Chapter 456: Fifth-Ring Wizard, Bottleneck, and Rank

That day, in the quiet chamber of the laboratory.

Jie Ming had just finished “ingesting” a wisp of planar origin that carried the property of “forced absorption.”

His consciousness slowly withdrew from the vast sea of cold formulas and intricate models concerning energy siphoning, forced stripping, unidirectional channeling, and so on, returning to reality.

He rubbed his slightly swollen temples, about to regulate his breathing for a moment, when he suddenly froze.

A strange sensation welled up in his heart.

The Ring of Truth trembled lightly of its own accord within his mental world, more solid and stable than ever before, and its resonance with the external elements had become noticeably clearer.

The total quantity of his mental power had not surged dramatically, yet its circulation now felt far smoother and more effortless.

“This is… a fifth-ring wizard?”

Jie Ming sensed the changes within himself, somewhat surprised, yet at the same time feeling it was only to be expected.

The requirements for advancing to a fifth-ring wizard were very clear: mastery of at least one law must reach above 10%, while mental power intensity must also meet the standard.

His mastery of the Spiritual Qi Law had long since surpassed 20%. Moreover, after his body had been tempered by the afterimages of time, it had become extraordinarily powerful. Through the mutual influence and tempering of the three treasures—essence, qi, and spirit—his mental power intensity naturally reached the required threshold.

“Fifth-ring already…” Jie Ming murmured to himself, his tone calm.

For him, this advancement brought almost negligible improvement in terms of “actual combat power.”

After all, it was the same old reason everyone knew: a wizard’s power fundamentally stemmed from “knowledge.”

A rise in rank merely meant that one’s “hardware” foundation, mental capacity, upper limit of energy manipulation, law-bearing capability had been upgraded. It was akin to swapping an outdated computer for the latest model of supercomputer.

But what truly determined how complex and how powerful a “program” (a spell) this “computer” could run was the quantity and quality of “knowledge” stored in one’s consciousness.

Jie Ming’s current situation was this: his hardware had just been upgraded to “fifth-ring standard,” yet the amount of legitimate fifth-ring “knowledge programs” belonging to the orthodox wizard system stored on his hard drive was pitifully small.

To put it bluntly, if one were to judge purely by the accumulation of orthodox wizard knowledge and corresponding combat techniques, he might currently be inferior to some veteran third-ring wizards.

Back when he was third-ring, he had already been able to threaten weaker fifth-ring wizards using black giants and composite methods. At fourth-ring, he dealt with fifth-ring wizards even more calmly.

Now that he had reached fifth-ring, he could still only maintain a threatening presence against peers of the same rank. Against sixth-ring wizards, he remained sorely lacking.

Moreover, the reason he had been able to keep his combat power from falling behind during this process relied entirely on knowledge from another system.

His combat superiority came from “cross-disciplinary knowledge dividends” and “composite technological advantages,” not from the wizard rank itself.

And now, having advanced to fifth-ring, the “gap in orthodox wizard knowledge” he needed to fill had grown even larger.

Those wizards who managed to cultivate to fifth-ring, every single one of them, was either a genius or a monster who had spent thousands of years deeply plowing their respective fields, accumulating vast knowledge and countless trump cards.

Compared to them, Jie Ming’s “shallowness” in wizard knowledge stood out especially starkly.

“The things I need to learn, research, and accumulate… have only increased…” Jie Ming let out a soft sigh. Far from relaxing because of the advancement, he instead felt the pressure on his shoulders grow heavier by several degrees.

With a slight shift of thought, he subconsciously directed his perception toward the state of his cultivation in the immortal path.

The circulation of the three treasures—essence, qi, and spirit—had become noticeably smoother than before. The previous “sense of disharmony” caused by his excessively powerful physique had clearly lessened.

The disparity among the three was shrinking rapidly. At this rate, within a few more years at most, they would once again return to a perfectly rounded, flawlessly balanced, and mutually reinforcing ideal state.

That was good news.

But immediately afterward, another discovery caused Jie Ming to furrow his brows slightly.

The bad news was that the growth rate of both his mental power and spiritual power showed absolutely no sign of slowing down despite the imminent restoration of balance.

They continued to climb at the same far-above-normal speed as before.

Taken at face value, this seemed like an enormous blessing—after all, his strength was increasing every single moment.

Yet when combined with his current realm and perception, it pointed to a somewhat unsettling fact: the distance between him and the theoretical standard required for the “Void Refinement Realm” appeared to be… absurdly large.

“Hiss…” Jie Ming couldn’t help drawing in a light breath, astonishment and uncertainty flashing through his eyes. “Is the strength chasm between these major realms for cultivators… really this vast?”

