Immortality Begins With Internal Breathing

Lin Zheyu let out a long breath, suppressing the shock in his heart as he stepped onto the Path to Heaven. Such an opportunity was rare, so he could not afford to waste any time. The value of this Path to Heaven was far greater than he had imagined. The formations and restrictions along it progressed step by step, ranging from first-tier formations all the way to fifth-tier formations.

After entering the Path to Heaven, anyone who wished to continue climbing had to analyze and break formations constantly. During this process, only the power of the Formation Dao was permitted. One could rely on their understanding of the Formation Dao to identify flaws within a formation and unravel it, or set up a targeted formation of their own to break it. These were the only two methods available.

The corners of Lin Zheyu's lips curved upward, a faint trace of excitement appearing on his face. "What an interesting way to conduct a trial... I can't rely on my strength and can only use methods of the Formation Dao to analyze and break the formations. This really is going to be quite difficult for me."

When Lin Zheyu studied the Formation Dao, he mainly relied on his spiritual Heavenly Eye to comprehend the Great Dao laws contained within formations. He would then integrate the methods by which Great Dao patterns leveraged the power of those laws into his divine patterns, transforming them into part of the power of his divine patterns.

As for actually setting up formations himself, Lin Zheyu had only experimented with some basic ones, all ordinary first-tier and second-tier formations.

His knowledge of the Formation Dao had come from Wu Di. The inheritance of the Formation Dao that Wu Di had received was neither complete nor systematic. It was more like something pieced together through unorthodox means. Wu Di was only proficient in a limited number of formations, and in many respects, he was actually inferior to Lin Zheyu.

By contrast, the sheer number of formations and restrictions on the Path to Heaven was astonishing. The dazzling variety before him covered almost every type of formation across the different tiers.

"What a wonderful place! With so many formations and restrictions arranged progressively to guide one's learning, anyone with enough latent potential and natural talent could practically teach themselves the Formation Dao here!" Lin Zheyu could not help exclaiming.

The thought flashed through his mind, and he quickly calmed himself, focused his thoughts, and cast aside all distractions before beginning to study the formations and restrictions on the Path to Heaven. Although he already had a foundation in comprehending the Formation Dao, this was Lin Zheyu's first time relying purely on the power of the Formation Dao to analyze and break formations. Moreover, because he knew too few types of formations, his progress was extremely slow at first.

"Minor Three Powers Formation... Grand Three Powers Formation... Earth Dragon Formation..." Lin Zheyu carefully observed the formations around him.

The formations in the outer section were all at the Qi Refining realm level. They were extremely crude and very weak. With the help of his spiritual Heavenly Eye, Lin Zheyu could spot their flaws at a glance, and more than a hundred ways to unravel them immediately surfaced in his mind. However, what he wanted was not merely to break the formations. He wanted to use the process of breaking them to learn the Formation Dao systematically.

The formations and restrictions along the Path to Heaven had been arranged in a very deliberate sequence. After mastering the formations encountered earlier, one could make slight modifications to them and use those variations to break the formations that came afterward. In this way, one could gradually gain a deeper understanding of the transformations and mysteries of formations.

"Uh, is this a Cleaning Formation used to keep courtyards neat? Why do they even have this kind of everyday-use formation here...?" Lin Zheyu muttered.

He did not look down on it simply because it was an everyday-use formation. The fact that such a formation appeared on the Path to Heaven meant that it had value of its own. Lin Zheyu overlooked nothing. Whenever a formation or restriction appeared, he patiently studied it until he understood it thoroughly. Quite often, an apparently useless everyday-use formation he had just finished comprehending would contain a crucial principle needed to break one of the formations farther ahead.

Time slowly passed. One cultivator after another walked past Lin Zheyu, leaving him far behind. The Pan Sisters finally reached the five-thousand-meter mark as well. Reaching this point was equivalent to possessing mid third-tier methods of the Formation Dao. Considering that the two had only recently advanced to the Golden Core realm, possessing such mastery of formations was enough to mark their natural talent and aptitude as truly exceptional.

At the foot of the Forbidden Mountain, a cultivator pointed toward Lin Zheyu and laughed. "Look, it's been two days, and that fellow still hasn't made it a hundred meters. Even with talent like that, he still came to the Forbidden Mountain to join in the excitement."

The woman beside the cultivator shot him a sidelong glance and said calmly, "Xingzhi, don't be rude."

"It's not like I'm wrong. The first time I came here, I made it two hundred meters in less than half a day," the man muttered, unconvinced.

He secretly glanced at the woman beside him. Seeing her staring coldly at him, he hurriedly shut his mouth. Even though he stopped talking, many other cultivators outside the Path to Heaven had also noticed Lin Zheyu. After all, a martial artist stood out far too much among immortal cultivators. Of all the cultivators climbing the Path to Heaven, Lin Zheyu was the only martial artist.

"Haha, that Xiao Yu isn't anything special after all! I heard he opened the three great divine repositories and awakened a special spirit divine ability. I thought it might be a divine ability that helped with comprehending the Formation Dao, which was why he came to climb the Path to Heaven. But it's already been two days, and he hasn't even made it a hundred meters. Looks like his spirit divine ability isn't much help when it comes to comprehending formations." A burly man laughed as he spoke to his companion. They were martial artists from the ancient, esteemed martial families who had deliberately rushed over after hearing that Lin Zheyu had entered the Path to Heaven.

"Then should we think of a way to interfere with him?" another man asked.

The burly man glanced at the fool and sneered. "Interfere with him, my ass! This is the Forbidden Mountain, the natal treasure of that Wei Family senior. If you have a death wish, then go ahead."

Another man shook his head, no longer interested in watching Lin Zheyu climb the Path to Heaven. "Let's go. He's nothing special after all."

***

At the five-thousand-meter mark of the Path to Heaven, Pan Xinyu broke through a formation and stopped to catch her breath. She curiously glanced down and saw that Lin Zheyu was still lingering around the two-hundred-meter mark. There was not the slightest surprise in her eyes. If Lin Zheyu had been advancing quickly, that would have truly surprised her.

After resting for a while, Pan Xinyu lowered her head and resumed studying the formation, pondering how to break it. She no longer paid any attention to Lin Zheyu below. Lin Zheyu, meanwhile, had already become completely immersed in the vast sea of the Formation Dao laid out before him.

The formations and restrictions set along the Path to Heaven were all classic, representative examples of widely used formation types. By continuously analyzing and breaking them, Lin Zheyu gradually began building a relatively systematic body of knowledge on the Formation Dao.

Establishing such a system and accumulating a firm grasp of the fundamentals was painfully slow in the beginning. This was not something that could be rushed. As the saying went, if the foundation were unstable, everything built upon it would collapse. If he wanted to go farther on the path of formations, he first needed to lay the most solid foundation possible.

Day after day passed. In the blink of an eye, more than half a month had gone by, yet Lin Zheyu had climbed less than a thousand meters. The formations and restrictions within the first two thousand meters were all first-tier formations and were very easy to break. For Golden Core realm cultivators, they posed no difficulty whatsoever.

Yet more than half a month had passed, and Lin Zheyu still had not crossed the thousand-meter mark. His snail-like climbing speed, combined with his unusual identity as a martial artist, made him exceptionally conspicuous among those climbing the Path to Heaven. Nearly every cultivator there had noticed this peculiar outlier.