Chapter 501: Cultivation
Su Ming sat on the stone for two days. In those two days, he did one thing: listen. He listened to the depression’s breathing. One hundred breaths made one cycle. When it inhaled, spiritual energy gathered, and the stone trembled slightly. When it exhaled, spiritual energy entered the water, and the stone sank a little. By the end, he didn’t even need to count anymore; his body naturally followed that rhythm, rising and falling with it.
On the second day, he finally opened his eyes, his gaze falling back to the lakebed. Those rings of formation lines, layer upon layer, were still slowly rotating. Su Ming stared at the outermost ring for a long time, then gradually drew his focus inward. In his mind, he wasn’t tracing the lines themselves, but rather the momentum—
He watched for a long time.
So long that Shadow even woke up from her nap, jumped down from his knee, and ran to the water’s edge to grab something—those phantom projections condensed from spiritual energy swam just beneath the surface, like fish, yet not quite fish. Shadow plunged her claws into the water with a swipe, and the phantom scattered, only to reform elsewhere a moment later. Undeterred, Shadow moved to a new spot and swiped again. After seven or eight tries, she hadn’t caught a single one.
Lin Yu had been hovering above the lake surface, watching the lakebed just like Su Ming. But the level at which he observed was completely different from Su Ming’s.
Su Ming was watching the “momentum.”
Lin Yu was watching the “principle.”
Every structure within the broken formation, he compared to the Spirit Gathering Array in his ring. This process wasn’t like flipping through a book; it was more like assembling a puzzle—picking up a fragment from here, holding it over there to compare, turning it at a different angle to compare again, confirming that they indeed belonged to the same picture.
The incomplete parts were blurry beyond recognition, yet precisely because of that incompleteness, they were easier to understand.
Lin Yu’s soul body flickered faintly above the water. Su Ming happened to look up at that moment and caught the expression on Lin Yu’s face—the space between his brows had relaxed a little, the corners of his eyes had softened a little. It wasn’t a smile, but something deeper than a smile, like a person walking a long night road finally seeing a lamp up ahead.
The third day. Su Ming began to move. He didn’t go into the water, nor did he use spiritual energy to probe the lakebed. He did something even more stubborn—he crouched on the muddy ground at the edge of the depression and used his fingertip to trace the formation lines from the lakebed. He traced that “momentum”: a curved line, a circle, an arrow marking the direction. He drew, then erased, then drew again. He wasn’t pursuing “understanding” first; he was pursuing “memorization.” He wanted to commit that momentum to memory, in his hand, in his mind.
Lin Yu drifted beside him, watching him crouch on the muddy ground, drawing stroke by stroke. He could see the deviations in Su Ming’s drawings—the rotation direction of the third ring had been recorded backwards, and the position of the crucial intersection point between the fifth and sixth rings was off by about a finger’s width. But he said nothing. Su Ming would discover it himself. He would trace it once, look at the lakebed once, compare them once, and naturally he would know where it didn’t match. This process might take a long time, but however long it took, it was more useful than directly giving him the answer. Lin Yu sighed inwardly—the hardest thing about being a master was never “knowing something,” but rather watching his disciple struggle, knowing that one single sentence could save him three days of effort, yet forcibly biting his tongue and not speaking.
Su Ming, utterly unaware, remained crouched on the muddy ground, burying his head in his tracing.
Shadow probably found it unbearably boring. She flew down from Su Ming’s shoulder, circled the edge of the depression, then ran back to the water’s edge to catch “fish.” This time, she had learned her lesson. She didn’t directly plunge her claws down to swipe; instead, she crouched by the water, tilted her head, stared at the phantom projections swimming beneath the surface, and waited for a long while.
A “fish” formed from spiritual energy swam to her feet.
Shadow lunged suddenly—
Her beak plunged into the water—
Water splashed everywhere—
Shadow lifted her head.
Her beak was empty.
That “fish” had scattered at the edge of her beak into a mass of blue mist, drifted for a moment, then condensed again elsewhere.
Shadow stood dumbfounded by the water’s edge, her entire being radiating the words: *this is impossible.*
Su Ming caught a glimpse of this scene from the corner of his eye, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.
Then he lowered his head again and continued drawing.
The fifth day. Su Ming’s muddy ground doodles had already reached the seventeenth version. All sixteen previous versions had been erased and started over. But when he was halfway through drawing the seventeenth version, he suddenly stopped, stood up, walked to the edge of the depression, and crouched down again to look at the lakebed. This time, his gaze didn’t gradually pull inward ring by ring, but went directly to the center—that central point where all the rotating lines converged. There was a grain of light there, flickering on and off.
He watched for a long time, then stood up, walked back to the muddy ground, and beside the seventeenth version’s drawing, he pressed down hard with his finger at the very center. The mud sank, leaving a round fingerprint.
“Master.”
“Mm.”
“That central point isn’t the end.” Su Ming’s speech was a bit faster. “Spiritual energy is drawn in from the outer rings and finally reaches the center—but it isn’t ‘released’ at the center. It’s ‘ejected’ from the center. Like a well. Spiritual energy converges from all directions at the well’s mouth, and then a force pushes it up from the mouth.”
Su Ming himself probably hadn’t fully realized how important a statement he had just made. But Lin Yu realized it. This kid had started to touch the “core” of the Spirit Gathering Array.
Lin Yu didn’t show any emotion, only lightly “hmmed,” then said, “Since you know there’s nothing simple about this place, don’t rush to comprehend it fully. It’s been here who knows how many years; it’s not going anywhere. Sit back down. You sat for two days earlier, and the circulation of your *Like Water Art* is now thirty percent faster than usual. Did you notice it yourself?”
Su Ming was taken aback, lowered his head, and looked inward at his Dantian. Sure enough, the fluctuation frequency of his spiritual energy lake was faster than before entering the secret realm. It wasn’t acceleration; it was smoother. Like a river channel that had been clogged for a long time getting some of its silt cleared. The water’s flow speed hadn’t changed, but the volume had increased.
“Cultivating in a place like this, the concentration of spiritual energy is enough for you to polish every single turn of your *Like Water Art* until it’s at its most perfect. Don’t worry about the formation lines for now. Just cultivate.”
Su Ming didn’t argue. He walked back to the stone and sat down cross-legged again. When Shadow saw him return, she flew back from the water’s edge, jumped onto his lap, and curled into a ball. Su Ming closed his eyes and began circulating the *Like Water Art*. The surrounding spiritual energy—brought together by the depression’s Spirit Gathering Array to a concentration so high it was nearly liquefied—gently seeped into his body from all directions. Without needing deliberate guidance, the spiritual energy itself followed the path of his meridians, burrowing inward. He only had to do one thing: maintain the rhythm of the *Like Water Art’s* circulation, neither too fast nor too slow, neither hurried nor unhurried. This was what he had learned on the Ancient Path—not to push with force, but to wait for it to reach the place it was supposed to go.
The formation lines on the lakebed continued to rotate slowly. Lin Yu, hovering above the water’s surface, also closed his eyes. The surroundings of the depression were as quiet as a painting that had been pressed onto the pause button. Only that expanse of deep blue water, flickering on and off, on and off—like a heart, still remembering to beat even in the depths of slumber.