Translator: AnubisTL
Jieming approached Levin Mills, who was now completely incapable of resistance, his gaze icy.
In the brief moment their eyes met, both clearly saw the killing intent in the other's gaze.
Without hesitation, Jieming unleashed a punch that instantly shattered Levin Mills' fleshly body.
A third-tier wizard's soul was sufficiently powerful to briefly survive outside its physical form.
But Jieming gave him no chance.
With a swift motion, he retrieved a special fourth-tier attack spell artifact from his internal space—one that contained a fourth-tier spell specifically designed to destroy souls.
As Levin Mills' weakened soul flew from his shattered body, attempting to escape, Jieming immediately activated the spell artifact.
However, he deliberately adjusted the angle slightly, ensuring the soul magic didn't completely annihilate the soul but instead critically wounded it, leaving it on the brink of death.
The result was precisely what Jieming had anticipated. Levin Mills' soul hovered in mid-air, unconscious and steadily dissipating.
Seeing this, Jieming reached out and cast "Soul Search."
The earlier fourth-tier spell had irreversibly damaged most of Levin Mills' memories.
But due to the nature of souls, fragments of his deepest obsessions and most vivid memories remained.
Within these fragmented remnants of memory, Jieming found the crucial information he desperately needed—the truth behind the entire incident.
Initially, Levin Mills and his team had indeed accepted a camp mission to search for the missing wizard squad.
Though Levin Mills constantly praised Jieming as a genius, his own innate talent was far from lacking. After advancing to the third-tier, he had mastered some fundamental knowledge of the space attribute.
It was precisely this knowledge that emboldened him to accept the risky mission.
Everything proceeded smoothly at first. They successfully located the wizard squad lost within the distorted space.
However, just as they were preparing to lead the squad to safety, the squad suddenly turned hostile, launching an unprovoked attack!
Fortunately, the squad consisted of only six wizards, with their highest combat power being two newly advanced third-tier wizards who hadn't even fully mastered their own powers.
Moreover, the cunning Levin Mills had anticipated such a betrayal and secretly positioned some team members in the surrounding area for support.
Thanks to the tenacious vitality granted by the "vitality" rule, Levin Mills narrowly survived and led his team to exploit their numerical advantage, killing several of their attackers.
The surviving third-tier wizard, realizing the assassination had failed, recklessly invoked his poorly mastered spatial rule, attempting to forcibly tear through space and escape.
This action triggered a chain reaction of spatial disturbances in the already unstable region, forcing Levin Mills and his team to temporarily withdraw and await the space to stabilize.
By extracting memories from the slayer's soul, Levin Mills discovered an earth-shattering secret: the core of this space distortion area contained an extremely rare and precious free-floating "plane origin"!
Apart from being directly extracted by seventh-tier wizards using their immense power, plane origins can also spontaneously condense within specific energy bodies or materials within a plane under certain conditions, forming valuable resources containing the origin.
Though naturally formed origins lack the purity of those extracted by seventh-tier wizards, they still greatly aid a wizard's path to advancement.
Crucially, the origin produced in this area was the rare and precious "spatial rule" origin!
This explained the third-tier wizard's unfamiliarity with his own power—he had forcibly absorbed the plane origin to advance, but hadn't yet accumulated the corresponding knowledge and control.
As for why they attacked Levin Mills' team, it was due to the unique properties of this precinct: to obtain the plane origin, one had to use a special method called "sacrifice," offering high-quality matter and information.
Due to violent spatial fluctuations, the plane origin in this area was extremely unstable. Through sacrifice, the origin could be "exchanged" out of its unstable state.
Material sacrifices were relatively easy to obtain, but "high-quality information" was exceedingly rare.
Although wizards believed information carriers were ubiquitous, pure information itself was scarce.
Aside from the pure plane origin, the most suitable medium for carrying information was the soul.
"High-quality information" meant that the souls of ordinary local beasts were useless. The most suitable sacrifices were intelligent beings—especially wizards, whose souls were highly condensed and brimming with vast knowledge.
Thus, the attacking team, seeing Levin Mills' group as relatively weak, launched their assault, intending to harvest more souls to exchange for the plane origin.
After all, ordinary wizards lacked the willpower to resist such a high-end resource as the plane origin.
However, they hadn't anticipated Levin Mills' hidden contingency plans. Despite their initial advantage, they ultimately suffered a crushing defeat.
The subsequent events were everything Jieming had personally experienced.
Levin Mills's team had deliberately hired a group of low-tier wizards as cannon fodder, both to more efficiently hunt down any remaining enemies and to conceal their shocking secret.
