Chapter 426: The Plan of an Eighth-Ring Wizard

Seeing that the other party’s attitude was not hostile, Jie Ming felt a slight relief in his heart.

He took a deep breath and asked the most crucial question:

“Your Excellency Altreus, may I ask… why have you personally projected yourself here to see me? Is there some instruction you wish to give? Also, the ‘introducing variables’ you just mentioned… what exactly do you mean by that?”

The Starforger Altreus’s gaze once again fell upon the chart in front of Jie Ming. The gentle smile on his face seemed to deepen slightly.

“Instruction is too strong a word,” he said casually, as though discussing the weather. “As for ‘variables’… actually, your two questions are really one and the same.”

He did not wait for Jie Ming to fully process that statement, but instead shifted the topic to something more fundamental, his tone resembling that of a mentor gently guiding a student toward the conclusion:

“After studying it for so many years, with the understanding you now possess… what do you believe is the true essence of this plane’s ceaseless time reversal?”

Jie Ming steadied his mind, his eyes sweeping across the streams of data on the chart.

Fifteen cycles’ worth of research results rapidly integrated in his consciousness, stripping away trivial details and pointing toward the most probable conclusion.

“It doesn’t resemble a natural phenomenon.” Jie Ming spoke, his voice clear in the quiet laboratory. “The triggering conditions are excessively quantified, the range of effect is strictly delimited, and the way it handles ‘memory contradictions’… it feels more like a preset error-correction program.”

“After synthesizing a great deal of information, we have concluded that this plane, or its core structure, is a strategic-grade war machine. Time reversal is its core function for ensuring that its internal combat units, the Sickle-Skull race , can endlessly restart, trial-and-error, and wear down powerful enemies.”

This was the consensus of the research team, yet even as he stated it aloud, Jie Ming could feel the excitement thrumming behind the conclusion.

A world that had forged an entire civilization into the components of a weapon… the knowledge and technology it represented were enough to set one’s blood racing just thinking about it!

Altreus gave a slight nod, his expression carrying the meaning of “Not bad, you’ve reached this step.”

“More precisely, it is a time-paradox generator.” He continued, “Ordinary time manipulation is like a dance of water elements, ripples across the laws. But this machine, while reversing time, must systematically ‘resolve’ all the resultant causal contradictions involving every affected entity, conflicts in material states, information lost and then reappearing, fractures in memory logic. It forcibly ‘rationalizes’ these contradictions. That is the most prominent characteristic of its nature as a ‘machine.’”

Jie Ming immediately seized the key point.

Yes—the wizards’ detection data had repeatedly shown that this plane’s mechanism for handling “paradoxes” was vastly different from conventional spacetime laws. It was as though it had built-in special fault-tolerance and override protocols.

If one regarded it as a machine specialized in generating and digesting time paradoxes, then every anomaly could be explained.

A complete war system took shape in his mind: the Sickle-Skulls were the blade and the expendable material, time reversal was the core, and paradox-processing capability was the ultimate defense and the potential killing move against high-level enemies.

To bind an entire plane so deeply to such a terrifying spacetime weapon… the creator’s ruthlessness and ambition were enough to send a chill down the spine.

While he was lost in thought, Altreus’s voice rang out again, calm yet carrying the power to pierce through fog:

“You were puzzled earlier because you couldn’t find any core entity responsible for creating the time reversal. That’s only natural. As the heart of a war system, it is inevitably hidden the deepest. After personally experiencing several cycles, I too saw through this truth. When dealing with a precisely designed machine whose core may simply be an ‘intrinsic non-intelligent rule,’ searching externally for some nebulous ‘controller’ is usually futile.”

The Starforger’s finger lightly tapped in the void, as though pressing down upon the invisible pulse of the entire plane.

“I chose a different path: instead of searching for weaknesses, I decided to try forcing it into overload.”

Overload.

The word struck like lightning, instantly clearing the fog in Jie Ming’s mind.

Altreus did not pause, continuing along the same line of thought:

“No matter how bizarre this machine’s technology may seem, the fundamental principles underlying its ‘time reversal’ must still share certain commonalities with everything else. Jie Ming, with your current level of knowledge, you should already understand where the greatest difficulty in achieving time reversal truly lies, correct?”

Jie Ming drew upon his reservoir of knowledge.

“Computational power,” he said slowly, his thoughts gradually sharpening.

In the world of his previous life, there was no distinct entity called “time.” So-called time reversal essentially meant precisely restoring the state of every fundamental particle in the universe to a recorded past position.

That required an unimaginable volume of information and computational force.

In the wizard world, although one could directly manipulate the entity called “time,” to reverse, without contradiction, the state of all matter, energy, information, and even souls within a certain range to an exact past moment still demanded an astronomical amount of data processing and law computation.

To put it bluntly, the computational burden was no less than in the previous case.

This was also why many wizards who had mastered time rules only used time acceleration or deceleration to assist in combat.

Even with the computational power of a high-rank wizard, achieving localized time reversal was far too difficult.

“Any manipulation of time, or indeed any manipulation of elements, requires sufficient computational power to process the information.”

“Precisely.” Altreus affirmed.

