novelraw Chapter 425: Starforger
Chapter 425: Starforger
The fifteenth cycle. Inside the core laboratory of the wizard encampment.
Outside, the thunderous roars of battle and surging waves of energy were completely sealed away by thick protective arrays, leaving only a low, droning hum as background noise.
Within the laboratory, the lighting remained constant and gentle, the air pristine. The only sounds were the faint hissing of circulating runes and the quiet flow of data streaming across light screens.
Unlike the other wizards, who were all focused on specific experiments or data analysis, Jie Ming sat alone at a circular workbench in one corner of the lab.
What lay spread out before him was not a single research report, but a grand, overarching research timeline and comprehensive war progress overview that he himself had compiled across all fifteen cycles.
Once all the wizards had gained the ability of “Time Anchoring,” and the vast research system could sustain itself without relying on him as the sole information nexus, Jie Ming had finally escaped that frantic, fire-fighting state of constant crisis management.
He finally had the breathing room to truly calm down and examine everything that had happened in this long cycle of reincarnation—as a genuine observer.
And the deeper he looked, the clearer that vague sense of wrongness became in his heart.
From the very beginning, I was never truly unique.
After sorting through every clue, this was the first thought that pierced his mind like an ice-cold needle. Everything he had done such as preserving information within his inner cave-heaven, using body-forging techniques to evolve resistance against memory resets, pushing the wizards to reverse-engineer the Sickle-Skull race’s memory mechanisms…
In principle… could only he have accomplished these things?
No.
Jie Ming understood very clearly that there was at least one person who could definitely have done it.
And done it far better than him.
That person was the eighth-ring wizard who had thrown them into this cycle battlefield and stood guard outside the plane—the Starforger, Altreus.
Leaving aside the fact that an eighth-ring wizard’s Law Solidification could render them immune to the effects of time reversal.
With an eighth-ring wizard’s profound understanding and mastery of the laws, would it really be difficult to create an “information preservation point” independent of the plane’s temporal flow?
With an eighth-ring wizard’s unfathomable soul strength and depth of knowledge, would directly analyzing, replicating, or even improving upon the Sickle-Skull race’s memory mechanism really be that hard?
Probably not difficult at all.
Yet Altreus had not done so.
Instead, he chose a completely different approach: throwing Frost’s vanguard legions into the grinder of endless cycles, then—only once every three cycles—symbolically sending in a batch of “elite reinforcement units” like Jie Ming and the others.
Why?
As his thoughts deepened, the grand schematic before Jie Ming seemed to come alive. Lines of data intertwined, slowly revealing a depressing truth.
Across these fifteen cycles of research, they had thoroughly analyzed the Sickle-Skull race’s physiology, society, and energy systems; they had figured out the triggering conditions, range of effect, and some of the underlying rules of time reversal; they had even developed sorceries to resist memory resets.
On the surface, the achievements seemed remarkable.
But all of it… was like meticulously mapping out an exquisite, intricate outer shell.
What they had studied was “how the Sickle-Skull race responds to the cycle” and “what phenomena the cycle manifests through the Sickle-Skull race.”
They had never truly touched, nor had they been able to touch, the core of the cycle itself.
That mechanism, that will, which drove everything and existed like the underlying code of the plane, still lay hidden in absolute, unfathomable darkness.
The Sickle-Skull race and the time reversal were like two concentric circles – seemingly adjacent, yet separated by an unbridgeable gap.
No matter how many Sickle-Skulls the wizards slaughtered, no matter how thoroughly they studied their characteristics, they were only clearing away the surface of the larger circle. The smaller circle at the core remained completely untouched.
“So…” Jie Ming let out a long sigh, leaning back in his chair and gazing up at the simulated starry sky formed by energy runes on the laboratory ceiling. “Wizard Altreus… probably saw through this truth a long time ago.”
“He understood early on that simply ‘studying the Sickle-Skull race’ and ‘accumulating experience within the cycle’ was like trying to fish for the moon in a well, completely futile, unable to reach the heart of the problem. So he didn’t bother doing what I did: performing these seemingly effective but ultimately superficial actions.”
Then… what was the meaning behind everything this Starforger had arranged?
Jie Ming recalled the reinforcement procedure.
Elite combat units like theirs were normally requested by the overall theater commander when they assessed the situation and petitioned Star Ring Federation headquarters for reinforcements. Only then would the Federation dispatch them.
Their group of thirty thousand had come precisely at the request of Wizard Altreus.
Yet thirty thousand… in a grand war encompassing an entire plane, this amount of reinforcement was nothing more than a drop in the bucket.
Even if every single one was an elite, how much could they really change against an enemy numbering in the trillions and the bizarre time-reversal cycle?
And then there was that strange reinforcement pattern, divided into multiple teams, with one team inserted only every three cycles, at fixed intervals, like a slow intravenous drip.
“With just this many people… it’s practically useless, isn’t it?” Jie Ming murmured to himself, his fingertips unconsciously tapping the sparse glowing points on the chart that represented the reinforcement units. “And this reinforcement method… just what exactly is the Starforger trying to do…?”
“Of course, it’s to introduce variables.”
A warm, calm male voice, seemingly resonating directly from the depths of his soul, suddenly answered Jie Ming’s mutter without any warning.
Jie Ming’s entire body stiffened. His heart violently skipped a beat.
He whipped his head around.
Less than a meter to his side, at some point, another figure had appeared.
The man appeared to be in his early thirties, with an ordinary face and wearing an almost crude, plain gray wizard robe.
There was no trace of energy or law fluctuations coming from him—he looked just like an ordinary person who had accidentally wandered into the lab.
He was currently studying the grand schematic spread before Jie Ming with great interest, a near-gentle smile on his face.
The Starforger, Altreus.
Jie Ming recognized him instantly, not just from his appearance, but from that aura of overwhelming “smallness” and “depth” that, even when completely restrained, still made the soul instinctively feel insignificant. Only an eighth-ring existence could possess such presence.
How could he be here?
When did he arrive?
Why hadn’t the other wizards reacted at all?
Jie Ming’s gaze quickly swept across the laboratory.
Allison was nearby, frowning slightly as she fine-tuned a high-precision soul resonance instrument. Master Moreas was quietly arguing with an assistant about optimizing some gene-coding scheme.
The other wizards were all immersed in their own work. Not a single one glanced in this direction, as though Altreus’s existence was completely transparent to them.
No… not transparent.
Jie Ming quickly calmed himself and observed more carefully.
He noticed that the dust on the floor where Altreus was standing had not been disturbed in the slightest.
This was not a physical body.
A guess surfaced in his mind.
“…Mass projection?” Jie Ming asked tentatively. To his surprise, his voice came out steadier than he expected.
Altreus turned his face toward him. A flash of clear astonishment passed through his eyes, immediately transforming into appreciative amusement.
“Oh? You actually know about ‘mass projection’? It seems your foundation of knowledge is quite solid.” He did not deny it.
Mass projection, a cutting-edge technique that projects a portion of one’s own mass, energy, and even consciousness information to a distant location through action-at-a-distance.
The projection possessed senses nearly identical to the original body and a certain degree of interaction capability, yet it was not true physical matter and required a stable channel to maintain itself.
This explained why he could appear without a sound, and why the other wizards had not noticed anything, because the “presence” of the projection could be precisely controlled, manifesting only to specific targets.