Chapter 428: Spell Model
Translator: AnubisTL
The laboratory’s lighting was adjusted to a soft, cool white, focusing on the three-dimensional model suspended in the center of the workbench.
Jieming stood before the platform, his eyes reflecting countless flowing runes and energy trajectories.
His fingertips traced patterns in the air, each tap causing the model’s internal structure to undergo a subtle adjustment. This was not the geometric stacking common to wizard runes, but rather a natural evolution akin to the “meridian growth” of spells from the cultivation world.
There was still one year left before his departure for the Reincarnation Plane, and he had finally completed this research project that had consumed nearly a century of his time.
Strictly speaking, the dizzyingly complex three-dimensional framework before him could not be called a mere “wizardry model.”
Its core was derived from a Divine Transformation Realm slaughter spell recorded in the Great Dao Library Pavilion—the Sunfire Extinction Ray.
“Using the essence of Sunfire as its foundation, fusing the intent of extinction, it transforms into light as it travels, reducing all in its path to ruin.”
These were the original words from the jade slip.
In the cultivation world, this spell was renowned for its concentrated power and extreme speed. At its highest levels of mastery, it could even burn through spatial barriers.
However, it came with a fatal limitation: it required pure fire-attribute spiritual energy to drive it, and placed immense demands on a cultivator’s realm and spiritual power reserves.
The modification process proved far more difficult than imagined.
First was the replacement of the power source.
The Sunfire Extinction Ray originally relied on the “everlasting” attribute unique to spiritual power to keep its flames burning. But elemental energy in the wizard world was more inclined toward “explosive release.”
Jieming had to sacrifice the spell’s “continuous burn” and “Dao Rhyme Erosion” effects, retaining only its purest “high temperature” and “annihilation” attributes.
Next was structural adaptation.
Cultivator spells emphasized “will guiding the art,” making the models themselves highly flexible.
Wizardry models, however, pursued “stability and reproducibility.” The position and connection angle of every rune had to be flawless.
It took Jieming a full decade to find a solution that made the two systems compatible at the level of energy flow.
Finally, the most critical step: multiplier enhancement.
The core reason why wizards could crush most other extraordinary systems at the same level lay in their enhancement of the “elemental multiplier.”
The same ball of fire element could only produce a small flame in the hands of an apprentice, but in the hands of a formal wizard, it could be transformed into a wall of fire. At the level of a high-rank wizard, it could even trigger a chain reaction, creating a firestorm that covered an entire city.
“…Done.”
He stopped his fingers and took a long breath.
The model before his eyes had stabilized.
The overall structure was a spiral-forward light cone, densely packed with 3,600 main energy nodes and over 100,000 secondary patterns. Two-thirds of these were wizard runes, and one-third were immortal cultivation talismanic seals.
The patterns of the two different systems were interwoven, surprisingly creating a strange sense of harmony.
Jieming nodded in satisfaction, but then shook his head in regret.
“The elemental amplification multiplier… is still not high enough.”
His advancement to a fourth-tier wizard had been too fast.
The price was that his knowledge accumulation was far from the average level of a fourth-tier wizard.
“With this multiplier enhancement, I’ve only just reached the lower bound of a fourth-tier wizard,” Jieming estimated. “If I had another few hundred years to fully master the Elemental Multiplier Superposition Theory and High-Tier Energy Compression Geometry, I could at least raise this to the next level…”
Even so, with the dual application of the cultivator system’s environmental energy channeling and the wizard system’s multiplier enhancement, the theoretical destructive power of this modified Sunfire Extinction Ray already surpassed the lower bound of a conventional sixth-tier spell.
More importantly, cultivator spells possessed an advantage that wizardry struggled to match: flexibility.
The base attack speed of the Sunfire Extinction Ray was the speed of light—a feature fully preserved in the modification.
Furthermore, it could adapt to the caster’s will: condensing all its energy into a point the size of a needle for a “Point-Kill Mode” that pursued ultimate penetration, or spreading out evenly to cover tens of millions of square kilometers in a “Carpet-Bombing Mode.”
It could even dynamically adjust between the two modes.
“Time to test it.”
Jieming waved his hand to dismiss the model and turned to walk toward the testing field deep within the laboratory.
Jieming activated the control runes, and the space within the testing grounds began to unfold layer by layer—five thousand kilometers, ten thousand kilometers, finally settling at fifty thousand.
He stood at the edge of the field and raised his right hand.
No incantations, no complex somatic gestures. Only a thought.
The Ring of Truth within his body resonated instantly, and a massive torrent of mental power surged through the modified spell model.
Half a second.
After just half a second of charging, Jieming felt the surrounding environmental elements begin to rage.
Fire elements were forcibly torn from the walls, from the depths of the earth veins, and even from space itself, converging in front of his palm.
Then, the light appeared.
It was a beam of white-gold light, so pure it was heart-stopping. Though no thicker than a thumb, it caused the temperature of the entire testing grounds to soar instantly.
The moment it left Jieming’s palm, it reached its ultimate speed—the true speed of light. Within the expanded fifty-thousand-kilometer testing field, it traversed from one end to the other in less than 0.17 seconds.
Jieming adjusted his aim. Mid-flight, the beam suddenly flared outward, transforming into a fan-shaped screen of light that uniformly covered all target zones within a three-thousand-kilometer diameter ahead.
Extreme heat.
Annihilation.
All matter was instantly decomposed into fundamental particles upon contact.
“Range and speed tests… passed.” He recorded the data and switched modes.
This time, the targets were six pre-deployed sixth-tier defensive targets—simulating the standard defensive force field of a sixth-tier wizard.
Each target’s surface flowed with multiple layers of composite shields, enough to withstand the continuous bombardment of conventional sixth-tier spells.
The Sunfire Extinction Ray reconverged into a beam.
The first beam struck the bullseye, causing the shield to flicker violently as its outermost layer instantly overloaded and collapsed.
The second beam followed immediately, piercing the second layer of the shield and leaving the third layer severely destabilized.
(End of the Chapter)