank connected to the Creation System.
As the passive catalysis function activated, the Incense Faith divine power and spiritual energy inside the culture tank began to slowly merge according to the preset ratio.
A pale golden light rose from the rune array at the bottom of the tank, enveloping the active tissue.
Soon, changes appeared at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Nerve cell clusters that would have originally taken several days to complete one division completed their first proliferation in just a few hours under the catalysis of the Creation System. The newly formed ganglia exhibited extremely high activity, and the establishment of synaptic connections was several times faster than in natural conditions.
"Not bad. It seems this species also possesses plant-like characteristics and can be affected by the cultivation acceleration of the Creation System."
Jie Ming nodded with satisfaction, recorded the data in his experiment log, and then turned back to his workbench.
The other gains from this planar war also needed to be sorted out.
He loaded the knowledge system of the plant people into the computing terminal, and the light curtain unfolded page by page before his eyes.
Jie Ming quickly skimmed past the irrelevant knowledge and soon found what he was looking for.
The plant people were quite accomplished in life force extraction systems, such as the structure of Micro Biochemical Reaction Chambers, the purification and storage technology of life energy, and the information transmission protocols of the racial neural network...
Every piece of knowledge, even from Jie Ming's current perspective, seemed invaluable.
He spent several days thoroughly organizing and archiving this content, even creating a new classification tag to store them separately. As for the gains from the Octopus People, they were of a completely different style.
From the data captured from prisoners and the battlefield, the individual cultivation system of the Octopus People was quite complex.
A mountain of techniques on how to strengthen the physical body, how to refine battle armor, and how to break through limits in battle were piled up, appearing extremely rich at first glance. But after a brief browse, Jie Ming confirmed that these things were of little significance to him.
He had the body refinement method and also tempered his body with solar true fire; on the path of physical enhancement, he had long taken a different route.
Those techniques of the Octopus People were several orders of magnitude inferior to the body refinement method in both efficiency and depth.
So he quickly packed and compressed these techniques, tossing them into the miscellaneous category, and then focused his attention on the intelligence and worldview common knowledge extracted from the consciousness of the Octopus People commander.
However, the gains in this area were not very substantial either.
That Octopus People commander did not know much.
After all, the internal structure of the Multiracial Alliance was too vast, and since the Octopus People civilization lost their Level 9 ancestor, their status had been increasingly marginalized, to the point where they could not even reach the threshold of mid-level decision-making meetings.
All he knew was roughly how many outposts of similar scale existed in his own mission zone.
Beyond that, it was just a fairly conventional understanding; he knew even less about the Multiracial Alliance than Jie Ming did.
The reason for this, according to the commander's memory, was that even when the Octopus People civilization still possessed a Level 9 existence, it could not be considered a core civilization within the Multiracial Alliance.
This information made Jie Ming's fingers pause.
A civilization with a Level 9 being was already at the pinnacle of the pyramid in the Endless Chaotic Void.
But if even such a civilization could only be considered a non-core member of the Multiracial Alliance, then what level were the core civilizations of the Multiracial Alliance? However, this also indirectly confirmed his and Viola's earlier judgment.
A Level 9 existence was indeed not irreplaceable for the Multiracial Alliance.
That was why they would distribute Level 9 artifacts to small unit forces in remote star regions.
And while browsing through worldview common knowledge, Jie Ming's gaze was quickly drawn to a term.
It was the Octopus People—or rather the Multiracial Alliance's—term for wizards, not simply 'wizard' or 'enemy'.
But 'Apocalypse Apostle'.
"...Strange?" Jie Ming couldn't help but fall into thought.
According to his analysis of the Multiracial Alliance's common language, the meaning of this term... to be honest, was somewhat peculiar.
In the Multiracial Alliance's common language system, the root concept of 'apocalypse' was not simply 'end' or 'death', but rather closer to a more specific scenario like 'end of the world'.
As for the meaning of 'apostle', it was similar to the most common religious term in many civilization languages, referring to a messenger or agent of some higher existence. 'Apocalypse Apostle' could be literally translated as 'the messenger who leads to the end of the world'.
This didn't sound like a casually coined nickname on the battlefield... or rather, if it were to be a nickname, 'monster' or 'wizard' would have been simpler pronunciations.
This term seemed more like a formal title that had been used for a long time within the Multiracial Alliance and preserved through multiple cultural fusions. Moreover, when the Octopus People mentioned this word, there was no mockery or disdain, only pure fear.
Jie Ming pondered for a moment, then quickly searched for terms like Sentience Calamity or Reflection Dimension.
Unexpectedly, Jie Ming quickly found both terms. Although the pronunciations differed from the language of Wizard Civilization, the underlying meanings were similar, and they were also specific nouns referring to those two calamities.
"This... how should I put it?" Jie Ming's expression turned somewhat strange.
Sentience Calamity, Reflection Dimension, Apocalypse Apostle.
No matter how you looked at it, these three were the same category of terms!
Combining these three terms and looking at them from the perspective of the Multiracial Alliance, it felt more like a group of civilizations gathering together to resist three world-level calamities...
"Uh, Wizard Civilization shouldn't be called a calamity... right?"
Toward the end, even Jie Ming himself felt a bit uncertain.
Then Jie Ming opened his magic network terminal and sent an encrypted communication to Viola.
A few seconds later, the light curtain lit up.
Viola's face appeared on the light curtain. Behind her seemed to be the interior of the Octopus People flagship wreckage; she appeared to still be handling aftermath work. The usual smile still hung on her lips, but it carried a few more obvious hints of teasing than usual.
"What, missing me already?"
Jie Ming expressionlessly ignored the remark and went straight to the point, laying out his findings.
After Viola heard him out, the smile on her face slightly faded, but the curve remained.
She did not explain at length as she usually did; instead, she tilted her head slightly, her tone carrying a sense of 'This is a long story, but I don't plan to tell it now.'
"Well... when you reach Level 6 and actively merge with a planar origin, you'll know."
As the words fell, the communication was cut off.
After the light curtain went dark, Jie Ming stood still, raised his hand to scratch his head, and felt somewhat bewildered for a moment.
Curiosity clawed at Jie Ming's heart like a cat's paw; he strongly suspected that Viola was deliberately not telling him just to get back at him for discovering the Level 9 artifact!
However, although Viola's words were a tease, they also indicated that this matter should be 'common knowledge' among high-level wizards. And because of Viola, Jie Ming made up his mind completely to complete his promotion to a Level 6 wizard as soon as possible.
After all, the gains from this planar war were indeed beyond imagination.
Once Viola sold the intelligence on the outposts, even just half of the share would be enough for Jie Ming to repay his debt to Tutor Clark while also covering the funding gap for building the Creation System.
As for the auxiliary stars of the All-Heavens Star Grand Formation, they could be left empty for now.
In short, the gains from this planar war solved the problem of insufficient military merit; even if Jie Ming did not participate in other planar wars in the future, he could rely on the long-term returns from his own technology to make his funding chain plentiful again.
More importantly, this planar war also made him see his own shortcomings more clearly.
Jie Ming actually knew the reason: although he had broken through to the Dao Integration Realm, the time was truly too short—only just over a hundred years in total. And during these hundred years, he had spent most of his time researching the Zhou Tian Star Formation and the Creation System, never having had the chance to properly study the various divine abilities of the Dao Integration Realm.
In simple terms, he lacked not only military merit but also time.
Therefore, it was time to advance to Level 6.