Free Web NovelSu Ming rubbed his numb wrist, but there was not a trace of discouragement in his eyes, only a bright flash of excitement.
Elder Qingquan’s words echoed in his ears: “You can contemplate the formation, it will benefit your current stage.”
If you can’t go through the gate, then strip what’s on the gate!
Su Ming stopped trying to probe the stone gate and instead walked to a flat boulder three zhang away, lifted his long robe, and sat cross-legged.
He fully projected his divine sense outward, no longer focusing on the surface-level ancient seal scripts, but instead observing, through the characters, the trajectories and nodes of the dark-golden spiritual energy flowing inside the gate.
Fifteen minutes later.
A smile tugged at the corner of Su Ming’s mouth.
Su Ming stared intently at the stone gate, “On the surface, these ancient seal scripts look chaotic and random. But if you strip them away and only look at the skeleton of the spiritual energy flows… this is an extremely ancient composite array, the Nine-Lock Linked Ring Formation.”
It was a terrifying structure that nested nine independent lock-type confinement arrays together through exquisitely interwoven nodes. Tug on one thread and the whole system responds; if one is forcibly broken, the other eight arrays multiply the backlash of destructive force.
“Even if I can’t enter, the structure of this formation itself is the perfect textbook.”
Without hesitation, Su Ming opened his storage pouch, flipped his wrist, and two jade slips dropped into his palm.
They were two core volumes from the long reading list Master Xuanheng had given him—Analysis of Ancient Runes and Three Thousand Questions on the Path of Formations.
Su Ming pressed the jade slips to his forehead, and the vast stream of information unfurled rapidly in his Consciousness Sea.
He lifted his head, comparing the obscure formation theory in the jade slips while staring fixedly at the formation lines flowing across the huge stone gate.
......
Time means nothing in cultivation, a single sit can lose track of autumn.
Deep within the Lantai Secret Garden, this rift valley seemed completely cut off from the world. Only the occasional drifting dead leaf testified to the passage of time.
Su Ming sat cross-legged on the boulder for a full five days, not moving an inch.
Aside from taking two fasting pills each day and a small piece of Silver-Spotted Heart-Clearing Orchid leaf to restore his divine sense, all of his mind and spirit were submerged in the massive Nine-Lock Linked Ring Formation before him.
His eyes were veined with fine bloodlines, his complexion a little pale from long-term divine sense exhaustion, but the light burning in those eyes was brighter and more frenzied than ever.
Within his current formation knowledge system, he had fully mastered about two hundred basic runes.
But those two hundred runes were mostly concentrated in major categories like Gathering, Control, Solidify, Flow, and Concealment. Their nature was gentle and supportive, like the Like Water Art he practiced, emphasizing tolerance and benefiting all without contention.
They could be used for defense, concealment, and directing earth veins, but they lacked an absolute kind of “dominion.”
The stone gate formation left by the Great Yan dynasty, however, contained core runes that were all high-level control types—Lock, Seal, Ban, Suppress.
They were two extremes that completely opposed each other.
On the first day, Su Ming tried to dismantle those control runes using his familiar doctrine of guiding and dispersing energy, and he got nothing but frustration. The dark-golden nodes marked with the Suppress character were like stones in a cesspit—hard and foul—refusing any probing of foreign spiritual energy and rudely rebuffing it.
On the second day, Su Ming fell into deep bewilderment.
He flipped through Analysis of Ancient Runes in his Consciousness Sea, which stated: “Suppress uses weight to oppress the light, substance to oppress the void, cutting off internal and external flow.”
A flash of inspiration struck his mind like lightning.
“Water cannot be compressed. When pressure reaches the extreme…”
“When water pressure is extreme, it can not only pierce steel but also form the most absolute lock! A ‘lock’ does not have to be iron chains; an extremely dense water flow barrier can also be a lock! A ‘seal’ does not have to be earth; a vacuum water belt that cuts off internal and external spiritual exchange can also be a seal!”
Su Ming closed his eyes and inhaled deeply the rift’s icy air.
On the third day.
He stopped trying to mimic the domineering trajectories of the dark-golden spiritual energy on the gate.
He raised his right hand, pressed his index and middle fingers together, and a drop of faint-blue liquid spiritual energy seeped from his fingertip.
This time, he did not use spiritual energy to forcibly etch the high-level rune representing “lock.” Instead, with his will, he compressed and stretched that droplet of water-attribute spiritual energy to the extreme, transforming it into an imperceptibly thin, taut water line.
He used the water line as ink and the Void as rune paper.
His fingertip moved through the air with extreme slowness.
With each stroke, the surrounding spiritual energy seemed to be forcibly drawn out by an invisible force, forming a tiny spiritual-energy vacuum band.
“Shi—”
When the final stroke fell, a lock character the size of a thumbnail, faintly blue, hovered quietly in front of Su Ming.
It did not have the arrogant, ostentatious dark-golden glow of the runes on the stone gate. It was calm and restrained, but the extreme tension contained within it made the surrounding space ripple faintly.
He had succeeded!
Su Ming did not stop; like a sponge parched to the limit suddenly thrown into an ocean of knowledge, he devoured it. He cross-referenced the obscure theories in Three Thousand Questions on the Path of Formations with the living formation structure on the stone gate in front of him.
On the fourth day, he decoded eight derivative variations of the Seal character.
On the fifth day, he fully understood the essential difference in law between Ban and Suppress.
The ink that had been rote-memorized in his mind transformed, in that moment, into living spiritual-energy trajectories, deeply imprinted into his muscle memory and the depths of his Consciousness Sea.
When the fifth day’s sunset cast its last orange glow into the rift valley,
the number of basic and high-level runes Su Ming had fully mastered surged from the initial two hundred and twenty-some to three hundred and twelve!
Nearly one hundred profound high-level runes added at once!
Such a leap would make the veteran formation masters at Formation Peak, those who had been buried in study for over a decade, spit blood with envy.
Su Ming slowly opened his eyes.
The bloodshot veins had completely faded from his gaze and were replaced by a clarity and depth that seemed to see through the essence of things.
He raised his hand and clenched the void.
No spiritual energy rippled outward, but three inches above his palm the air formed an absolutely motionless sphere. Even the fall of a speck of dust inside would be instantly suppressed, suspended in midair, unable to move an inch.
This was genuine comprehension, not rigid etching.
Su Ming stood up and exhaled a long, stale breath. He brushed the dust from his gray robe and returned the two jade slips to his storage pouch.
He raised his head and looked once more at the stone gate hiding countless treasures of past dynasties.
“Thank you.”
Su Ming whispered in his heart.
Then he turned decisively.
He did not glance back at the gate brimming with temptation.
He stepped forward with steady pace, followed the path he had come, and walked out of the deep rift valley. His silhouette disappeared into the dusk, leaving the stone gate, which had endured a thousand years, still standing silently in the cold wind.
