The rest of the journey went smoothly, and the three quickly returned to Noren Workshop.
Wizard Noren and Senior Anton Buchanan were practically unable to wait, following Jie Ming into the teleportation array to the Infernal Sulfur Plane.
Standing beside the teleportation array in the laboratory, the childlike Senior Anton rubbed his chubby hands together, wearing an eager smile wholly unsuited to his status as an eighth-rank Wizard.
“Hurry, hurry!” he urged, craning his neck, his tone filled with undisguised urgency. “Noren, you old thing, what are you dawdling for? Let’s go!”
Wizard Noren laughed and shook his head. “Don’t be so impatient. An eighth-rank Wizard, yet you act like you’ve never seen a stone before.” Though he said that, Noren’s steps also quickened.
“This is no ordinary stone,” Senior Anton muttered, but his eyes never left Jie Ming.
The two followed Jie Ming through layer after layer of defenses and soon reached the area where important items were stored. Jie Ming took out the Reflection Prism, which was wrapped in layers upon layers of seals.
On the obsidian-like surface of the prism, beneath the layered suppression of sealing runes, a dim luster still flowed. That luster was unusually restless, as if a great beast were sealed within.
Jie Ming placed the Reflection Prism gently on the laboratory bench, called up a contract template on the Magic Net terminal, and quickly drafted a standard lending agreement with his fingertips on the light screen.
He handed the contract over, his tone solemn. “Both of you, these are the terms we agreed on: this thing is temporarily lent to you for research, but all related knowledge produced during the research must be fully copied to me. When I need it, it must be returned immediately.”
Anton didn’t even look, pressing his spiritual imprint onto the contract at once, as if afraid that Jie Ming might change his mind a moment later.
Wizard Noren, by contrast, read through the terms carefully before nodding. “Reasonable and fair. This is what we agreed on.” With that, he too left his spiritual imprint on the contract.
Then he looked up at Jie Ming, approval in his voice. “You handled everything quite well this time, with sufficient caution. It seems you’ve learned a great deal from Clark over the years.”
“You flatter me,” Jie Ming said with a smile. “This matter is too important, so it’s better to be cautious.”
Senior Anton, who had already been eagerly leaning toward the Reflection Prism, reached out to touch it, only for Wizard Noren to slap his pudgy little hand away.
“Ever since your body shrank, you’ve become impatient too!” Wizard Noren glared at him. “The seals haven’t even been removed yet, and you want to touch it?”
Senior Anton withdrew his hand sheepishly. “I was just anxious…”
Then he turned to Jie Ming, his smile piling back up. “Kid, your luck really is something, even better than that brat Clark. But are you sure you don’t mind lending this out so readily?”
Jie Ming spread his hands with a nonchalant look. “Senior, you’re joking. At my current level, even if what’s inside the Prism were laid out in front of me, I couldn’t chew through it. Rather than let it sit here wasting away, it’s better to let the two of you research it first.”
“Besides, if the two of you blaze the trail first, I can directly harvest the fruit later when I reach that level. Whatever you research also saves me the effort of researching it myself. Why not?”
“You’re certainly direct,” Wizard Noren said with a nod.
Anton found it hilarious, winking at Wizard Noren. “See? This kid thinks more clearly than anyone.”
But then Wizard Noren seemed to think of something and shook his head helplessly. “Still, simple as the reasoning is, your mindset is rare. If it were someone else, even knowing this, they might not be willing to hand over such a treasure so readily.”
Jie Ming was a bit curious, but Anton had already pulled him over to the Reflection Prism. “Enough, let’s not delay the real business!” Jie Ming nodded, casually traced a few runes, and the layers of seals on the Reflection Prism unraveled by themselves.
Looking at the energy source beside the Reflection Prism, Wizard Anton clicked his tongue in wonder. “Kid, your luck really is something. You’re only sixth-rank, yet you’ve gotten your hands on two ninth-rank creations, one of them such a precious treasure.”
“Senior, this thing wasn’t just casually placed here…” Jie Ming explained the Reflection Prism’s signal-emitting principle in detail. Wizard Noren nodded. “I see. It’s indeed a fairly common method, but fortunately it’s easy to handle.”