One must understand that his mental power and spiritual power were growing in tandem, and their intensity basically corresponded to his wizard rank.

Now that he was a fifth-ring wizard, his mental power intensity had met the requirement.

Based on past experience, the combat power of wizards and cultivators corresponded fairly one-to-one. Logically speaking, the total quantity and qualitative transformation of his three treasures should have already reached the threshold of a Void Refinement Realm cultivator.

But reality was different.

He felt that he could not sense any direction whatsoever for advancing to the next higher major realm.

This sensation was completely different from the smooth, natural “water arriving and channel forming” feeling he had experienced when breaking through minor realms before.

“Something’s wrong.”

Jie Ming decisively set aside all ongoing research and even temporarily halted his absorption of planar origin.

He walked to the center of the quiet chamber, sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, and sank all of his attention into the deepest part of his consciousness.

The phantom of the Great Dao Book Pavilion, cast from white jade, stood silently.

Jie Ming’s consciousness body stood before its gate, thoughts racing:

“Query: key points for advancing from Spirit Transformation to Void Refinement, essential differences between the realms, comparisons between ancient and modern methods, and related classics!”

Several jade slip and scroll phantoms, imbued with antique hues and an aura of great age, immediately flew out from deep within the pavilion and hovered before him.

Jie Ming’s consciousness swiftly immersed itself in them and began reading at high speed.

Time passed as his mind operated at blazing speed.

A vast amount of profound, obscure information—concerning ancient secrets and the essence of cultivation—was absorbed by him.

After a long while, Jie Ming’s consciousness body slowly raised its head. A trace of realization flickered in his eyes, accompanied by a hint of complexity.

“So that’s how it is…”

The good news was that the absolute disparity in strength between a Spirit Transformation cultivator and a Void Refinement cultivator was not as outrageously exaggerated as he had just imagined.

Some old monsters who had immersed themselves in the Spirit Transformation stage for tens of thousands of years could possess the capital to challenge—or even suppress—ordinary Void Refinement cultivators.

But the bad news was that advancing from Spirit Transformation to Void Refinement would likely be far more difficult than any of his previous realm breakthroughs.

Because starting from the Spirit Transformation realm, the subsequent major realms gradually moved away from the category of “man-made bottlenecks” and became… more “primitive” and “arduous.”

“Bottleneck…” Jie Ming chewed on the word as key insights drawn from the classics surfaced in his mind.

To countless low-tier cultivators, a “bottleneck” was something they loathed deeply.

It was the pass that blocked their progress, the source of despair after bitter years of cultivation without the slightest advancement.

Yet only after reaching higher levels did Jie Ming finally understand from these ancient records that “bottlenecks” were actually artificial shortcuts deliberately researched, created, and solidified by generation after generation of brilliant predecessors in order to reduce the difficulty of advancement and pave a broader path of cultivation!

They could even be called artificial “staircases” that allowed later cultivators to climb to greater heights!

Their existence did indeed limit the ultimate ceiling a cultivator could reach within a single realm.

But conversely, they also provided a clear, traceable “breakthrough point.”

As long as one accumulated steadily and successfully broke through this relatively “fragile” checkpoint, they could achieve a leap in life level and enter the next realm.

“As long as you break through the bottleneck, you advance”—for a path of cultivation filled with unknowns and uncertainty, this was practically a form of “cheating.” It dramatically reduced the randomness and unpredictability of advancement.

The state Jie Ming was currently experiencing was the authentic predicament faced by the most ancient cultivators, those who had no predecessors to pave the way: as long as resources and aptitude were sufficient, the power within the body could accumulate almost without limit. Yet ahead lay only chaos—there was no clear “bottleneck” or “checkpoint” for one to “break through.”

No matter how much you accumulated, you had no idea which direction to push in order to pry open the door to a higher level.

Breaking through man-made “bottlenecks” was already extraordinarily difficult for most cultivators.

But in the eyes of higher-tier cultivators, if one couldn’t even break through these deliberately weakened and clearly signposted “bottlenecks,” then facing Jie Ming’s current “no clear bottleneck, only a vague chasm” primitive state would leave them completely helpless, doomed to never advance further in their lifetime.

The classics also mentioned that, in order to further reduce advancement difficulty, later generations had carried out almost “refined” modifications to the lower realms.

The most classic example was the Qi Refinement stage.

As the compulsory path every cultivator had to walk, Qi Refinement had been modified the most times and the most thoroughly.

It had long since broken free from the simple division of “early, middle, late, and perfection” into four stages. Instead, it had been subdivided into nine full layers—from the first layer of Qi Refinement to the ninth—each layer often further divided into early, middle, and late minor phases.