This way, even if their plan were exposed, they could easily silence the wizards, or even repurpose them as "high-grade resources" for sacrifice, using them to exchange for plane origin.
The third-tier wizard who had narrowly escaped, upon discovering that Levin Mills and his team had sealed all exits, found himself trapped with no way out.
Desperate, he sacrificed all his dead companions, exchanging their lives for a massive amount of plane origin to force his advancement, hoping to leverage his newfound tier advantage for a slim chance of survival.
As Jieming reviewed these fragmented memories, a flicker of understanding flashed in his eyes.
He finally grasped Levin Mills's true scheme and understood why the fourth-tier wizard had been so weak—essentially, he was merely a second-tier wizard whose rank had been artificially inflated through the forced accumulation of origin.
Though he possessed the mental power and physical strength of a fourth-tier wizard, he lacked the corresponding knowledge and skills, making him utterly vulnerable.
But Jieming quickly shifted his focus to the most crucial piece of information: the sacred site capable of exchanging for "plane origin"!
Countless thoughts raced through his mind.
After a long time, Jieming made his decision.
He turned to face the fourth-tier wizard, who still lay weakly on the ground.
The wizard had witnessed Jieming's entire handling of Levin Mills. Now, as Jieming's gaze swept over him, only bitterness remained on his face.
The magic-nullifying field hadn't fully dissipated, and the wizard was critically injured and near death. Without hesitation, he chose to submit. "Don't kill me... I'm willing to accept the camp's judgment and audit."
Jieming nodded without further comment, conjuring a new contract and handing it over.
The fourth-tier wizard let out a miserable laugh, ultimately imprinting his mental power onto the contract.
For Jieming, this was the most secure course of action.
On the surface, the wizard civilization strictly forbade infighting among its own kind.
As long as such acts remained undiscovered, they went unpunished. However, if conclusive evidence emerged, violators faced severe judgment.
Unless the circumstances were exceptionally heinous, execution was rare. Instead, wizards possessed countless methods to exploit a criminal wizard's value to the utmost, forcing them to spend their remaining lives atoning for their crimes.
As the one who exposed and apprehended the criminal, Jieming would permanently receive a portion of all benefits extracted from the fourth-tier wizard—whether resources, knowledge, or military merits.
In other words, for the rest of his life, the fourth-tier wizard would become a "living mine" under Jieming's control.
Of course, all of this depended on him passing the so-called "audit."
Unlike the relatively public "trial," the "audit" was far more secretive.
It was typically initiated only when the camp or higher-level authorities suspected a wizard of exhibiting abnormal conditions such as "mind corruption," "soul replacement," or "mental incubation."
And this method of forcibly advancing through a single plane's origin was precisely one of the primary scenarios under scrutiny.
Theoretically, a wizard could indeed advance using pure "plane origin," but only if the origin came from different planes.
This was because plane origin was essentially an aggregation of information, and consciousness and spirit were also forms of information.
If a high-tier being willingly decomposed their soul information into fundamental origin and allowed another to completely absorb it, they could perfectly replace the target's underlying consciousness without causing any abnormal soul fluctuations.
In reality, this was the most common scenario detected during audits.
As long as a world's Lord of the World (the strongest being in that world) possessed sufficient intelligence to see through the true power behind the wizards, they would easily understand that they faced only two paths: death or becoming "spoils of war."
While some fiercely independent individuals might choose to drag their enemies down with them in death, many others, unwilling to die, would seek ways to save themselves.
This method, akin to body seizing, would be easily conceived by beings capable of communicating with the plane origin.
As Jieming pondered this, he recalled a legendary senior he had encountered before his formal advancement, during a visit to the Elosia Plane. This senior had returned from the shadow plane and ascended five tiers in just five years.
Later, after learning the inner workings of such matters, Jieming specifically checked the academy archives and discovered that the senior's name had been quietly added to the list of deceased.
Without a doubt, that "fortunate one" had been body seized by the Lord of the World of the shadow plane.
Yet it was precisely this sacrifice that allowed the Noren Workshop's powerhouses to swiftly pacify the shadow plane, which had previously been notoriously difficult to manage.
Looking back, Jieming realized that Mentor Clark's enigmatic smile at the time likely stemmed from advance knowledge of these events, hence his knowing amusement.
"...Let's go."
Jieming withdrew his thoughts, glancing at the ashen-faced fourth-tier wizard and the group of survivors still reeling from shock.
Without another word, he swept up the spoils of war from the ground and took the lead, flying back in the direction they had come from.
(End of the Chapter)
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