With that, without any visible movement, Jie Ming’s True Illusion Void-Breaking Eye noticed that the fluctuations emitted by the Reflection Prism were instantly blocked. “Alright, we won’t disturb you anymore.”
Senior Anton said that, but his hands were already eagerly hoisting the Reflection Prism onto his shoulder.
Jie Ming didn’t even have time to formally say goodbye before watching the two carry the Reflection Prism out of the laboratory in high spirits. Even Wizard Noren, who had always appeared quite steady, was walking strangely fast.
Jie Ming could even hear Senior Anton arguing with Wizard Noren about who should research it first as they stepped onto the teleportation array. “I’m younger than you, so I should go first!”
“What kind of twisted logic is that?!”
The two voices bickered all the way into the teleportation light and disappeared.
Jie Ming smiled and didn’t mind. He went back and re-seated the ninth-rank creation’s energy source.
A moment later, the teleportation array lit up again.
Viola and Clark walked out one after another.
The moment she saw Jie Ming, Viola crossed her arms and looked him up and down with a complex gaze mixed with envy, jealousy, and resentment. Her eyes practically screamed, “Why does this kid get to steal the show just by going to a conference?”
“Jie Ming, you go to an Academic Symposium and manage to make such a big name for yourself.” Viola dragged her words out, sour and long. “I heard even the spatial masters from the Void Architecture Academy and the Anti-Entropy Alliance publicly praised you. Do you know what they’re calling you out there now?”
“What are they calling me?” Jie Ming asked with interest.
“Rising Master of the Spatial Domain!” Viola spit out each word.
Jie Ming said nothing, only looking at her with a faint smile.
“Stop putting on that act!”
Viola was so annoyed by his attitude that she lunged at his head and bit down.
But unlike before, Jie Ming didn’t run around wildly. Instead, he laughed coldly. “Heh heh heh… Didn’t expect this, did you, Senior Sister? This body of mine is only a puppet, and it doesn’t have a pain-sensing system installed!”
“What?!” Viola looked up in shock. “You used such a cheap trick!”
The two roughhoused for a while, until Clark finally couldn’t stand it, grabbed Viola by the collar, and dragged her aside.
He glanced at Jie Ming and gave a slight nod. “You did well this time.”
With that, he dragged Viola away, as if they had teleported over only to say those few words.
Of course, coming from Clark, specifically coming over to say those words was already extremely high praise.
As for whether that “did well” meant doing well at the Academic Symposium, or doing well in handling the Reflection Prism… that was open to interpretation.
But judging from Viola’s reaction, Jie Ming guessed that Clark had most likely not told her about the Reflection Prism, not even the slightest hint.
And that was the correct way to handle it.
The Wizard Civilization had all kinds of detection methods. While direct soul-searching wasn’t possible, there were still plenty of ways to find out a secret if someone truly wanted to. When it came to important matters, the fewer people who knew, the better.
The Reflection Prism involved experience for ninth-rank advancement. If information at that level leaked out, let alone the public star zone, even many eighth-rank Wizards of the Four Great Powers—especially those old monsters who had lived for who knows how many years without being able to advance—might personally step in.
After seeing them off, Jie Ming returned to the main laboratory, sat down at the workbench, and began carefully sorting through the gains from this trip.
Apart from the Reflection Prism, which had already been taken by Wizard Noren and Senior Anton, the most important gain was naturally the growth in knowledge.
The large amount of cutting-edge theory Jie Ming had absorbed at the Academic Symposium, the mental-force fluctuation regulation technique from the combat-track sub-forum, and the new ideas derived from discussing spatial studies with Savien and the other two all genuinely enriched the knowledge system in his mind.
Reflected in Law mastery, taking 100% Law mastery as base 1, after so many days of the Academic Symposium, Jie Ming’s highest Law—Space Law—had reached thirty percent, while his other Laws had also increased by two to five percent to varying degrees.
This gain meant that the improvement speed of his Law-Crystallization Domain increased further.
However, his Dharma Aspect was still too large, so the Law-Crystallization Domain still couldn’t be brought into battle for the time being.