In total, just within the single realm of Qi Refinement, artificial “minor bottlenecks” numbering as many as twenty-six had been created!

Each minor bottleneck served to weaken the overall difficulty of the final “great bottleneck” from Qi Refinement to Foundation Establishment.

It was equivalent to taking a sheer, precipitous, unclimbable cliff and transforming it into a series of relatively gentle stair segments with places to rest.

Though there were more steps and climbing remained arduous, it was far easier and safer than scaling a sheer rock face directly.

By the time one reached Golden Core and Nascent Soul stages, the number of cultivators capable of reaching those levels had sharply declined, so the “staircasing” modifications to those realms were neither as fine nor as thorough as those applied to Foundation Establishment.

Thus Foundation Establishment had four relatively clear phases—early, middle, late, and perfection—while Golden Core and Nascent Soul usually had only three: early, middle, and late.

And when it came to the Spirit Transformation realm…

The cultivators who could reach this stage were already exceedingly rare. Research and “modification” of this realm were naturally even scarcer, leaving its state far closer to the “primitive” condition that Jie Ming was now experiencing.

Power could still be accumulated, but the “road signs” pointing toward advancement were blurred and indistinct. One had to grope about, comprehend, and even rely on “luck” or “sudden insight” to find the direction.

“So the state I’m in now is actually the ‘normal’ one… All the smooth sailing I experienced earlier was thanks to the painstaking efforts of predecessors who reformed and optimized the cultivation system.”

Jie Ming withdrew from deep consciousness, slowly opened his eyes, and couldn’t help but frown.

He suddenly thought of the wizard ranking system.

Following this logic, advancing from wizard apprentice to official wizard required igniting the spirit fire and condensing the Ring of Truth.

From first-ring to second-ring required constructing a complete energy circulation system. From second-ring to third-ring involved deep contact with and initial application of laws. Each of these advancements carried very clear, almost “qualitative transformation” landmark changes.

But advancing from third-ring to fourth-ring, and fourth-ring to fifth-ring, felt more like an accumulation of “quantitative change” without that earth-shaking sense of life-level leap.

Thinking about it now, the wizard ranking divisions had likely also undergone similar artificial adjustments.

“Perhaps from third-ring to sixth-ring is essentially one complete ‘mid-tier wizard’ major realm?” Jie Ming speculated inwardly.

“And fourth-ring and fifth-ring were deliberately carved out as ‘small steps’ or ‘midway checkpoints’ to reduce the confusion and difficulty during this long accumulation process.”

“That way, during the prolonged process of law accumulation, wizards would have relatively clear goals, could track their own progress, and would not become completely lost in the boundless ocean of laws.”

This hypothesis perfectly explained why he had been able to threaten—and even defeat—some weaker fifth-ring wizards while still at third-ring and fourth-ring using composite methods.

Because in essence, they were still within the same broad “mid-tier wizard” realm. The difference lay mostly in the “numerical value” of law mastery, rather than an absolute disparity in life form or the fundamental nature of power.

But facing a sixth-ring wizard…

That was already the next major realm—the starting point of high-tier wizards!

An existence that had completed law solidification and undergone some qualitative transformation in life form!

Thus the chasm between fifth-ring and sixth-ring wizards far surpassed the gaps between previous minor ranks.

Recalling the past, when Senior Sister Viola had chosen to leap directly from third-ring to sixth-ring, her breakthroughs through fourth-ring and fifth-ring had indeed been quite relaxed. Only the final breakthrough to sixth-ring had required considerable effort.

“Looking at it this way, Senior Sister Viola had probably already realized this back then. So for her, what others called ‘skipping three ranks in a row’ was simply breaking directly from one major realm to the next.”

“In that case… sixth-ring wizards are probably even more troublesome than I imagined.” Jie Ming’s gaze grew grave as he once again raised his danger assessment of sixth-ring wizards by another level.

After all, what he would soon face was a proper wizard war. Beings as intelligent and cunning as wizards would absolutely never engage in simple king-versus-king, general-versus-general combat.

On the contrary—even Jie Ming himself, when thinking about the upcoming war, instinctively first considered how to annihilate as much of the enemy’s low-end forces as possible in order to create an advantage for his side.

Therefore, on the battlefield, the likelihood of him encountering high-tier wizards was extremely high.

“It seems I’ll have to work even harder.”

Jie Ming reached out, picked up the next test tube containing a conceptual planar origin encapsulated with “abyssal assimilation,” uncorked it, and once again began that luxurious yet arduous process of “devouring knowledge.”