With the matter resolved, Jie Ming finally relaxed.
Leaning back in his comfortable chair, he began browsing the magical network terminal in his laboratory, reviewing the various messages accumulated over the past fifty years.
Earlier, he had only skimmed the monitoring logs related to spatial stability. Now, settling down, Jie Ming realized he had an overwhelming amount to address.
Among the terminal’s message list, aside from David’s updates on resource handovers and research progress, as well as the Junction’s transaction records over the past fifty years, the most prominent were messages from his two friends—Amy and Victor.
Their messages were similar, each leaving two.
The first messages, sent over forty years ago, mentioned they had completed their previous round of military service. They had planned to visit Jie Ming to catch up and share their gains.
Unfortunately, Jie Ming was still in the distant Frostflame Plane, buried in the heavy workload of post-war statistics, unable to meet them.
So, they left messages asking him to reconnect once he returned.
The second messages, sent four or five years later, noted that after waiting years without any sign of Jie Ming’s return, they had decided to embark on another round of military service.
Victor’s message was more tactful.He simply told Jie Ming that after completing this new round, they would likely fulfill the lengthy military service contract signed with the academy upon enrollment.
At that point, they would gain true freedom to choose their paths.
Amy’s message was far more direct.
With an undeniable tone tinged with anticipation, she insisted Jie Ming “wait for them.”
Once they returned from this service, the three would venture together as free wizards into the vast planar battlefields for true adventures.
Reading their messages, especially the confidence radiating from Amy’s words, Jie Ming couldn’t help but smile warmly.
From their tone, it was clear both had made significant gains during their decades of military service.
Their strength and horizons had likely expanded greatly, enough to believe they could catch up to or even surpass him.
Jie Ming, however, was confident.
His fifty years in the Frostflame Plane, grappling with the anomaly of a living plane and studying vast amounts of knowledge, had propelled his progress far beyond their imagination. He didn’t think they could overtake him so easily.
Still, seeing his friends regain their drive and find direction on the harsh path of wizardry was a joyful occasion for him.
He sent brief replies to both, informing them of his return and wishing them well in their service.
After addressing other necessary responses, Jie Ming conducted a thorough inspection and upgrade of the Golden Garden’s defense systems, the underground laboratory’s energy cycles, the arrangements for his territory’s inhabitants, and even the Infernal Sulfur plane assigned to him. With all external matters finally settled, he returned to his laboratory after ten days.
Taking a deep breath, he calmed his mind completely and began preparing for his advancement to second-tier wizard.
Among the three core requirements for advancing to second-tier wizard, Jie Ming’s mental strength, honed through fifty years of relentless meditation and accumulation in the Frostflame Plane, had already fully saturated the Ring of Truth, meeting the hardware standard for advancement.
The vast and complex knowledge system needed to reconstruct the Ring of Truth had also been amassed through his exposure to immense information and studies during his spare time over those fifty years.
Now, only the final, most critical step remained: bringing his soul and body to a state of “extreme activation.”
This requirement was essentially a foundation for future advancement to third-tier wizard.
Only a highly activated soul and body could clearly perceive the ever-present “rules” within a plane, preparing one for studying and selecting those rules later.
On a practical level, extreme activation also enhanced a wizard’s ability to sense and harmonize with surrounding elemental forces.
This significantly lowered the “threshold” for manipulating elemental forces, making spellcasting faster and less taxing.
Moreover, if a wizard’s chosen system was suitable, they could even temporarily achieve a state of “elementalization” during combat.
However, based on discussions with Mentor Clark and Senior Sister Viola, they didn’t recommend relying heavily on “elementalization” in battle.
As they explained, while bodily elementalization seemed to grant immunity to most physical damage, it could be easily shattered by attacks of sufficient magnitude or those imbued with special rules.
Furthermore, when facing attacks of the same or opposing elements, an elementalized body became even more vulnerable, taking amplified damage.
This ability was, at best, useful for dominating weaker foes.
Using it recklessly against peers was tantamount to suicide.
Unfortunately, in planar wars, wizards mostly faced enemies of equal or higher tiers.
Thus, Jie Ming paid little attention to this so-called “combat advantage.”
What he truly valued was the immense aid “extreme activation” provided in perceiving rules.
However, with the wizarding civilization’s current technology, most methods couldn’t maintain “extreme activation” as a constant state.
The few techniques that could were prohibitively expensive, requiring vast rare resources or highly dangerous bloodline modifications.
Even with Jie Ming’s wealth, the costs were unaffordable.
Thus, mainstream wizards devised a clever, effective workaround: before advancement, they used high-intensity “modification surgeries” or special potions to temporarily induce an unstable “activated” state in their body and soul.
Then, they immediately performed the advancement ritual, leveraging the “life sublimation” phenomenon during the leap in life tier to permanently stabilize this temporary state!
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