Wizard: I Have a Cultivation System

The instant the tip of the bare foot, its nails painted black, brushed against his side, Murphy first felt the soft, slightly cool touch of the sole, mingled with a faint scent different from the office’s incense.

Immediately after, an invisible force pushed him, sending his body irresistibly into the Otherworld passage.

There was little to describe about the process of crossing worlds.

If one had to use an analogy, it was perhaps like taking a short nap in a smoothly moving train car, only to wake up at the next station to find the scenery outside had quietly changed.

The bizarre, grotesque scenery he had expected of the Nightmare World did not appear.

What greeted his eyes was a refreshing, even picturesque landscape of beautiful mountains and clear waters.

Murphy stood on a gentle, grassy slope.

Beneath his feet was soft, thick grass, damp with dew. The blades were a vibrant, dewy green, dotted here and there with nameless wildflowers.

The air was incredibly fresh, carrying the distinct, damp fragrance of earth and plants—a stark contrast to the suffocating stench of the sewer and the foul passage from before.

Not far down the slope, a crystal-clear stream wound its way through the land. The sound of its babbling water was gentle, its surface glittering in the sunlight.

On the far side of the stream were rolling hills covered in a dense forest. The trees were tall and their branches lush, creating layers of different shades of green that stretched to the horizon, meeting a sky as blue as if it had been washed clean.

A few fluffy white clouds drifted leisurely across the sky. The sunlight was warm but not scorching, and it brought a gentle warmth as it fell upon him.

A gentle breeze swept by, carrying the breath of the forest and the faint sound of birdsong in the distance.

Everything seemed so peaceful, normal, and beautiful.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with the word "Nightmare."

[Retrieving map of host’s surrounding area]

[Retrieval complete.]

[Host’s current coordinates retrieved: Celestial Demon Realm]

"Celestial Demon Realm?"

Murphy murmured to himself.

Suddenly, he snapped his head up, his dark, profound eyes gazing toward the sky of this picturesque world.

It was gone.

The net.

In Murphy’s spiritual perception, the great net—the one woven from unobservable matter that was omnipresent and all-pervasive in the New Realm—had vanished.

And with it, its functions of information transmission and surveillance were gone as well.

’Could it be?’

A flicker of emotion passed through Murphy’s eyes.

With almost no hesitation.

The instant he confirmed the net was gone.

He immediately raised his right hand, fingers held together like a blade. Their tips glimmered with an extremely condensed mote of Dark Gold light.

Then, he aimed his hand at the very center of his brow.

Without hesitation, he thrust it forward.

His hand, along with half of his forearm, sank into his own forehead as if passing through water, meeting no resistance at all!

Murphy’s face showed no sign of pain or any other unusual expression.

It was as natural as breathing.

A moment later.

He slowly withdrew his hand from his brow.

In his palm rested a faint point of light, which he had carefully extracted from within his own skull.

It was a round object, about the size of a walnut.

It was a deep, silvery white, and at its core, complex patterns of light—intertwining Crimson and silver-white—flickered on and off.

This was the core of the Mind Furnace.

During the final showdown with the Ironspine Duke in the Old Realm, his true consciousness had almost completely dissipated from forcefully attempting to form a Golden Core and withstanding the subsequent Dao Transformation.

His sense of self could no longer be maintained; the continuity that anchored his identity had been shattered by the wash of Dao Rhyme.

Just as his consciousness was about to fade into nothingness, the Mind Furnace had activated its emergency protocols, following the preset "Cognitive Highest Anchoring Protocol." It seized control of his remaining body, wrung out the last of his Origin, and unleashed the decisive, tide-turning blow.

In a way, at that moment, the Mind Furnace was no longer just a Dharma Artifact.

It had preserved the vast majority of Murphy’s memories, thought patterns, and logical decision-making chains, all of which he was rapidly losing to the Dao Transformation.

This information, which should have dissolved back into primordial chaos along with his consciousness, was forcibly preserved by the furnace in the form of data encoding.

One could say that, at that moment, the Mind Furnace had temporarily become the vessel for Murphy’s personality.

Of course, Murphy knew that this replica would inevitably have major flaws.

It was built based on his past eleven years of research and preset models, capable only of processing problems within known logical frameworks and executing pre-programmed commands.

But the things that truly made "Murphy" a unique individual.

Things like sudden flashes of inspiration, intuition that transcended logic, the irrational perseverance that emerged under extreme pressure, and choices driven purely by emotion.

With his technical capabilities at the time, these decisive variables were impossible for him to crack, and thus were never recorded by the model.

But the Murphy of that time—or rather, the version of him that left behind one final obsession before completely dissipating—didn’t care in the slightest.

Whether his self was continuous, whether it was complete, even whether the model carrying his memories and logic could still be considered "Murphy"...

...none of it mattered.

He had already gambled everything to kill the Ironspine Duke.

Even if he would no longer be himself.

As long as the Old Realm was free from the Ironspine Duke’s interference, it was all worth it.

Moreover, he believed the version of him sent to the New Realm, in the distant future—if he ever made it there—

could perhaps achieve the status of an Immortal and reverse everything.

Even if that Immortal was no longer him.

That Immortal might even sever his past self and send that old body back to its place in the past, drifting along the river of time.

However, a miracle occurred at the very last moment.

The "Withered Heart," sent with the combined, desperate effort of Margaret, Othilia, and Noe VII, caught up to his main body as it was being flung into the New Realm.