Chapter 490: Verification
Su Ming couldn’t help stretching out a finger and gently pressing down.
The stone surface was faintly cool.
When his fingertip touched it, he vaguely felt an illusion of touching the skin texture of a living creature.
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
Lin Yu stood to the side, looking down at him. His tone had finally regained some of its usual demeanor, yet the strange, heavy stillness in his eyes hadn’t completely faded.
Su Ming hummed in acknowledgment, not rushing to infuse spiritual energy for a test.
Instead, he sent only the faintest wisp of spiritual energy through his fingertip, gently brushing the edge of the pattern.
On the stone slab, those originally dim lines flashed brightly for an instant.
Just a flash.
Then they sank back into stillness.
Inside the Xuantian ring, Lin Yu watched Su Ming’s approach—not taking risks, not rushing for gains, not seeking a sudden breakthrough—and a peculiar feeling stirred in his heart.
This kid’s methods… at least, not all of them were taught by him. Su Ming had carved his own path.
That realization only deepened the sense of “being verified” in Lin Yu’s mind.
Some people walk fast, some walk slow; some look down from heights, some grope their way through mud. But at the end of the road, what they see is still the same vein.
Su Ming didn’t notice Lin Yu’s shifting gaze.
After thoroughly cleaning the stone slab again, he slowly rose to his feet and took a few more steps forward.
The forest was very quiet.
Apart from the sound of his soles pressing fallen leaves, there was almost no other noise.
But he hadn’t walked far before his attention was seized by a tree by the roadside.
It was an ancient tree.
Its trunk was absurdly thick—probably more than three adults linking arms couldn’t encircle it. The bark was deep gray, cracked on the surface, yet it showed no signs of decay. Instead, it exuded an exceptionally steady vitality. Thick, robust roots arched out of the ground, like old dragons lying on the earth—silent, but carrying weight.
What stopped Su Ming wasn’t the tree’s size.
It was the pattern on its bark.
Those patterns were like vines, spiraling up the trunk layer by layer. But after looking for only a moment, one could tell they weren’t vines at all. They weren’t natural cracks either.
They were formation lines.
And moving formation lines at that.
They crept across the bark’s surface at an extremely slow pace, like living things, flowing along their set trajectories bit by bit. Each line was unhurried and unflustered, as if the tree breathed, and they breathed along with it.
Su Ming stood before the tree, holding his breath slightly.
Shadow on his shoulder also quieted down, tilting her head, her golden eyes fixed straight on the bark.
Su Ming extended his hand.
His fingertip was only an inch away from the bark.
In the next instant, he finally pressed down gently.
The moment he touched it, an indescribable tranquility spread from his fingertip, climbing upward.
The feeling came lightly.
It wasn’t a spiritual energy impact or a divine sense tremor.
It was more like a single, extremely cool drop of water falling into an originally taut heart-lake. It didn’t raise waves—it simply smoothed those fine creases, layer by layer.
Su Ming still carried some lingering frustration over the white crane destroying the fields, wariness of the unknown secret realm, and alertness about the strange stone path. But under that single touch, those emotions felt as if an invisible hand had gently stroked them. They didn’t vanish—they simply settled.
He didn’t lose his vigilance.
He just inexplicably quieted down.
With his fingertip against the bark, he could clearly feel those slowly flowing lines. They were no longer just “looking alive”—they genuinely carried some kind of strange rhythm, moving slowly through the bark, wood, sap, and spiritual essence.
The longer Su Ming looked, the stranger he felt.
This wasn’t the kind of formation plate he was familiar with.
It wasn’t the method of breaking down runes, inscribing them stroke by stroke, then activating them with spirit stones.
It was as if the tree had grown into a formation itself.
The tree was bone, the bark was membrane, the sap was spiritual flow, and the rings were overlapping layers of support. The formation lines weren’t attached to it—they were born within it. Just like how a deer’s antlers aren’t wooden sticks stuck on its head, but a part of the deer itself.
“Well, well…”
Lin Yu’s voice was very light, almost a murmur.
He had somehow floated in front of the tree.
Before, at the stone path, he had only been silent. Now, at this tree, even his silence felt like it carried extra weight. His soul body hovered quietly in midair, his gaze following the formation lines up the bark until they were blocked by the layers of canopy above.
For a long time, he didn’t speak.
Su Ming slightly turned his head.
“Master?”
“Don’t interrupt.”
Lin Yu didn’t look back.
This “don’t interrupt” wasn’t his usual casual dismissal of an annoying disciple—it sounded like he genuinely feared disturbing something.
Hearing this, Su Ming naturally stopped speaking. He withdrew his hand from the bark.
He stepped back half a pace and seriously studied the whole tree.
This tree was enormous.
Standing before it, one instinctively felt smaller. The canopy blotted out the sky, so even sunlight could only leak through gaps in the branches and leaves in scattered streaks, slanting onto the trunk and those slowly creeping formation lines.
As the light flickered, those patterns seemed to come even more alive.
Shadow jumped down from Su Ming’s shoulder, hopping a couple of steps among the roots. She, too, seemed to sense that this place was different from the rest. Instead of her usual impulse to pounce on anything unfamiliar, she stopped very obediently on a tangled old root, lifting her little head to look at the tree.
Lin Yu was still standing there.
But this time, he wasn’t just looking.
He was recognizing.
He recognized the structure on the bark almost at a glance.
No deduction was needed.
No comparison either.
Because this kind of structure was something he had thought about, tried out, and repeatedly pieced together in countless lonely years—from broken memories, scattered ancient texts, and long periods of soul-body stillness.
Five hundred years was too long.
Long enough to wear out many thoughts, to turn many supposedly brilliant flashes of inspiration into just one sentence—maybe I was overthinking it.
But this tree before him was telling him—no.
You weren’t just imagining things.
You weren’t just warming yourself in the darkness.
Five hundred years ago, someone really had walked this path, and reached this step.
Lin Yu’s mind fell into a terrifying stillness at that moment.
As he looked at those lines, only an extremely soft sentence floated up in his heart.
So, I wasn’t the only one who thought this way.
In that instant, he didn’t even analyze or deconstruct.
Because there was no need.
The lines, turns, blank spaces, buffers, and load-bearing points on the bark—the whole system—he understood all of it. Not because he was much smarter than others, but because this thing had already run through his heart countless times before. It’s just that back then, no one had answered.
Now, the answer had come.
Right on this tree.
Su Ming didn’t know what storm was stirring inside Lin Yu’s heart.
All he knew was that this tree made him want to sit down.
The thought came abruptly.
In an unfamiliar secret realm, by a strange stone path, under a tree that grew formation lines—a normal person’s first reaction would be to look more, remember more, be more guarded, and preferably set up two layers of alert formations around them, never casually sitting in meditation.
Of course, Su Ming was also a normal person—the kind who especially cherished his life.