Among the vast Void, the territory of the Arcane Empire is expanding silently like a greedy giant beast.
In the Empire's current strategic map, the most eye-catching deterrent force is the three Floating City that are as huge as stars.
They are not only mobile war fortresses, but also the culmination of the Empire's highest magic civilization and alchemy industry.
However, the current status of these three cities is different: one of them was unfortunately damaged in a tragic cross-dimensional battle not long ago and turned into an icy wreckage; while the remaining two are stationed in two completely different sectors on the outer border of the Empire, serving as the ultimate defensive support point to deal with this protracted war.
However, within the very few high-level Core Circles of the Empire, there is hidden a huge secret that can change the balance of the game in the heavens. The true "Tenth Tier position" Floating City built by Ian himself has never shown its true power level in the eyes of the world since its birth.
According to Ian's far-sighted layout, this supreme throne, which carries the power of the God-Slayer, will be used as the final move against the old enemy Guznader.
Therefore, even if this city occasionally appears in some special mission worlds, it is always covered with an extremely sophisticated arcane camouflage. In the perception of the outside world, it is just a slightly more powerful Ninth Tier weapon.
In this operation, Ian's goal is to completely conquer a "Ninth Tier plane" located deep in Abyss. In order to ensure that this conquest can be completed in the fastest, most stable way without leaving any consequences, he decided to reveal his trump card and officially use his Tenth Tier Floating City.
But this creates a thorny strategic gap: if the main force is transferred away, there will be a serious void in the original border defense line.
Ian was not bothered by this. He once again demonstrated his almost cheating attainments in the field of Law of Time. He held tightly the Space-Time Staff that was flowing with silver starlight, and recited a spell in the main control hall that could rewrite cause and effect - [Time Clone].
As the end of the staff tapped Void, a silver fold of time spread rapidly over the city guarding the border. In just a few seconds, a city projection in perfect condition that was completely "borrowed" from the past time node was forcibly pulled into the present world.
This clone not only has all the outer defense facilities of the original body, but even the aura is exactly the same, which is enough to hide it from the prying eyes of any hostile forces.
After completing this feat of "replacing flowers and trees", Ian's real Tenth Tier Floating City slowly came out of hiding, wrapped inside the severely damaged remains of the Ninth Tier city, turned into an aurora that tore apart Void, and headed towards the established coordinates of Abyss.
When Floating City officially entered the stable Void sailing mode, Ian strolled in the long corridor full of science fiction and magical rhythms. His movements were extremely gentle, his eyes were full of fascination, his slender fingers slowly stroked a wall engraved with dense runes, and he murmured an extremely affectionate whisper:
"Oh, baby... I missed you so much."
Tsunade, who was standing aside, looked at Ian's almost "fetishistic" fanatical appearance, and his beautiful eyes suddenly revealed an extreme sense of strangeness and discomfort.
Even in that world where ninjutsu was rampant, she had never seen a leader show such goosebump-inducing tenderness to a pile of cold metal and stones.
"You guy... don't you have any sense of shame?" Tsunade couldn't help scolding, with a hint of disgust in his tone, "You say such love words to a wall, what is in your mind?"
Ian retracted his fingers and turned his head to look at Tsunade. His expression was extremely serious and confident, and he did not feel any embarrassment after having his "quirk" broken.
"You don't understand, it's not just a city, it's my 'darling'." Ian's deep pupils reflected the glimmer of the entire city.
"In order to build and enchant it with high dimensions, I have spent hundreds of years. The amount of resources invested in this city is enough to directly buy at least hundreds of complete parallel timelines in your Shinobi World universe."
Lin An paused, and there was a hint of pride as an alchemist in his tone. "More importantly, this floating city is the product of my lifelong knowledge, wisdom and soul perception as a 'great alchemist'. It is an extension of my life and the embodiment of my will."
Seeing Ian's serious expression, Tsunade still felt that this way of expressing emotions was weird, but he also understood a little bit of this man's logic. For Arcanist, the crystallization of Truth and knowledge did make their hearts beat faster than beauty.
After sighing at his work of art, Ian quickly calmed down his emotions and devoted himself to another important task of the trip: trying to repair the damaged Ninth Tier Floating City.
He came to the experimental center, where a large amount of rare ores looted from Naruto World had been piled up. But Ian did not intend to use conventional engineering methods. He wanted to try a higher-level and more efficient cheating method.
He plans to mobilize the extremely precious "World Source Force" as fuel to drive a large-scale Time Magic, trying to force the damaged Divine Artifact to "go back" to the peak moment before it was destroyed.
"World Source Force is in place. Time and frequency are synchronized. Start--Time Rewind!"
Ian grasped Void with both hands, and the entire laboratory was filled with the dazzling stream of causal light. However, the miraculous scene of material reorganization and metal recovery that was supposed to occur did not happen. As the light dissipated, the pile of ruins still lay there quietly, and the damaged sections did not even show the slightest sign of healing.
Ian was stunned in place. This was the first time that he encountered such a complete spell failure after mastering the top time Authority.
'Is the difficulty of going back in time in Void really so different from that in a low-dimensional universe like Shinobi World?' Ian quickly analyzed in Sea of Consciousness.
According to common sense, if Void is extremely resistant to time, he may need to rewind the time scale thousands or even millions of years ago to offset this plane-level correction.
'No, this doesn't feel right. My senses tell me that the problem is not the magnitude of the energy.' Ian's keen intuition sounded a sharp alarm. As a grand master in the time domain, he sensed some deeper and more disturbing sense of violation. In order to rule out chance, he continued to cast several time spells with different principles, and even used small-scale Time Stop and acceleration. However, the results were without exception, and all feedback pointed to one word - futility.
'This can't be... what happened?'
This situation of being out of control made Ian feel unprecedented pressure. For him, repairing the city itself is not difficult. He has many alternatives and can even directly rebuild it with resources.
But this phenomenon of "Truth failure" is as terrifying as a physicist discovering that gravity suddenly disappears. If the underlying theoretical support behind this is not understood, his Dao Heart may even have cracks as a result.
Ian enables Morgana to enable the highest level of environmental monitoring.
'Could it be that the remaining Void Energy is interfering with the ripples of time and space?' This was the first hypothesis that came to Ian's mind. After all, Void Energy has the ability to assimilate all things. Perhaps when it destroyed the city, it also erased the "imprint" of the object on the timeline?
Ian frowned and conducted several rounds of extremely precise and high-precision cross-testing on this hypothesis. He used micro clones to cast spells in an environment full of Void Energy, and monitored the data feedback in real time.
Unfortunately, the experimental data ruthlessly overturned his conjecture: although Void Energy would interfere with spell casting, it was by no means enough to completely render Time Rewind ineffective.
Time passed minute by second in the dead laboratory, and Ian's brain had entered an unprecedented overload operation mode. Tens of thousands of calculations were going crazy Blink in his golden pupils.
Finally, after several hours of deathly silence, Ian's eyes suddenly erupted with a terrifying brilliance that could see through the manuscripts of all things.
'Wait... what if time has not expired, but the city itself has refused to be repaired?'
An extremely bold and crazy idea took shape in his mind. It involved the uniqueness of "Ninth Tier existence" on the causal level, and the extremely secret and irreversible law imprinting produced by Void on high-end artifacts.
'Could it be that...'
Ian stared closely at the pile of ruins, and a smile that was both excited and trembling suddenly appeared at the corner of his mouth. He knew that he had touched the ultimate secret about the nature of higher-level existence that had been shrouded above Arcanist Civilization's head.