Chapter 519: Why Is There No Spiritual Energy in the Air?
Master Xuanming took the token and walked forward without a word.
Su Ming followed behind.
As they passed through that unimaginably heavy bronze gate, Su Ming’s gaze casually swept across the stone walls lining the passage.
His steps suddenly paused.
Those were not ordinary stone walls.
On the smooth gray-black rock, densely packed names had been carved everywhere.
"Li Changkong, Zhao Wuji, Shen Canghai, Lin Tingfeng..."
One after another, line after line. The handwriting was inconsistent: some names were etched with profound sword intent, others were gouged out with sheer fingertip force, and some letter edges still bore dark red stains of dried blood that had been there for who knew how many years.
At least a thousand names.
Su Ming stood in front of the stone wall, silent.
In his ears he seemed to hear again the earth-shattering cries and slaughter from outside Northwind City in the Great Xing, and before his eyes surfaced the faces of mortal comrades who had died in the blizzard at Iron Wall Pass.
Though immortal and mundane paths diverge, some things are the same.
"Senior brother..." Qingfeng stepped forward.
Su Ming turned to look at Qingfeng and Mingyue, their faces still showing traces of youthful innocence, and pointed at the abyssal black mist on either side that seemed ready to swallow the entire sky.
"We guard here to prevent abyssal beasts and evil cultivators from destroying the passage," Su Ming said, looking straight at the two inexperienced outer sect disciples, "The peaceful years you saw in the Purple Bamboo Sea weren’t granted by heaven and earth. Every name carved here was bought with a life."
Qingfeng said nothing.
He stared blankly at the name "Lin Tingfeng", his finger slightly curling.
Mingyue bowed her head, her eyes reddening a little. It was the first time she had felt so directly how close serenity and cruelty were in the cultivation world.
A verified sword cultivator in front waved them through.
Su Ming cast one last glance at the name-covered stone wall and at the two silent youths, then passed the pass guarded by the Azure Edge Sword Sect.
The moment they crossed the gate, the sharp air around them instantly softened.
Master Xuanming walked at the front, hands folded behind his back, his withered gray robe fluttering slightly in the breeze.
From start to finish, he did not look back at the wall filled with names.
The instant they passed through that heavy bronze gate, the howling wind and soaring sword qi that seemed ready to tear the heavens apart behind them were cut off as if by an invisible giant blade.
The air around them fell silent at once.
Gone was the knife-like cold of the far north, gone was the soul-chilling oppression of the abyss.
Su Ming stood on the dim wooden airship, frowning slightly.
He inhaled instinctively.
His Like Water Art moved in response, a deep azure spiritual-energy lake stirring within his dantian, an invisible net unfurling to draw stray spiritual energy from the surroundings to replenish the reserves spent maintaining his protective spiritual light.
But there was nothing.
No— not absolutely nothing, but so thin it was obscene. It felt like a parched man facing a well dried up for months, scraping a few drops of muddy, earth-scented water from the sand.
"What’s going on?" Qingfeng stood at the stern and had also noticed the anomaly; he sniffed hard, the excitement that had flushed his face upon entering the Central Continent replaced by astonishment. "There’s... nothing in this air?"
"Yeah." Mingyue agreed at his side. She reached out a slender finger and grabbed at the air as if to catch something. "Why does the spiritual energy here feel thinner than at the foot of Cloud Hidden Sect’s outer sect mountain?"
Su Ming said nothing.
He stood at the prow, his late-stage Foundation Establishment divine sense cautiously extending along the airship’s edge less than fifty zhang before retracting immediately.
Within those brief three breaths, he confirmed that within fifty zhang the spiritual energy was this depleted. Entering the Central Continent, a cliff-like drop in heaven-and-earth spiritual energy could mean they had stumbled into a vast Formless Pattern of absolute energy starvation. If that were the case, any large release of spiritual power now would draw the formation’s killing snare. The Grand Teleportation Talisman in his sleeve would take at least one and a half breaths longer to activate in such a thin spiritual environment than in the Northern Frontier. That extra one and a half breaths could mean dying ten times over before a Spirit Transformation old monster.
Thinking of this, Su Ming subtly drew his right hand into his sleeve and pinched a mid-grade spirit stone between his fingertips to compensate for the talisman’s activation energy shortfall.
"Master." Su Ming whispered into his Consciousness Sea.
Lin Yu’s soul body slowly materialized from the Xuantian ring. A dim blue glow flickered in the blackness of the Consciousness Sea.
"Don’t waste effort probing," Lin Yu replied. "It’s not a formation blockade, and it’s not an absolute spirit land. The very foundation of this region is empty."
Shadow poked half a black head out from Su Ming’s collar, its golden eyes nervously scanning around. It opened its sharp beak to catch stray energy in the air but only inhaled a mouthful of dry dust, and sneezed loudly in disgust.
"Cheep..." Shadow complained, then retreated.
Master Xuanming stood by the meditation cushion in the airship’s center, hands folded behind him.
A sardonic smile crossed his gaunt, drawn face. He didn’t look at Qingfeng or Mingyue; instead he turned and fixed his sunken gaze on Su Ming’s back.
"What?" Master Xuanming’s hoarse voice sounded in the dead-quiet ship, like fingernails scraping dry bark. "Surprised?"
Su Ming turned, hands crossed before him, maintaining an impeccable posture.
"Report, senior," Su Ming nodded truthfully, his expression calm. "The Central Continent is the absolute center of the human cultivation world, the convergence of myriad veins. I always thought the spiritual energy here would be as rich as rivers, even turning mist into rain. Seeing it now, it is indeed far from what I imagined."
"Center?"
Master Xuanming suddenly laughed low. The sound reverberated in his chest, carrying a cold detachment that seemed to have seen through the world’s hardships.
"Exactly because it’s too central."
He turned and pointed with thin fingers at the gray sky beyond the airship and the endless desolate land below.
"The Central Continent’s territory is vast—at least ten times the Northern Frontier. Yet the number of cultivators concentrated here is a hundred, even a thousand times greater!"
His pace of speech was slow; each word struck the three juniors like a hammer blow.
"In the Northern Frontier, one Cloud Hidden Sect holding twenty large spirit veins can support tens of thousands of disciples. In the Central Continent, even this void that seems empty above our heads hides tens of thousands of secluded sects and wandering cultivator cave dwellings."
Qingfeng sucked in a cold breath, eyes wide.
Master Xuanming withdrew his hand and patted his wide sleeve.
"Everything born under heaven has its limit. No matter how vast a vein, no matter how rich the heaven-and-earth spiritual energy, it cannot withstand this hundredfold, thousandfold of cultivators, day and night, extracting like a plague of locusts."
The old man’s gaze grew unfathomably deep, as if piercing the fog of time.
"For centuries, the veins beneath the Central Continent have been dug to riddled hollows; the stray spiritual energy in the air has long been forcibly drawn into the great sects' halls with lock-spirit formations. What’s left is scraps and cold bones—worse than the mundane world."
Su Ming stood stunned.
This was not natural desolation but exhaustion after extreme prosperity. Countless cultivators, in their scramble for the path to eternal longevity, had drained the world’s vital qi.
It was an image far crueller than beast infestations in the Northern Frontier—absolute resource depletion.
"Then... how do cultivators in the Central Continent practice?" Mingyue couldn’t help but ask softly, her brow tightly furrowed. "Without spiritual energy, won’t cultivation stagnate?"