The advancement process had been so seamless that Jie Ming faced no undue complications.
Without hesitation, he reached for the vial of potion originally prepared for his breakthrough, uncorked it, and drank it in one gulp!
Boom—!
The immense medicinal power instantly dispersed within his body, like a torrential flood breaching a dam, surging through his limbs and bones.
An ordinary cultivator, freshly advanced, would likely scramble to guide and refine this energy to avoid being overwhelmed by its potency.
But Jie Ming let the flood run free, allowing it to be voraciously consumed by the insatiable suction from his lower dantian, like a bottomless abyss!
The medicinal power was efficiently transformed by his body into pure spiritual energy, which was then drawn unceasingly into his dantian, pouring into the slowly rotating Golden Core.
Through some mystical mechanism, it surged into the rapidly expanding inner space within him!
This process continued for a long time until the potion—potent enough to stabilize an ordinary Golden Core cultivator’s realm with energy to spare—was completely absorbed, and the terrifying suction in his lower dantian gradually subsided.
Jie Ming eagerly directed his consciousness into his inner space.“This is…!”
Even with his mental preparation, he was stunned by the sight before him.
The originally room-sized, hazy gray space had undergone a world-shaking transformation!
Its boundaries had expanded dramatically in all directions, vast enough to easily encompass a small village.
Most astonishing was the top of the space, no longer a chaotic void but showing faint signs of clear and turbid separation.
Though still barren, it carried the embryonic sense of a “vast sky and faint clouds.”
The lower part of the space also gained a newfound “solidity” it had never possessed before.
Undoubtedly, if this evolution continued, this inner space would become a true, tangible world!
“I never expected the expansion to be this immense!” Jie Ming’s face brimmed with irrepressible joy.
This harvest far exceeded his expectations.
And the changes brought by the Golden Core Realm went far beyond this.
Calming his mind, Jie Ming sensed an all-encompassing enhancement of his essence, qi, and spirit. His five senses sharpened, his thought processes accelerated, and his physical strength and recovery surged dramatically.
Moreover, the true essence of the Foundation Establishment stage had fully transformed into a higher-tier power, one closer to the essence of the laws of heaven and earth.
Whether casting spells, refining treasures, or inscribing talismans, both effect and efficiency would see significant improvements.
“At this stage, it can no longer be called true essence—it should be called ‘spiritual energy,’” he noted.
But the most critical change was the increase in lifespan!
Normally, due to the modifications of the wizard system, Jie Ming didn’t pay much heed to lifespan changes.
Yet the lifespan extension in the Golden Core Realm far surpassed his expectations.
The Qi Refinement stage granted a lifespan of 180 years, Foundation Establishment 800.
But the Golden Core Realm… according to the records in the Great Dao Book Pavilion, the longest-lived Golden Core cultivator in documented cultivation history had lived for 1.12 million years!
Their ultimate cause of death was the natural decay of the soul to an extreme degree, beyond the reach of any soul-prolonging treasures, not the decay of the physical body.
In other words, once the Golden Core was achieved, the body theoretically attained immortality.
The limit of lifespan then depended on the soul’s longevity!
And the soul’s longevity hinged on the strength of one’s will and the soul-enhancing treasures or pills consumed.
After thoroughly examining his revitalized state, Jie Ming rose with satisfaction, a newfound sense of power and control flooding his heart.
Suppressing his excitement, he rushed into the laboratory like a gust of wind.
For the next few months, the laboratory blazed with light, resonating with various energy fluctuations and strange humming sounds.
Jie Ming immersed himself in a sea of knowledge and the passion of creation.
Drawing on his new understanding of energy control in the Golden Core Realm, he began refining and innovating his runic wizard artifacts.
These runic wizard artifacts were his unique weapon system, blending the wizard’s “knowledge as a lever for power” with the cultivator’s “using one’s own strength to harness the external forces of heaven and earth.”
During the Qi Refinement and Foundation Establishment stages, limited by the scale of external forces he could draw upon, the runic wizard artifacts excelled in release speed and continuity, forming a barrage-like suppression mode akin to the “Great Radiance.”
But their single-attack destructive power was limited, often requiring additional energy due to high consumption.
Now, everything had changed!
In the Golden Core Realm, Jie Ming’s ability to sense and manipulate the energy of heaven and earth had undergone a qualitative leap.
He could finally integrate the characteristic of “harnessing external forces” more deeply into the destructive core of his runic wizard artifacts!
Months later, Jie Ming held a newly crafted runic wizard artifact, thumb-sized yet exponentially more complex, its structure gleaming like pure crystal. He stood before a desolate mountain range in the Infernal Sulfur Plane, filled with hard metallic ore.
“Let’s… test its effects.”
With a slight thought, he activated the basic function of the new runic wizard artifact.
Swish…
A seemingly unremarkable energy projectile, the size of a fist, shot from the artifact’s tip.
It silently sliced through the air, striking a nearly thousand-meter-high mountain of high-density metallic ore.
The next second…
BOOM!!!
A deafening roar echoed as the heavens and earth dimmed!
A blinding, indescribably terrifying orb of light erupted, instantly expanding and engulfing the upper half of the mountain!
A earth-shaking shockwave followed, spreading in a ring, with visible airwaves rolling outward like a tangible tsunami!
This was no mere explosion or collapse.
Under Jie Ming’s solemn gaze, the upper half of the struck mountain was as if erased by an invisible giant hand, vaporized and annihilated in the searing white light!
The ground below the explosion’s epicenter, with rock layers containing over seventy percent metal, was peeled apart and shredded like fragile biscuits.
Tons of metallic fragments and molten magma were hurled thousands of meters into the sky, then crashed down like a apocalyptic meteor shower!
Smoke and dust billowed, the rumbling deafening, as if doomsday had descended.
Jie Ming hovered in midair, enveloped in a faint protective shield that deflected the incoming shockwaves and debris.
Gazing at the utterly transformed terrain and the massive crater—dozens of meters deep and over a kilometer wide—his eyes gleamed with radiant brilliance.
“It worked!” he murmured, his voice tinged with irrepressible excitement.
Amplified by drawing upon greater elemental forces, this strike’s power had surpassed the scope of a second-level wizard, firmly reaching the destructive tier of third-level wizardry!
This meant that a single strike from him now possessed the terrifying power to obliterate an entire city!