Chapter Summaries

Benjamin and Viola completed and tested the nest’s redesign, turning it into a rapidly growing, self-replicating battlefield shield before Benjamin stored it in his Pocket Dimension. Decades later, Benjamin emerged from secluded cultivation having completed Void Refinement, with only the fusion of his true form and dharma body left before he could reach Dao-Integration.

• Benjamin and Viola repeatedly revised the nest’s design over several months, then confirmed that the finished modifications matched their plans.
• Benjamin and Viola tested the nest in a desert, where it devoured sand and energy, grew to about one and a half kilometers across, and reached Level 3 combat power.
• Benjamin drew the nest into his Internal Grotto-Heaven, and he and Viola rested; before leaving, Viola demanded payment and Benjamin gave her an Entropy Brain.
• Decades later, Benjamin emerged from secluded cultivation and assessed that his dharma body had nearly solidified into physical form, completing Void Refinement.
• Benjamin reflected that fusing his true form with his dharma body remained the final step before perfecting Void Refinement and becoming able to break through to Dao-Integration.

Benjamin’s soul developed an ability to automatically organize new knowledge, freeing his remaining Entropy Brains for trade and bringing his assets to roughly thirty billion Advanced Military Merits. He used potions and the Self-Aspect Freedom True Form Scripture to advance to Perfected Void Refinement, making his thousand-meter-tall Dharma body his true body and discovering his transformed senses and power.

• Benjamin’s Body Tempering Method evolved his soul so it continuously organized newly learned knowledge without an Entropy Brain.
• Benjamin valued his remaining Entropy Brains and other assets at roughly thirty billion Advanced Military Merits, then searched the Great Dao Library for materials to advance his cultivation.
• Benjamin spent ten months preparing magic potions from Wizard World techniques and Cultivation World pill theory, then drank the final potion in his specially built chamber.
• Benjamin circulated the final transformation formula as essence, qi, and spirit flowed into his Dharma body, while his original body became insubstantial.
• Benjamin’s original body vanished as his Dharma body became his true body, and he gained 360-degree vision and heightened perception of energy and waves.
• Benjamin absorbed much of the chamber’s elemental energy in a single breath and found his thousand-meter body cramped in the chamber.

Benjamin completed his transformation from a Dharma Body into a true form, expanding his Internal Grotto-Heaven and gaining new innate abilities. After testing his power and adopting a normal-sized body, he left the sealed chamber and prepared to pursue the Dao-Integration Realm.

• Benjamin's Inner Circulation accelerated, causing his Internal Grotto-Heaven to expand as the Incense Divinity Path supplied the Spiritual Power it consumed.
• After fifteen days, Benjamin's Internal Grotto-Heaven stabilized at more than ten times its former area and began generating enough Spirit Energy to refill his Spiritual Power in a quarter of an hour.
• Benjamin discovered that Inner Circulation and the Body Tempering Method had become innate, mutually reinforcing abilities, and that his body had begun generating a small amount of Spirit Energy.
• Benjamin tested his true form and found that he could compress and manipulate space with precise control.
• Benjamin shifted from his kilometer-tall Dark Gold form into a normal-sized body, confirmed it worked well, and left the sealed chamber to plan his advance toward the Dao-Integration Realm.

Benjamin studied the danger of Dao Assimilation and sought rule-fused creatures for research into safer Dao-Integration in the Wizard World. He ended his rest early and secured a place in a Level 8 Wizard’s mission to handle a planar rule anomaly.

• Benjamin reviewed Dao Assimilation’s risks and concluded that methods developed in the Cultivation World might not work unchanged in the Wizard World.
• Benjamin ended his rest period and searched the Elite Combat Unit Recruitment System for missions involving rule-fused creatures.
• Benjamin learned how the recruitment system developed and why the Spirit Awakening Technique’s Level One Training Agreement brought many high-ranking wizards out of seclusion.
• After hours of refreshing the system, Benjamin found a private bounty from Level 8 Wizard Alston involving rule-bound creatures in a plane and a damaged Miniature Glass Garden.
• Benjamin applied immediately and won one of the mission’s 1,000 slots, then left his laboratory to prepare.

Benjamin arrived at the Miniature Glass Garden to join Alston’s mission to find and resolve the Eeries that had infected the plane. Alston imposed strict limits on destruction, civilian casualties, and spell output, then opened the mission to teams and individuals.

