Chapter 498: Imitation
The Shadow suddenly stopped.
The line hung suspended in the void, faintly glowing, lasting for three or four breaths.
Then, one after another, the lines dimmed.
Like burnt-out embers, they began to crumble from the edges, silently turning into extremely fine specks of light that merged into the mist.
The Shadow was also dissipating.
It started from the feet, like a painting being erased from the bottom up. The hem of the robe vanished, the waist vanished, the arms vanished.
The last to disappear were the fingertips.
That finger, suspended in the void, seemed to bend slightly in its final moment.
As if to say: This is where it ends.
Then, there was nothing left.
The mist closed in again.
The world was reduced once more to only white within five steps.
Su Ming stood still.
He didn’t know how long he had been watching.
Maybe a long time. Maybe not. When that Shadow was there, time felt like it had been stretched into an extremely long thread, and he couldn’t tell how long that thread was.
He slowly raised his right hand.
His fingertips trembled slightly.
He tried to imitate.
In the void, he extended his index finger, following the trajectory of the Shadow’s movement from memory, gently swiping through the air.
Nothing happened.
His fingertip cut through the air, leaving no trace behind. No light, no line, not even a fluctuation of spiritual energy. The air was still air, the void still the void.
Su Ming withdrew his hand.
He wasn’t discouraged.
He just stood there for a moment, then tried a second time.
This time, he deliberately slowed his pace, recalling in his mind the brief pause the Shadow made before lowering its finger. His finger hovered in midair, paused for one breath, then descended.
Still nothing.
Su Ming put his hand down.
He didn’t try a third time.
Not because of frustration.
But because he suddenly realized something very clearly—that Shadow wasn’t trying to “teach” him.
It had simply “existed.”
It didn’t know someone was watching, and it didn’t care if anyone was watching. It did what it did because, at that moment, it had walked this path, stood in this mist, and then done what it was doing.
Like a drop of water falling into a river, not to tell the downstream rock, “This is the shape you should be worn into.”
It just fell.
Su Ming took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.
Then he stepped forward and continued walking.
The Shadow on his shoulder stirred slightly but still didn’t cry out.
Lin Yu floated behind him.
Silence.
Silence all the way.
But deep within his Consciousness Sea, everything he had just seen was now merging with every ancient formation text he had ever read. Those descriptions that were once just words—“void as paper,” “using the spirit as a brush,” “force following the principles of heaven”—now had images.
They were no longer just words.
They were the Shadow’s finger. They were the trail of light left in the air. They were that trajectory, precise down to the finest detail.
Lin Yu knew that his own understanding of the path of formations had, at this moment, moved toward “concreteness.”
He didn’t speak.
Because some things, even he needed time to digest.
The mist flowed silently beside the two of them.
Su Ming continued walking.
Step by step.
Extremely slow, extremely steady.
After who knew how much longer, the mist began to thin.
First, at his feet—the mist on the stone path receded first, revealing the old, weathered patterns. Then below his knees, then up to his waist. The mist retreated like a tide, layer by layer pulling back, growing thinner and lighter with each step.
The distant tree shadows reappeared.
First, the nearest one, its outline blurry, like a splash of ink wash painting. Then the second tree, the third. Color gradually returned.
Su Ming saw sunlight.
Just a single beam.
It leaked down from the dense canopy high above, slanting onto the stone path not far ahead, warming that small patch of ground slightly.
Su Ming paused for a step.
He stood at the edge where the mist had completely receded, raised his head, and watched the dust motes slowly drifting within that beam of light.
Su Ming continued forward.
After leaving the mist zone, he didn’t look back.
Not because he didn’t want to, but because the thick fog had already closed behind him, like a door silently shutting. The path ahead had returned to how it was before—the stone path underfoot, ancient trees on both sides, light beams slanting down from above, and only a very thin layer of mist hugging the ground, flowing slowly.
Everything seemed no different from the first few days of entering the secret realm.
But Su Ming knew it was different.
The way he walked had changed.
Before, when he traveled this path, he was more focused on “seeing”—observing the patterns on the stone path, the flow of spiritual energy, the structure of the formation lines on the ancient trees.
Now, he had begun to “listen” and “feel.”
Every few steps, he would extend his left hand, palm outward, sensing the extremely faint temperature differences in the air. Passing every tree, he would unconsciously slow his pace, letting his body lean closer to the trunk, using his skin to feel the tree’s aura—not at the level of spiritual energy, but the most primal temperature, humidity, even the extremely faint woody fragrance emanating from the bark.
These were things he wouldn’t have paid attention to before.
A cultivator has divine sense, spiritual energy sensing, and five senses far beyond ordinary people. Who would bother with the temperature difference on their palm?
But the mist zone had forced him back to that level.
And then he discovered that level held more than he had imagined.
He walked a long way further.
Su Ming didn’t bother calculating the days.
He had already learned not to count anymore. On this path, “how many days have passed” and “how far have I walked” were equally unreliable. All he knew was that the trees along the roadside were getting bigger, one after another.
Not just a little bigger.
It was the kind of progression you could see at a single glance.
Trees from a few days ago were thick enough for four or five people to wrap their arms around, reaching two or three hundred feet high. But the deeper he went, the thicker the trunks became. Later on, some ancient trees required seven or eight people to encircle, their canopies spreading out like giant umbrellas, blocking almost all the light from the sky above.
The patterns on the bark had also changed.
Su Ming stopped before a particularly massive ancient tree, leaned in to take a closer look. The formation lines on the bark were layered one on top of another, as if someone had drawn dozens of times on the same wall. The outermost layer could still be faintly distinguished, but when he looked deeper, the second layer was already entangled with the first, and the third layer had completely merged with the first two, making it impossible to tell which line belonged to which.
He reached out and touched it.
Hum.
The feedback was stronger than any tree he had encountered before.
Like a stone thrown into water, the first tree had made ripples that spread a foot before stopping, the second tree spread three feet. But this one—after the ripples sank, they seemed to continue going deeper, to a place beyond his perception.
Su Ming withdrew his hand.
He stared at those tangled patterns for a long time, then finally shook his head.
He couldn’t understand them.
Not completely—he could still roughly judge the trend of the outermost layer, which was similar in structure to the previous trees. But below the second layer, he was out of his depth. The way these patterns were superimposed exceeded his current level of comprehension.
After sitting before the Stone Tablet, he had learned one thing.
If you can’t understand it, don’t force it.
Just remember it first.
Su Ming silently committed this tree’s position and the characteristics of its outer layer patterns to memory, then turned and continued walking.