Chapter 493: Falling Leaves
After walking for who knows how long, the stone path began to show changes.
At first, it was just subtle differences.
The gaps between a few slabs were slightly wider, the edges no longer so smooth, as if some force had pried them apart. Taking a few more steps forward, cracks began to appear on the stone surfaces—not the uniform, fine crazing of age and weathering, but as if someone had punched upward from underground with immense force, the impact bursting through the stone layers.
Su Ming’s pace slowed.
Shadow instinctively folded its wings, shrinking against his shoulder.
The stone slab sections on both sides of the crack were scorched black.
Su Ming walked to the edge of the crack and stopped, carefully examining the entire shape of the fracture.
The crack wasn’t long, only about two zhang. It started from the edge of a tree root on the left and ended beside a raised greenstone on the right. But the charred cross-section was unnaturally deep, a heavy, dark hue, as if something had been burned through by an unknown force in an extremely short time.
Faint traces of runes remained on the fractured surface of the slab.
Those runes were already deformed—twisted, broken, tangled together like a crumpled ball of silk thread, the directions no longer discernible.
Su Ming crouched down.
He reached out, his fingertips lightly touching the edge of the fracture.
The stone surface was slightly cool, colder than the rest.
No spiritual energy fluctuation.
No reaction from any prohibitive runes either.
But the moment his fingertip pressed against it, an indescribable feeling surged up from the depths of his heart.
Not fear.
Not alertness.
But… pain.
A dull, deep ache, as if it were seeping out of the stone itself.
It wasn’t his pain.
He was certain of it.
This thought came without reason, yet Su Ming just knew—this broken stone slab beneath his hand, like all the other intact slabs on the path, had once silently and quietly borne someone’s footsteps.
It had complete runes, a stable flow of spiritual energy, and had breathed slowly under the support of the earth vein’s main trunk.
Until that moment, when something shattered that peace.
Su Ming’s fingertips moved slowly across the fractured surface.
The stone debris along the crack’s edge had weathered very thin; a light touch made it crumble and fall. He didn’t use spiritual energy to forcefully probe the internal structure, only using his hand to feel those distorted remains of the runes.
What had they once looked like?
Su Ming didn’t know.
But he could feel that the way those runes broke wasn’t caused by external force.
It wasn’t something striking in from the outside.
It was an explosion from within.
“Master.”
He didn’t turn around, his voice very soft.
The Consciousness Sea was silent for a moment.
Lin Yu drifted out.
His soul body hovered above the crack, his gaze falling on those charred fractured sections.
Su Ming thought he would be like before—silent first, then guiding, letting him slowly understand on his own. But this time, Lin Yu didn’t stay silent for long.
“Spiritual energy backlash.”
Four words, crisp and decisive.
Su Ming looked up at him.
Lin Yu’s expression didn’t show any obvious change, but Su Ming had been with him long enough to read something else beneath that unnatural calm.
“The person who created this path back then—” Lin Yu’s voice slowed down, “was deducing something here.”
He paused.
“The deduction failed.”
Su Ming lowered his head to look at the fractured section beneath his hand, silent for two breaths.
“Spiritual energy backlash… could blow up the path like this?”
“It wasn’t ordinary spiritual energy.” Lin Yu’s soul body slowly descended, floating beside the crack, almost touching the fractured surface. “Look closely at these runes. They weren’t torn apart by external force—they burst from within. This path itself is a formation, and the spiritual energy flowing within it went wrong, exploding along the veins—like a riverbank bursting, but the water didn’t flood in from outside; the bank itself cracked open.”
Su Ming lowered his head, re-examining the fractured surface.
Following Lin Yu’s description, those twisted remnants of the runes indeed didn’t look like they had been “smashed,” but rather “blown apart from the inside.” The direction of the runes should have been smooth and continuous, but at a certain node, they suddenly deviated, like a string stretched to its limit that snapped abruptly, the two ends flying off in opposite directions, never to be rejoined.
He suddenly understood where that “pain” came from.
This path had wounded itself.
It wasn’t hit by someone, wasn’t destroyed by an external enemy—it was that the person walking on this path, at some point, pushed what he poured into it too hard, moved too hastily, exceeding the limit the path itself could bear.
So the path cracked.
And that person?
Su Ming didn’t ask out loud.
Because the answer was obvious—a person ten thousand years ago, long gone. All that remained was this wound.
He withdrew his hand and stood up.
Shadow tilted its head, watching him for a while, then flew down from his shoulder.
The little one landed on a pile of fallen leaves beside the cracked area, lowered its head to sniff, then looked up at Su Ming again, as if confirming its master was unharmed. Then it burrowed into the leaf pile, fluttered a bit, and popped out from the other side, a dead leaf clamped in its beak.
It flapped its wings and flew to Su Ming, then opened its beak.
The dead leaf drifted down from midair.
Su Ming didn’t pay it much attention at first.
But as the leaf fell halfway, his gaze suddenly froze.
That leaf didn’t drop straight down.
Nor did it wobble left and right in the wind like ordinary fallen leaves.
During its descent, it followed an arc.
Very gentle, very soft, very… regular.
As if an invisible thread was guiding it, not pulling it, but leading it—from the upper left to the lower right, tracing an extremely shallow curve, before slowly drifting to the ground.
Su Ming stared at that leaf, motionless for a long time.
Seeing that he wasn’t responding, Shadow picked up another leaf and flew up, letting it go.
The second leaf fell.
This time, Su Ming watched more closely.
An arc.
Almost identical to the first leaf’s arc.
The direction, curvature, and speed were all very similar.
It wasn’t random.
Su Ming bent down, picked up a dead leaf from the ground himself, raised it to eyebrow height, and let go.
The leaf drifted down.
The same arc.
He picked up another leaf, moved to a different spot, and let go.
This time, the arc’s direction changed.
Not from left to right, but from the upper right to the lower left. The curvature was also slightly different, gentler. But it was still regular, predictable—definitely not random wind.
Su Ming stood still, a light slowly dawning in his eyes.
He began testing repeatedly around the cracked area.
With each step, he picked up a leaf, raised it high, let it go, and observed its drifting direction.
The third leaf: veered left.
The fourth: fell almost straight.
The fifth: clearly spiraled right.
The sixth…
Su Ming suddenly crouched down.
He connected the trajectories of the recent falling leaves in his mind.
Those arcs weren’t isolated.
When pieced together, they formed an invisible river—flowing in from somewhere on the left side of the path, passing beneath the stone slabs, and flowing out from somewhere on the right. The falling path of each leaf was marking the direction of that “river.”
But there was no wind here.
At least, no wind he could feel.
Su Ming slowly stood up, taking a deep breath.
It wasn’t wind.
It was spiritual energy.
It was the spiritual energy permeating this forest, flowing along some unseen veins. When the leaves fell, they were drawn by the flow of spiritual energy, thus following those arcs.