Chapter 499: Runes
"You can see the first layer now."
Lin Yu's voice suddenly sounded.
Su Ming's steps paused slightly.
Since they left the mist zone, Master had been unusually quiet. It wasn't the deliberate solemnity he sometimes put on, it was real thinking. Su Ming could feel that the experience inside that thick fog—especially the shadow of that Void Formation—had impacted Lin Yu, possibly even more than it had affected Su Ming himself.
"The deeper you go, the more layers there are."
Lin Yu's soul body drifted out of the ring.
He hovered beside Su Ming, his gaze falling on the ancient tree they had just passed. His face wore that same indifferent expression, but there was something in his eyes Su Ming rarely saw.
Weight.
A heaviness that had reached the bottom.
"I can see more than you can."
Lin Yu said this with a calm tone.
Not bragging, not lecturing, merely stating. Like someone who had walked far telling a young traveler at the start of the road: the path ahead is longer than what you can see now.
Su Ming looked at him. "Which layer can you see?"
Lin Yu did not answer.
Su Ming did not press.
He had gotten used to it.
What Master didn't say was either something he hadn't fully understood yet, or something that saying aloud wouldn't help—it's not that Su Ming couldn't comprehend it, it's that some things must be reached on your own. Force-feeding them would only split the foundation.
They continued walking in silence.
Lin Yu drifted behind him, the sheen of his soul body flickering in the mist. What he didn't say was—those layered formation lines were more than mere patterns in his eyes. They were a system.
Each layer was not independent.
There were correspondences between the first and second layers, continuations between the second and third, conductions from the third to deeper layers. They resembled a real tree—roots, trunk, branches, leaves—each with its role yet sharing the same vascular system.
And those isolated rune fragments, the pieces he had dug out over five hundred years from ruined tomes—the thirty-seven variants of "Lock," the twelve trajectories of "Flow," the connection between "Solidify" and "Balance" that he had never been able to bridge—on this path were being slowly connected by a force he couldn't describe.
It wasn't him organizing them.
The path was stitching them together.
Those scattered beads were like being threaded by an invisible string. He didn't need to arrange them, didn't need to think "which bead goes after which." The road was doing it itself. He only needed to walk, to observe, to let himself sink into those lines.
A faint tremor stirred in Lin Yu's heart.
Not excitement.
A very deep, unspeakable steadiness.
Suddenly, a light chirp came from ahead.
"Chirp!"
Shadow leaped off Su Ming's shoulder.
It flapped its wings and darted forward, bouncing twice on the stone path like a black fluff ball, landing on a slab five or six steps ahead. Then it lowered its head and began clawing at the dirt lodged in the slab's seams.
Su Ming looked up.
Shadow chirped again, more urgently.
Its claws dug nonstop into the seam, throwing out bits of leaf and damp soil. The little creature's movements weren't playful—its whole body was taut, its golden eyes locked onto something deep within the crack.
Su Ming walked over.
He crouched.
Shadow backed half a step but kept staring at that spot.
Su Ming looked down into the seam.
The soil and fragments of leaf had been cleared by Shadow to reveal the stone wall deep in the crack. Embedded in that stone wall was an object.
Very small.
About the size of a fingernail.
Hidden under soil and moss, it was nearly invisible. But Shadow's vision was keener than Su Ming's—it could see the thing giving off a very faint glow.
Su Ming reached out and gently brushed away the remaining dirt with his finger.
It was a shard.
Its material looked like a kind of stone, but much smoother than ordinary rock, edges rounded as if time had repeatedly polished it in the earth. The shard was gray-white, its surface carrying a very faint sheen, not harsh to the eyes, more like moonlight pressed into stone.
Something was carved on it.
Su Ming wiped the shard's surface with his sleeve and leaned in to look.
Half of a rune.
A rune he did not recognize.
To be precise, it was the upper half of a rune. The lower half was gone—the shard had broken at some long-forgotten time, the other half lost somewhere, leaving this stump embedded in the seam and buried by seasons of earth.
Su Ming stared at that half-rune for a long time.
Its stroke style differed from the three thousand six hundred basic runes he knew. Older, rougher, as if the carver had not used cultivators' usual spirit-engraving technique but a more primitive, single-stroke, hand-carved method. Yet within the surviving half-structure, there was a turning—a minute arc change—that felt vaguely familiar to Su Ming.
He thought for a while but couldn't place it.
"Master."
Lin Yu drifted over.
His soul body hovered beside Su Ming, gaze fixed on the shard.
Three breaths of silence.
"A lost variant of the Lead rune."
Lin Yu's voice was soft.
Su Ming looked up at him.
He knew the Lead rune. One of the three thousand six hundred basic runes, belonging to the "pulling, guiding" category. He had mastered the fundamental form of Lead and two common variants.
But "variant" and "variant" differed.
A basic variant made subtle adjustments on the original structure to change the traction strength or direction of spiritual energy. A "lost variant" implied—the modification method itself had been forgotten.
"Only half of it remains," Su Ming said quietly.
"Half is enough to see," Lin Yu stared at the shard and fell silent for a moment. "At least you can see its starting stroke and the intent of its ending. The core of this variant isn't about what it leads, but how it leads—it adds an extra cushioning to the arc turn compared to the current version, like telling the guided thing not to rush, take it slowly."
Su Ming didn't fully understand.
But he remembered.
He carefully pried the shard from the crack. The shard felt slightly cool, extremely light, almost weightless. He wiped it with his sleeve again and placed it inside the innermost compartment of his storage pouch, with the Soul-Nourishing Incense recipe and the longevity jade pendant.
Having done this, he stood.
Shadow hopped onto his shoulder, cocked its head, watched Su Ming tuck the shard away, then let out a triumphant chirp.
That chirp clearly carried the meaning: not bad, I found it.
Su Ming couldn't help but tap its forehead.
"Noted. You get credit."
Shadow ruffled its feathers, lifted its little head, and grew even prouder.
Su Ming resumed walking. Shadow took to the air, no longer perching on his shoulder, but fluttered to a stone slab one or two zhang ahead, peered down carefully, then flew to the next slab. Back and forth, it seemed to be earnestly scouting the path.
Every time it flew a bit, it would land and wait for Su Ming.
Su Ming followed; it flew ahead again.
Occasionally it chirped, as if to say, "This way is fine."
He watched the tiny black figure hopping across the slabs, a faint smile curving his lips. Since entering the secret realm, the little creature seemed to have matured a bit. Not in size—it still looked the same, a ball of black fluff—but in temperament. Where it once would pick fights with spirit beasts ten times its size, it now began to scout first.
Whether it had been frightened by the mist zone or subdued by those ancient trees, he didn't know.
The road was long.
Su Ming lifted his head and looked ahead.
The mist thinned, the trees grew larger. The runes on the stone slabs became denser.
The end of the road remained out of sight.
But he no longer cared about that end.
He simply walked.
Step by step.
Somewhere ahead, Shadow chirped again.
"Chirp—"
A clear, slightly boastful sound.
As if saying: come on, this slab is interesting too.