“The reversal range of this machine is confined within the plane. Therefore, in theory, if we continuously inject new information and new variables into this closed system beyond its preset processing capacity, it is possible to overwhelm its inherent ‘error-correction’ and ‘override’ logic, causing confusion, lag, and eventually… collapse from overload.”

As his words fell, every aspect of Altreus’s overall arrangement suddenly clicked into place in Jie Ming’s mind!

The million-strong vanguard legions served as both the “base number” and the “anchor point,” maintaining basic combat power while also forming the “baseline information flow” that the system processed on a daily basis.

Wizards were beings that inherently carried vast amounts of information. A legion of a million wizards possessed sufficient combat strength to ensure they would not be wiped out by the Sickle-Skulls through information asymmetry across cycle after cycle.

When the wizards later underwent changes, the larger the baseline legion, the greater the information variation produced by each change.

And each subsequent entry of the thirty designated reinforcement squads represented, for this system, an unplanned “major variable injection”!

A gleam of calculation flashed in Altreus’s eyes: “By my calculations, this system can withstand roughly twenty-five ‘significant tactical changes.’”

More crucially, the entry of each squad inevitably triggered adaptive changes from the Sickle-Skulls, which in turn forced tactical adjustments from the wizards.

Thus, each reinforcement injection triggered at least two “information transformations.”

Thirty squads meant at least sixty “transformation shocks” far exceeding the system’s tolerance!

Moreover, Frost’s two seventh-ring adjutants, as high-rank individuals, were themselves powerful sources of variables—potentially serving as the final straw that breaks the camel’s back.

“A plan… to overload a precision machine using ‘unexpected events’ and ‘variables.’” Jie Ming murmured, light flashing in his eyes as everything became clear.

But a new question quickly arose: “Your Excellency, since the goal is to introduce variables, why don’t you enter the field in person? The ‘information volume’ you carry, and the ‘variables’ you would generate, should far surpass the total of all reinforcement forces combined.”

The nearly affable smile that had always graced Altreus’s face finally faded.

He did not avoid the question, but instead displayed a rare degree of frankness.

“Two reasons.” He raised a finger. “First, the ‘information volume’ I bring is simply too enormous. If my true body entered, what would occur might not be a gradual overload, but an instantaneous triggering of the highest-intensity paradox countermeasure. It would be like smashing a star into a pocket watch, the watch would certainly be destroyed, but we would obtain no usable wreckage to study. Our goal is to acquire a spacetime machine in as intact a state as possible, not a violent torrent of chaotic laws.”

He paused, then raised a second finger, his tone growing even calmer, yet carrying an unmistakable gravity: “Second, I am wary of the time paradoxes this plane might induce.”

An eighth-ring wizard’s “wariness.”

The word sent a chill through Jie Ming’s heart.

Altreus’s gaze passed over his own near-perfect “mass projection.”

“Why do I only use a projection? Aside from precisely controlling variables, it is also because… with my current state, the instant my true body steps into this realm, there is an extremely high probability that I would immediately trigger a paradox attack powerful enough to severely wound me.”

He looked at Jie Ming, his expression containing not the slightest trace of jest: “In fact, I have already been injured once. When I first detected the anomaly of time reversal and realized the situation had exceeded normal parameters, I forcibly intervened and pulled the entire legion out of one cycle as a whole. That single act of interference triggered the deepest countermeasures of this plane.”

Jie Ming held his breath. “The injury… was it severe?”

“Very severe.” Altreus nodded, his tone as flat as if stating an objective fact. “It took me a full three seconds to completely heal.”

Three seconds.

Jie Ming froze for a moment, then an icy wave of dread gripped him.

He understood all too well what “three seconds” meant to an eighth-ring wizard.

It might sound trivial—only three seconds to heal, as though the injury were a joke.

But in truth, the higher the rank, the deeper the self-modification a wizard underwent, and the stronger their undead nature became.

For beings of the eighth-ring level, ordinary physical destruction and energy annihilation often didn’t even qualify as “damage.”

Even if the majority of their bodily matter was obliterated, it was merely a temporary change in form of existence—recovered with a mere thought.

Only attacks that touched the root of the soul or the very layer of existence itself were defined as “injuries” that required “healing.”

The time needed to heal directly reflected both the depth and the lethality of the damage.

An injury that required an eighth-ring wizard to focus for “three seconds” to heal… in theory, already carried killing power sufficient to threaten Altreus’s life!

“The most terrifying aspect of time-based abilities…” Altreus seemed unconcerned about revealing such things; he explained calmly, “is their ability to manipulate ‘temporal sequence’—stacking multiple, massive amounts of damage and detonating them all in the same instant. If this machine were pushed to its limit and chose self-destruction, in theory it could completely repeat a paradox attack against me thousands or tens of thousands of times within the same ‘instant.’ That kind of stacking…”

He did not finish the sentence, but Jie Ming could already envision the horrifying scene.

Even an eighth-ring wizard might be cut down beneath that accumulated, ultimate blade of time.

Though for a being of the eighth-ring level, death did not necessarily mean permanent demise… it would certainly cost them all face for this lifetime.

And for existences with infinite lifespan, sometimes social death could be far more unbearable than actual death.