Chapter 494: Stay
Su Ming suddenly understood.
This forest wasn't static. Spiritual energy had always been flowing, but it moved too gently, too slowly, for human senses to detect at all. Yet the leaves could detect it.
Su Ming picked up another leaf and held it at different heights, feeling to see if something would gently nudge his fingertip. Nothing. The spiritual energy flow was so subtle that even a Foundation Establishment cultivator's physical senses couldn't grasp it, yet it truly existed.
He began to walk, tossing leaves as he went. Every few steps, he released one, tracking its drifting trajectory with his eyes, silently noting the direction. Leaf after leaf, step after step.
He didn't know how long had passed before Su Ming suddenly stopped.
"Master. The spiritual energy is moving forward." His voice was low and quick. He turned in another direction and released a leaf. "No—it's not just moving forward. It's turning. Like water following a path as it turns. The spiritual energy on the left side of the path is stronger than the right. There's a main direction, but it isn't straight. It's circling. Circling around every ancient tree, every intact stretch of stone path. It goes around, then comes back, forming a kind of..."
He couldn't continue.
Lin Yu's voice came from the Consciousness Sea, carrying a trace of barely perceptible amusement: "Breathing. What you're describing is called breathing. This path is breathing. Spiritual energy flows in, flows out, circles around, then flows back."
Su Ming looked down at the stone path beneath his feet and suddenly felt that something between him and this path had shifted. Before, he had seen it as a puzzle, a device requiring careful wariness. But now, he felt he was looking at something alive. It was breathing, had a pulse, and bore wounds that had once ached.
Shadow had flown back at some point without him noticing, landing on his shoulder with a leaf still clamped in her beak. Su Ming reached out and took it, not letting go, just pinching it between his fingers as he looked up at the path still hidden in the fog ahead.
Lin Yu silently watched Su Ming's profile. This brat had figured it out in less than three days. Back when he had read the phrase "spiritual energy flow can be observed through objects" in a fragmentary ancient text, it had taken him three whole months to truly comprehend it. He had painstakingly reconstructed it through deduction, but Su Ming had walked it out. Different paths, same destination.
Su Ming stood there a moment longer before gently setting down the leaf and starting to walk again. This time, his posture shifted. He began to look up—watching the direction trembling leaves swayed on their branches, the arcs of mist drifting through the forest, the angles at which light beams refracted after piercing the canopy. This path was beginning to reveal its breathing to him.
He didn't know how long he had walked when the fog ahead thickened once more. Su Ming had stopped measuring time by "how far he had gone." All he knew was that his breathing was slower than before, and the circulation of the "Like Water Art" inside him was far more harmonious than when he had first entered the secret realm.
Until he saw the second tree with formation lines.
It was far larger than the first. Its trunk was so thick that five or six people linking arms could barely encircle it, and the formation lines on its bark were incredibly dense. The lines on the first tree each followed their own path, clearly separate from one another. But the lines on this tree converged—three or four merging into one, spiraling, intertwining, pushing and squeezing past each other before splitting apart again. Those convergence points moved extremely slowly, as if something beneath the bark was wriggling and adjusting.
Su Ming sat down before the tree. This time, he didn't first inspect his surroundings or set up a sensing formation. He simply felt that, having come this far, he should sit down.
Shadow jumped off his shoulder and burrowed through the gaps between the tree roots. When she grew tired of burrowing, she leaped onto his lap and curled up. Time flowed by. The fog came and went, then came and went again. The light moved slowly from one side of the canopy to the other, then back again.
Lin Yu hovered in midair, his gaze fixed on the dense formation lines, as if reading an ancient scroll written on tree bark. After staring for a long time, he suddenly spoke.
"The formation lines on this tree are one level deeper than those on the first tree."
Su Ming snapped back from his half-awake state. "What do you mean?"
"The formation lines on the first tree were form. Each line had a clear start and end point, and their directions could be traced. Not this one. These lines are no longer just about direction—they're expressing something." Lin Yu condensed a thin thread of soul power and pointed it vaguely at a spot on the right side of the trunk where three lines were about to merge. Su Ming followed his gaze—the three lines approached each other at different speeds, some pausing, some slowing. One seemed to hesitate, its speed dropping. The other two gently pressed against it, as if pushing it, or perhaps waiting for it. In the end, they merged into one, circled in an extremely tiny loop, then split apart, each veering off in a new direction.
Su Ming stared at that process, and a ridiculous thought suddenly arose in his heart. That didn't look like formation lines functioning. It looked more like three people discussing something.
"You see it?" Lin Yu said. "The formation lines on the first tree had fixed structures and fixed functions. The lines on this tree are intent—they have their own judgment and adjust themselves based on the spiritual energy environment."
Su Ming's heart shook. Self-adjusting formation lines meant the formation on this tree didn't require someone to control it from behind. It could handle changes on its own.
"Can I touch it?"
"Since when did you become so polite?"
Su Ming reached out and pressed his fingertip against the trunk. The feeling this time was completely different. The first tree had given him stillness. This tree gave him resonance. An extremely faint fluctuation came from deep within the bark, precisely hitting a certain frequency in the flow of spiritual energy inside him. The two aligned.
"Close your eyes," Lin Yu said.
Su Ming complied. In the darkness, his sense of touch became clearer. The formation lines beneath the bark were slowly rotating in circles. Not a mechanical rotation, but a rhythmic swelling and contracting, like breathing. One inhale, one exhale. One tension, one release.
"It's... alive?"
"Yes. It is alive."
Su Ming didn't open his eyes. He continued to "listen" to the tree with his palm. The longer he listened, the more layers he felt. That wriggling wasn't just on the surface—there was a second layer, a third layer deeper down, like rings encircling rings. Each layer had a different rhythm, the outer layers faster, the inner layers slower. Su Ming suddenly remembered that each ring of an ancient tree's growth corresponded to one year of growth. And this tree's formation lines—each ring corresponded to a superimposed layer of formation lines.
He snapped his eyes open. "They weren't carved in. They grew along with the tree."
Lin Yu watched him silently, then said after a moment, "You're right."
Su Ming pulled his hand back. He stared at the still slowly gliding formation lines. Something was being restructured in his mind. Ever since his first day studying formations, he had always used "carving"—carving runes, carving formation plates. But this tree told him something else: formations didn't necessarily have to be "carved." They could be "planted." Like planting a tree, burying the seed of a formation line into its carrier, then letting it grow, change, and adapt to its environment on its own. You didn't need to control the path of every single line. You only needed to give it a direction at the very beginning. Then, time would complete the rest for you.