• Benjamin teleported to the Miniature Glass Garden and saw that most of the other arriving wizards were Level 6 or higher.
• Alston appeared on the platform and warned the wizards to protect his carefully cultivated plane.
• Alston explained that Eeries, strange living diseased rules from another plane, had entered the garden through a breach and needed to be resolved.
• Alston offered the Eeries as spoils and access to their plane for further research, but forbade large-scale damage and civilian deaths.
• Alston restricted every spell’s output to no more than Level 3, sent the wizards maps with suspected Eerie locations, and began the mission.
• The wizards dispersed to form teams, travel alone, or study their maps.

Benjamin traveled to a town where an anomalous finger in salt jars had caused 47 deaths, and sensed something wrong upon arrival. He was joined by eight other Level 6 Wizards as they prepared to investigate.

• Benjamin chose a remote forest-edge location marked for abnormal deaths and flew toward it.
• On the way, Benjamin sensed eight other Wizards heading to the same location.
• Benjamin reviewed reports describing a finger that reappeared in salt jars and caused families who ate the tainted food to die of kidney failure.
• Benjamin landed on a hill overlooking the town and sensed a subtle abnormality in the air.
• Eight Level 6 Wizards landed behind Benjamin.

Benjamin and eight other wizards investigated the deaths caused by an anomalous finger in a town’s salt jar. They discovered that it redefined victims and their soul remnants as inherently salty, then prepared to inspect the jar.

• Nine wizards agreed to consult the managing Artificial Human, Old Herman, before deciding how to investigate the anomaly.
• Old Herman reported that two more members of blacksmith Hans’s family had died after eating food from the affected salt jar.
• Old Herman led the wizards to the Town Hall morgue, where they examined the bloated, altered bodies.
• Benjamin dissected a corpse and found its tissues hardened and transformed despite having normal sodium levels.
• The young witch detected that the victims’ tissues and soul remnants had been conceptually redefined as salty, and the wizards concluded the finger was altering the meaning of saltiness.
• Old Herman offered to lead the wizards to the finger in Hans’s salt jar.

Benjamin and the other wizards investigated the finger in Hans's salt jar, but none of their scans detected anything unusual. After learning its genetic material closely matched Hans's family, a burly wizard swallowed it to test its effects, leaving the group awaiting the result.

• Old Herman brought Benjamin and eight other wizards to Hans's home, where Karl was grieving alone after witnessing his mother and younger sister die.
• The wizards examined the finger in the salt jar, but energy, magical-law, fate, and visual scans revealed no anomaly.
• A thin-faced wizard found that the finger's genetic material closely resembled Hans's family, though no one in the family or among the victims was missing a finger.
• The burly wizard removed the finger from the jar and swallowed it while Karl watched in horror.
• The burly wizard used dark green magic to examine his body's reaction and then opened his eyes with a strange expression.

The curse witch explained how the finger used genetic material to trigger a soul-level curse, and Karl began suffering after seeing it. Benjamin and the wizards stopped the curse and searched for the finger, but it had vanished, leaving them unsure why.

• The curse witch deduced that the finger had used the victims’ genetic material to establish an incomplete exchange between flesh and salt and trigger a soul-level curse.
• Karl began choking and screaming that everything tasted salty after seeing the finger, activating the curse.
• The wizards used protective and curse-removal spells while Benjamin coated Karl with Liquid Adamantine, and Karl recovered.
• Benjamin and the other wizards searched the house, town, and surrounding area but found no sign of the finger.
• Benjamin tasted the salt from the shaker and confirmed it was ordinary table salt.

Benjamin and the other wizards deduced that the aberration had no fixed body and manifested a finger to curse one family at a time. They planned to trap it by sealing the town and watching for its next appearance, leaving Benjamin to monitor the town from the central square.

• Benjamin and the wizards concluded that the finger was a temporary tool and that the aberration had merged into the town's environment.
• The curse witch and Benjamin reasoned that the aberration manifested when it acquired a family's genetic material and targeted households one at a time.
• Benjamin proposed using genetic material as bait to lure the aberration into a controlled environment.
• The wizards decided to seal the town with a barrier, assigning themselves construction tasks and Benjamin the job of monitoring for the finger.
• Benjamin sat beside the town fountain, spread his mental power across the town and its surroundings, and used the Fate System to search for anomalies.

