Chapter 351: Advancing Toward the Starry Sky

For a very long time afterward, Jie Ming embodied the phrase “frenzied studying” to its absolute extreme.

With his learning ability already far surpassing ordinary people, and the vast foundation of knowledge he had accumulated before, Jie Ming absorbed a truly staggering amount of genuine knowledge in this world.

This outrageous learning efficiency allowed him to progress along the academic path at a speed that could only be described as terrifying.

University courses that would normally take others several years to complete were conquered by him one after another with astonishing efficiency.

Theses, projects, examinations—every hurdle lay flat before him like a smooth, open road.

In the end, he finished his physics degree ahead of schedule with the highest honors in the entire school, his achievements dazzling.

He even attracted the attention of several senior professors on campus, who regarded him as a once-in-decades academic genius.

His “parents,” naturally, were “overjoyed beyond measure,” their faces blooming with flawless smiles of pride.

They held a celebration banquet for him and spoke all manner of encouraging and expectant words.

Yet those overly perfect reactions and emotional expressions now struck Jie Ming as a bone-deep falseness, a discomfort that crawled beneath his skin.

Especially as his experience in distinguishing “real people” grew, the flaws in his parents became ever more glaring in his eyes—like watching an intricately choreographed puppet show utterly devoid of soul.

Over these years, Jie Ming did not confine himself solely to the campus.

After nearly two years of effort, he took advantage of this highly advanced civilization’s convenient global transportation network and, in his spare time, visited almost every continent, every major city, and every natural wonder on the entire planet.

He personally confirmed with his own eyes that the planet beneath his feet was real and solid.

Its physical scale, geological structure, ecosystem—all matched the characteristics of a normal life-bearing planets.

The tens of billions of human individuals living upon it were, for the most part, also real—flesh and blood, possessing independent lives and emotions, and absolutely not mere background filler.

Yet Jie Ming’s exploration went no deeper than that.

Beyond this, he discovered nothing.

Seeing the final deadline drawing ever closer, shortly after the graduation ceremony, Jie Ming presented a plan to his “parents.”

He intended to take an interstellar liner to the famous “Frontier Star”—a planet on the edge of human territory renowned for its unique interstellar port and burgeoning high-tech industries—for a “graduation trip” that doubled as “career exploration,” seeking inspiration and opportunities for his future path.

His “parents” agreed almost without hesitation, their faces wearing the same supportive smiles as always.

They swiftly prepared his luggage and booked his ticket; the entire process went so smoothly that Jie Ming could only sigh, once again confirming the falseness of his parents.

A few days later, Jie Ming stood upon the vast boarding bridge of the interstellar spaceport. He turned back for one last glance at the familiar azure planet behind him.

Then he turned around and stepped into the interstellar passenger liner “Voyager,” a vessel that resembled a gigantic silver whale.

The interior of the ship was far more spacious than its exterior suggested, employing mature space-expansion technology.

The passengers came in all shapes and forms, though the majority were human.

Some wore suits and ties—businesspeople on work trips; some traveled with children—families visiting relatives or sightseeing; and some, like him, were young scholars brimming with curiosity.

They chatted, read, admired the view outside the portholes, completely immersed in their own lives.

Jie Ming found his cabin and waited in silence for departure.

When the ship launched, he felt almost no vibration—only the port facilities rapidly receding outside the window and the gradual replacement of the view by the profound darkness of space, announcing that they were leaving planetary gravity at an unimaginable velocity.

Once the ship stabilized, Jie Ming began carefully examining the cabin facilities, the screens displaying navigation data, and even the visible portions of the engine structure through certain observation windows.

Comparing the knowledge he had acquired over these past years with everything he already knew, Jie Ming quickly recognized that the technological tree employed by this vessel was completely different from the elemental rune technology he was familiar with.

It also diverged from the classical physics and relativistic technological path of Earth in his previous life.

Instead, it emphasized gravitational manipulation, spatial folding, and some special, highly efficient principles of matter-energy conversion.

Though it differed considerably from the elemental system, it was complete in itself—logically rigorous and highly self-consistent.

The long interstellar voyage lasted several months.

Most of that time, Jie Ming wandered every corner of the ship, using its equipment to verify the knowledge he had learned.

Occasionally he would visit the observation deck and gaze silently into the boundless darkness beyond the window.

The visual effects of cross-space travel were bizarre and phantasmagoric, like swimming through rivers of color.

Along the way, the ship docked at the ports of other planets.

Whenever it paused for a few days of resupply, Jie Ming would disembark and explore those worlds.

This journey carried him across several human-colonized planets—from bustling commercial hubs to remote mining worlds.

He stood in the deserts of alien planets, feeling the strange interplay of light and shadow beneath binary star systems and the dry, biting wind; he dove into planets covered entirely by global oceans, observing architecture and lifestyles in deep-sea cities that differed vastly from those of the homeworld; he passed through asteroid belts and watched colossal industrial ships swallow mineral-rich rocks like whales feeding on krill.

With his own two feet he measured alien soil; with his own two eyes he verified the starlit sky.

In the end, Jie Ming confirmed: the star systems were not mere textures, the planets were not background props.

This excluded the possibility that the world was a “small-scale simulation” or a “planetary-level illusion.”

The true scope of this plane genuinely encompassed several—perhaps even dozens—of galaxy-sized galactic clusters!

This was a super-massive cosmic-type plane in the truest sense!

Standing atop the highest peak of an unfamiliar planet, gazing up at alien constellations that glittered across the heavens like shattered diamonds, Jie Ming felt none of a traveler’s romance—only a heavy solemnity before boundless unknowns.

Faced with this genuinely real and infinitely vast sea of stars, the existence capable of silently enveloping such an immense domain, suppressing nearly two million wizards along with their original cognition and power, and perfectly integrating them into the social operating rules beneath it—this power appeared all the more unfathomably deep and utterly terrifying.

It was like an invisible colossal net draped over every inch of space and every living being in this plane.

Yet this vastness and terror did not plunge Jie Ming into despair. On the contrary, it acted like a powerful sobering agent, completely washing away the very last trace of wishful thinking in his heart.

He drew a deep breath of the thin, frigid alien air, his gaze sharp as a blade.

No matter how powerful the existence behind the curtain might be—since it was “real,” it must inevitably possess “rules” and “logic” by which it operated.

And what Jie Ming needed to do was nothing other than a wizard’s true calling:

Observe, understand, and then… seize control!