Another gain was that after uploading the Life Stabilization Field Technology, his military merit income had surged again.
In addition, the income from the Blood Sacrifice Method had not yet entered a stable period and was still being sold continuously. With these two income streams, he no longer needed to worry about formation-eye materials at all, nor would he have to live frugally in the future.
Beyond that, his gains in social connections were also enormous.
The friendship of Savien, Basian, and Morna, the three spatial masters, went without saying. Jie Ming had also met quite a few people at the Academic Symposium.
He had only met those people for the first time, so there was no real friendship to speak of; expecting them to help with anything was out of the question. But a large portion of them came from eighth-rank Wizard families, and to Jie Ming, their greatest value was as customers.
Not to mention, the previously stalled sales of the hallucination-resistance devices and liquid adamantite set had sold quite a bit more through them.
But besides these gains, Jie Ming also had points of dissatisfaction—for example, that battle with the seventh-rank Wizard.
Of course, being able to defeat a seventh-rank Wizard was already enough for most sixth-rank Wizards to brag about.
But Jie Ming, who had actually fought Hogg, knew very well that Hogg was merely a newcomer who had recently advanced to seventh rank.
Whether it was the application of his Law-Crystallization Domain or the accumulation of all kinds of knowledge, he was still at the sixth-rank stage; only his Law and mental-force capacity had reached the seventh-rank baseline.
Yet even against such an opponent, Jie Ming couldn’t take him down easily.
He had relied on the Reversal Palm to stubbornly withstand the opponent’s attacks, relied on the dual enhancement of his Dharma Aspect and Light God Transformation to barely gain the upper hand in energy confrontation, and in the end relied on attrition to grind the opponent down bit by bit.
After that fight, Jie Ming understood clearly that there was still a huge gap between himself now and his mentor Clark when Clark had also been at sixth rank.
After all, when Clark was at sixth rank, he had once faced more than one hundred thirty seventh-rank Wizards alone, and had even suppressed them head-on.
Those were over a hundred genuine seventh-rank Wizards, and more than a few were seasoned veterans who had long been battle-tested.
Yet in front of Clark at that time, they were still easily crushed. If not for the coordination of more than two thousand additional sixth-rank Wizards, those seventh-rank Wizards might have been routed completely.
That overwhelming dominance stood in stark contrast to Jie Ming’s current sorry state, where he could barely win against a newly advanced seventh-rank Wizard only through repeated maneuvering and self-healing.
“Still, strictly speaking, I’ve only just advanced to sixth rank not long ago, while my mentor at that time had been at sixth rank for many years. So I still have a chance to catch up.”
Jie Ming didn’t sell himself short either; as he said, he still had considerable room to grow.
Leaning back in his chair, Jie Ming pondered silently for a moment, then sat up straight and pulled up the Talisman Imprint Rune Artifact modification plan on the terminal. At the current stage, Jie Ming had many paths by which to improve his combat power.
But whether it was accumulating knowledge, improving his Law-Crystallization Domain, or comprehending the Mustard Seed Contains the Dao True Body Art, none of it could be completed overnight.
After a quick calculation, Jie Ming found that the closest to completion was actually the development of the new sixth-rank version of his Talisman Imprint Rune Artifact.
Coincidentally, after attending the Academic Symposium, his knowledge accumulation had risen another whole tier, and he was now able to try creating his own sixth-rank spells.
“Right, in that case, I can first study the technique Wizard Redes taught, which can greatly increase spell destructiveness and reduce cast time.”
The rune frequency combination technique that Wizard Redes taught at the Academic Symposium could, on average, increase a spell’s destructive power by about five percent. But Jie Ming’s Talisman Imprint Rune Artifact also utilized immortal cultivators’ energy-control techniques, so even a mere five percent increase, once amplified, was a considerable gain.
“Then… let’s create an offensive spell first.”
Spells suited for the Talisman Imprint Rune Artifact were mainly the simple, crude energy-bolt types or ray types.
After thinking a moment, Jie Ming opened a light screen, called up information related to sixth-rank ray-type spells, and buried himself in research.