Benjamin and the wizards used a crystal tube filled with the town’s genetic information and connected Fate Lines to lure an anomaly into their trap. The anomaly appeared as a finger in a salt jar, and the wizards began sealing it after discovering its curse worked on the concept of saltiness.

• The Dark Blue Robed Wizard revealed that he had concentrated genetic samples from the townspeople and the other wizards into a crystal tube to serve as bait.
• Benjamin connected the town’s Fate Lines and fate fluctuations related to the anomaly to the tube, making the bait ready.
• The wizards took positions in the cellar, and the curse witch prepared to redirect the anomaly’s curse onto them.
• Benjamin spotted an extra finger in the salt jar, and the curse witch’s rune trapped it while shifting the curse’s focus to the wizards.
• The Life School wizard transformed into an elemental creature but still tasted salt, leading Benjamin to conclude that the curse acted on the concept of saltiness.
• The curse witch began sealing the finger as the other wizards helped reinforce the spell.

During the attempt to seal the Salty Finger, a second anomaly attacked the curse witch through newly drawn graffiti that could alter reality. Benjamin traced the attack to an abandoned estate, but the anomaly's true body remained hidden.

• As the wizards lowered their defenses to seal the Salty Finger, an unseen force twisted the curse witch's right arm and the anomaly escaped the finger.
• Benjamin detected an abnormal Fate Line leading northeast, and the wizards flew to an abandoned estate about a kilometer away.
• The wizards found fresh graffiti depicting all nine of them, with the curse witch's right arm painted over to match her injury.
• Benjamin concluded that the graffiti could alter reality and had tested its influence on the wizards before injuring the curse witch.
• Benjamin searched the Fate Lines for the anomaly's true body but could not locate it.

The wizards compressed the barrier around the town to force Salty Finger and the Graffiti Anomaly out of hiding. Salty Finger appeared first, and the Graffiti Anomaly surfaced soon after, turning its attacks toward Benjamin.

• The dark blue robed wizard proposed shrinking the barrier while the Level Six Wizards filled its inner wall with their Law Solidification Domains, leaving Benjamin to protect the townspeople.
• Benjamin monitored the town with his spiritual power and Fate System as the wizards contracted the barrier.
• When the barrier shrank to fifty kilometers, the Graffiti Anomaly tried to manifest graffiti around town, and Benjamin destroyed each medium before it could fully appear.
• As the barrier contracted to a radius of one kilometer, Benjamin sensed Salty Finger trapped in a small area and the Graffiti Anomaly struggling within the compressed space.
• At a diameter of fifty meters, Salty Finger appeared above Fountain Square, and the barrier blocked its curse waves from reaching the townspeople.
• The Graffiti Anomaly emerged in the air above the square, failed to affect the wizards protected by their domains, and turned its attention toward Benjamin.

Benjamin endured the Graffiti Anomaly’s reality-altering attacks until his body adapted, then seized and beat the anomaly into submission. He sealed it and the Salty Finger in separate containers, leaving the eight Level 6 wizards to secure them.

• Benjamin let the Graffiti Anomaly attack him and rapidly developed resistance to its attempts to rewrite his body.
• Benjamin captured the Salty Finger and sealed it in a rune-lined test tube.
• The wizards shrank the barrier until the Graffiti Anomaly manifested, and Benjamin grabbed it with his partially transformed true-form hand.
• Benjamin beat and kneaded the Graffiti Anomaly into a fist-sized ball, then sealed it in a law-material container.
• The eight Level 6 wizards sealed both containers, and the deep blue-robed wizard praised Benjamin.

The nine wizards divided the captured anomalies, with Benjamin taking Salty Finger and the others sharing Graffiti Anomaly before they entered the anomaly plane. Benjamin could not fit through Wizard Alston’s standard portal because his true existence exceeded a thousand meters, so Alston enlarged it and let him pass.

• The wizards agreed to give Salty Finger to Benjamin and divide Graffiti Anomaly into eight portions, which the curse witch separated and distributed.
• The deep blue-robed wizard reported the mission complete, and Wizard Alston opened a rift into the anomaly plane and warned the wizards to preserve the plane and stay in light at night.
• The wizards crossed the rift one by one, each carrying a source of light, until Benjamin discovered that the portal rejected him.
• Wizard Alston examined Benjamin’s disguised form, recognized that his existence exceeded a thousand meters, and expanded the rift.
• Benjamin stepped through the enlarged rift into the anomaly plane.

