496: Chapter 496 In the Fog

He didn't know when, but the fog had thickened.

It wasn't a gradual process of getting denser—at least Su Ming hadn't noticed the transition. As he walked, he suddenly realized that the tree shadows ahead had faded by a layer.

At first, he could still see ten steps ahead.

After a few more steps, only eight steps remained visible.

After walking for a while longer, the outline of the nearest ancient tree ahead had begun to melt into the white mist.

Su Ming slowed his pace even further.

Ying squatted on his shoulder, its feathers pressed tightly against its body. This little creature, usually fearless, was silent in the increasingly dense fog. Even its breathing seemed suppressed, its golden eyes darting left and right, as wary as a young beast huddled at the mouth of a cave.

Su Ming reached out and gently patted Ying's back.

"It's okay."

Ying didn't cry out.

But it didn't relax either.

Su Ming withdrew his hand and continued forward.

The flagstone path beneath his feet was still there.

This was the only thing he could confirm.

The feel of the flagstones wouldn't deceive him—with every step, the faint Spiritual Qi fluctuations from his soles were still normal, one light and one heavy, one sinking and one floating, no different from the sections of the path he had walked in the past few days. The path hadn't broken; it was still there.

But the problem was, he was starting to lose his sense of direction.

It wasn't a simple disorientation of "not knowing north, south, east, or west."

It was a stranger feeling.

The flagstone path was clearly beneath his feet, extending straight ahead, yet as Su Ming walked, he always felt as if the path beneath his feet was "turning." Not a physical bend—he looked down, and the flagstones were still neatly arranged, one after another, their direction unchanged. But his body was telling him something else: You are veering to the left.

He stopped.

Closed his eyes.

Tried to perceive his surroundings with his Divine Sense.

The flow of Spiritual Qi should help him determine direction. In the past few days, he had spent a lot of time experimenting with the trend of Spiritual Qi using fallen leaves, and had already figured out the general pattern of Spiritual Qi flow within the Ancient Path—heavy on the left, light on the right, main current on the left, tributaries on the right. As long as he perceived the main direction of Spiritual Qi, he could confirm whether he had gone off course.

Divine Sense spread out.

Then—nothing.

It wasn't truly nothing.

Rather, everything had become blurry.

Su Ming's Divine Sense should have been like a fine mesh, which, when cast out, could clearly perceive the density, flow, and rhythm of Spiritual Qi. But in this dense fog, his Divine Sense, when cast out, was like a handful of sand thrown into cotton.

No feedback.

No rebound.

The Spiritual Qi was there, he could vaguely feel it, but its direction, strength, and rhythm were all wrapped up by something, turning into a formless Chaos.

Like a membrane.

An extremely thin, extremely uniform, yet omnipresent membrane, covering his Divine Sense and the outside world, filtering everything into the same color.

Su Ming opened his eyes.

The fog was still there.

It was even denser.

He looked ahead—beyond five steps, there was only white.

He looked back—also white.

Left and right—white.

Beneath his feet—flagstones.

Above his head—the high branches and leaves he could occasionally see were now swallowed by the fog. The entire world had shrunk into a circle with a radius of five steps, with him at the center and nothingness beyond the circle.

Su Ming stood still, not panicking.

He silently counted a few breaths in his mind, confirming that his Ruoshui Art was operating normally, his Meridians were not being corroded, and his Spiritual Qi was not being drained. He checked the location of his great teleportation talisman and his life-saving Formation Plate.

They were all there.

He took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.

"Master."

Silence fell in his Sea of Consciousness for a moment.

Lin Yu's voice came, unhurried.

"Mm."

"My Divine Sense can't reach out anymore."

"I know."

"Is there a way?"

Lin Yu didn't answer immediately.

Su Ming waited.

He knew what his Master's silence meant—either he was thinking, or observing, or he had already figured it out but wasn't ready to say.

As expected, after a long while, Lin Yu finally spoke.

"Don't use your Divine Sense for now."

Su Ming was slightly startled.

"Don't use Divine Sense? Then what should I use?"

"What else do you have on you?"

The question was strange.

Su Ming thought for a moment: "Spiritual Qi... eyesight..."

"Is eyesight useful in this fog?"

"No."

"What about Spiritual Qi?"

Su Ming tried sending a wisp of Spiritual Qi to his fingertip and felt it. The Spiritual Qi was still circulating normally within his body, but once released, it was swallowed by that

"Not useful either."

"Then don't use any of them."

Su Ming fell silent.

No Divine Sense. No externalized Spiritual Qi. No eyesight.

Then what did he have left?

"You are a Cultivator," Lin Yu's voice was calm, "but before becoming a Cultivator, you were first a living person. What does a person have?"

Su Ming paused for a breath.

Then he suddenly understood.

Physical sensation.

The most primal physical sensation.

He closed his eyes.

Not cultivating, not entering a meditative state, but simply closing his eyes.

The fog clung to his face, damp, with a slightly cool touch. That coolness wasn't uniform.

The left side of his face was cooler than the right.

Su Ming's heart stirred slightly.

He slowly turned, aligning his body with the

Cold.

Then he switched to his right hand.

Not as cold.

He turned another tiny angle.

His left hand felt even colder.

He turned again.

The coldness began to even out.

Su Ming, like a sightless wanderer, used his skin to

The fog was not uniform.

Although the naked eye couldn't distinguish its density, and Divine Sense was completely disrupted, his body wouldn't lie. The temperature differences, humidity differences, and even pressure differences on his skin were telling him things his eyes couldn't.

He spent a long time, rotating little by little, reaching out little by little, feeling little by little.

Finally, he determined a direction.

Not by seeing, not by calculating, but by the subtle difference in coolness on his skin.

He opened his eyes and took a step.

The flagstone beneath his foot hummed.

The sound was exactly the same as before—faint, steady, with a hint of awakened vibration.

He hadn't taken the wrong path.

The path was still beneath his feet.

Su Ming didn't relax.

He simply closed his eyes again, reached out his hand, and felt the temperature differences around him.

Then, one step.

Another step.

Each step was taken extremely slowly. So slowly that Ying thought he was treading in place, poking half its head from his shoulder to look at him with confusion.

Su Ming ignored it.

All his attention was focused on the temperature changes in his fingertips and palms.

In this dense fog that even Divine Sense couldn't penetrate, Su Ming, for the first time, abandoned all the methods of a Cultivator, like the most ordinary Mortal, relying on his body itself to gauge direction.

Clumsy.

Slow.

But every step landed on a flagstone.

Lin Yu floated behind him, silent the entire time.

His soul body was indistinct in the mist, its edges blurred as if smudged by water. But his eyes were clear, quietly watching Su Ming's back as he fumbled his way forward, step by step.

What he didn't tell Su Ming was—

He saw through this fog at a glance.

The patterns of the fog were to him like opening an old book he had read countless times. That

He had read similar records in books.

In ancient times, some great Array Masters, when setting up important sections of roads, would deliberately release an extremely uniform thin mist of Spiritual Qi in specific areas to