Chapter 488: Entering the Secret Realm
"You saw it?" Lin Yu's voice dropped lower.
"Yeah." Su Ming said softly, "There's spiritual energy in this fog, and it's not seeping out—something is pulling it along."
Lin Yu was silent for two breaths before speaking. "We're probably eight-tenths of the way there. Be careful. Don't go probing recklessly with your divine sense. In places like this that have existed for ten thousand years, some things will turn around and look back at you the moment you stare at them."
Su Ming slowed his breathing even further, and the *Like Water Art* within him receded accordingly, leaving only the most basic layer circulating, allowing his own qi to align with the surrounding spiritual energy.
After about another half hour of walking, the mountain path suddenly came to an end.
The space ahead opened up abruptly.
Su Ming stepped out from under the trees, and the scene before him widened suddenly, even causing his breath to catch for a moment.
It was a cliff.
Beyond the cliff, a sea of clouds surged, a vast expanse of white. The distant peaks only revealed their blue-black outlines, like reefs submerged in the waves. Sunlight streamed down through the clouds, illuminating the entire sky and earth with dazzling brightness, yet it couldn't penetrate the gate in front of the cliff wall.
The stone gate was embedded in the mountain wall opposite the cliff.
It was about ten zhang high and nearly four zhang wide. The gate's surface was pitch black, but its edges had been worn gray by the passage of time. The door frame was covered in extremely dense formation lines, layer upon layer, like countless compressed rivers circling one another into the stone. Many areas had already blurred—some lines were broken, some missing, and some only left a shallow impression.
But even so, its weight was still intimidating enough to make people dare not stare too long.
What was truly striking wasn't those intricate formation lines.
It was the two characters above the door lintel.
Ancient Path.
The characters weren't large, but they were incredibly deep.
It was as if someone had stood here back then, raised their wrist, and written them in one smooth stroke, then let them endure the dust and frost of ten thousand years of wind and rain, yet not a single ounce of their essence was damaged.
Su Ming stood at the edge of the cliff, silent for a long time.
Wind swept up from below the cliff, rustling his sleeves and also ruffling the fine black feathers on Shadow's neck. The little one stared at the stone gate and surprisingly didn't make a sound, just fixed her eyes unblinkingly on those two characters.
"This place..."
In his Consciousness Sea, even Lin Yu rarely dropped his joking tone, his voice becoming soft. "There's really something to it."
Su Ming slowly let out a breath.
It wasn't that he hadn't seen large formations before.
He'd seen them at Iron Wall Pass, at Lantai Secret Garden, and had witnessed the methods of Xuanheng and Qingquan.
But this gate before him was different.
It didn't feel like a pressure bearing down on him, nor like a surge of spiritual energy trying to force him to his knees. It simply stood there—quiet, ancient, even somewhat dilapidated—yet it naturally made people feel that behind the gate lay a very, very long stretch of time.
Long enough to wear a person down.
And long enough to reveal who they truly were.
Su Ming stood there for a good while before raising his hand and pulling the purple token from his sleeve.
As soon as the token appeared, the fog around the stone gate seemed to stir slightly.
Su Ming walked to the gate, but didn't activate it immediately. Instead, he slowly circled the stone gate once. Each step was extremely meticulous, his gaze sweeping over the broken points of the formation lines, the wear marks on the edges, the moss at the bottom of the gate that had almost grown into the rock wall.
His formation cultivator instinct made him unable to resist wanting to look, wanting to calculate, wanting to find some skeletal framework from these remnants.
But Xuanheng's words echoed in his mind at that moment.
*Don't seek speed. Don't seek the end. Don't seek to force a breakthrough.*
In the end, Su Ming suppressed that urge, silently committing those pattern distributions to memory, but not reaching out to touch them.
"What, not going to dismantle it?" Lin Yu asked deliberately.
"Holding back."
"What a man."
The corner of Su Ming's mouth twitched slightly, but he didn't respond to him.
After a moment, he stood back in the center, raised the token, and gently pressed it against the stone gate.
The moment the token got close, a purple light blazed brightly.
It wasn't the blinding kind of brightness, but a steady, layered glow that spread outward. It was like someone lighting a lamp in deep water, the light rising layer by layer from within.
The next instant, the formation lines on the stone gate lit up, one after another.
The outermost ring lit up first, then the second, third, fourth... Those traces that had slumbered for who knows how many years slowly awakened, as if roused by some long-lost key. The purple light flowed along the lines, and wherever it passed, stone chips fell rustling, as if countless dusty memories were opening their eyes at this moment together.
*BOOM—*
A deep, muffled sound, almost as if it came from deep underground, emerged from within the gate.
The stone gate began to move.
Not inward, not outward, but slowly splitting to both sides, sliding open along some extremely ancient trajectory inch by inch. The gate moved very slowly, and with every inch it shifted, the cliff wall and the ground beneath Su Ming's feet trembled slightly.
Shadow suddenly grabbed tightly at the fabric on Su Ming's shoulder.
Su Ming also unconsciously held his breath.
When the gate had opened wide enough for one person to pass through, it stopped.
Behind the gate, there was no palace hall, no mountain valley, no bright sky and earth illuminated by spiritual energy like in common secret realms.
There was only fog.
A dense fog, almost milky white.
That fog didn't roil, surge, or dissipate. It just hung there quietly, as if there was no world behind the gate at all, only a bottomless void.
Standing before the gate, Su Ming could clearly feel that behind him was still the wind, the sunlight, and the breath of the cliff's sea of clouds. But inside the gate, there was nothing—not even sound, as if it had all been swallowed up.
Su Ming turned his head and looked back.
The cliff, the sea of clouds, the sunlight, the mountain forest—they were all still there. The sun had shifted westward, and golden rays fell on the ancient trees at the cliff's edge, the leaf edges glowing brightly, like an ordinary afternoon in the mundane world.
He suddenly understood why Xuanheng had said that the Ancient Path was a road.
Because standing at this moment before the gate, you hadn't even entered yet, yet you already felt like you were standing at the junction of two lives.
On one side was the familiar sect, the master, the cave dwelling, the spiritual fields, the Sect Leader's white crane and all those annoying little troubles. On the other side was a road hidden in the fog, of unknown length, unknown scenery, unknown where it would lead.
Shadow let out a soft cry.
As if urging him on.
Lin Yu also spoke calmly from the ring. "Let's go. The gate's open. Are you going to stand here posing for half the day?"
Su Ming smiled.
"That's true."
He withdrew his gaze, hesitated no longer, and stepped forward.
One foot stepped into the fog.
In an instant, the sound of the wind, the sunlight, and the mountain air behind him were all erased as if by an invisible hand. The white mist surged in from all directions, brushing past his cheeks, his cuffs, his shoulders, completely swallowing him whole.
Shadow also dashed in after him, landing back on his shoulder.
Then, behind him came the sound of the stone gate closing, extremely slow and deep.