Benjamin cautiously explored the Dark Night Anomaly, found an abandoned settlement, and encountered locals whose guns and supernatural abilities could not threaten him. After sealing a strange entity bound to one man, he captured the fleeing survivors and used Soul Search to gather information about their world.

• Benjamin tested how the Dark Night Anomaly reacted to light and used Fate Lines to locate a settlement while avoiding broad spiritual scouting.
• Benjamin reached the abandoned settlement and was fired on by four armed locals, but he caught or deflected their bullets and assessed their weapons.
• A tall, thin man summoned a snake-like strange entity, which Benjamin suppressed and sealed into a bead, leaving its host gravely weakened.
• The other three locals fled, but Benjamin pulled them back with an invisible force and restrained them.
• One captive fired at Benjamin during an apparent interrogation, injuring himself with ricocheting bullet fragments, and Benjamin used Soul Search on another to learn about the world's language, society, history, and strange entities.

Benjamin learned about the world’s anomaly classifications, technology, and the city of Mist City from the memories of four bandits he killed. He headed toward Mist City to hide, study anomalies, and gather material for his attempt to reach the Dao-Integration Realm.

• Benjamin searched the four dead bandits and took their money pouch before leaving the abandoned settlement.
• Benjamin learned that anomalies were classified into five levels and that the Dark Night Anomaly had once wiped out a city of more than one million people.
• Benjamin discovered that this world’s technology resembled the late twentieth century, but high-speed and high-altitude flight were dangerous because they attracted anomalies.
• Benjamin learned that marine anomalies supported ocean travel, while gene drugs and sealed anomalies gave people dangerous paths to enhanced power.
• Benjamin identified Mist City as a refuge for criminals and Psychics and set out toward it to study anomalies and seek research materials.

Eric noticed Benjamin had opened an Old Bookstore in the Old District and began considering learning medicine so he could escape factory work by opening a clinic. Benjamin settled into his hidden clinic and laboratory, while Mist City's dangerous night fell and he kept watch from the bookstore.

• Eric saw the newly opened Old Bookstore and, after visiting it, met its owner, Benjamin.
• Eric reflected on his factory job and his mother's lessons, then decided to save money and seek an apprenticeship in medicine.
• Benjamin revealed that he had obtained a complete false identity, rented the house, and built a clinic and laboratory in its basement.
• As dusk arrived, Benjamin withdrew his mental probing, secured the bookstore, and read reports of a disappearance and nighttime safety warnings.

Eric continued visiting Benjamin’s Old Bookstore and sensed that the suitcase-carrying stranger who arrived there was dangerous. After Eric left, Benjamin exchanged optimized genetic drugs for payment, research materials, and information about new horrors and black-robed figures outside Mist City.

• Eric visited Benjamin’s bookstore for the fifteenth day in a row and suggested installing electric lights.
• A strangely unsettling man entered, and Eric sensed that he regarded Benjamin as a superior.
• Benjamin told Eric it was getting late, and Eric left the bookstore despite his curiosity.
• Benjamin showed the man ten tubes of optimized genetic drugs, whose success rate was five percent higher than the original formula.
• The man paid Benjamin with old currency, delivered requested research materials, and reported new horrors east of the city and figures in black robes.
• The man left with the drugs, and Benjamin kept the money and materials as part of their ongoing trade.

Benjamin prepared anomalous fragments for research and arranged for Eric to watch the Old Bookstore while he attended a Psychic Association lecture. As Association staff began assessing reports about his improved Gene Serum, Benjamin rode toward the exhibition center, pleased that his bait had been cast.

• Benjamin examined newly acquired anomalous fragments and considered the research value of prohibited Gene Serums.
• Benjamin asked Eric to watch the Old Bookstore and oversee electricians while he attended a public lecture organized by the Psychic Association.
• Eric arrived the next morning, took Benjamin's instructions and keys, and stayed at the shop as Benjamin left for the exhibition center.
• At the Psychic Association headquarters, Dirk and Harding reviewed rising missing-person reports and discussed a newspaper clipping about Gene Serum with a reportedly improved success rate.
• Harding decided to monitor the serum for a month before judging whether it was genuine, and said the Association would investigate whoever had optimized it.
• Benjamin boarded a crowded public bus and thought that he had cast his bait.