499: Chapter 499 Runes

"What you can see right now is the first layer."

Lin Yu's voice suddenly rang out.

Su Ming paused in his steps.

Ever since they left the fog zone, Master had been very silent.

It wasn't the silence of him deliberately acting profound as usual, but rather that he was truly thinking about something.

Su Ming could feel that the experience in that thick fog—especially the shadow of the Void Realm array formation—might have had a greater impact on Lin Yu than on himself.

"The deeper you go, the more layers there are."

Lin Yu's soul body floated out from the ring.

He hovered beside Su Ming, his gaze falling on the ancient tree they had already passed behind them. His face still wore that indifferent expression, yet deep in his eyes was something Su Ming rarely saw.

Heaviness.

A heaviness that had reached its bottom.

"I see more than you do."

The tone of Lin Yu's voice as he said this was very flat.

It wasn't showing off, nor was it guidance; it was merely a statement.

Like someone who had traveled a long way, telling the young person just starting out beside him: The road ahead is longer than what you see right now.

Su Ming looked at him: "How many layers have you seen?"

Lin Yu did not answer.

Su Ming did not pursue the question any further.

He was already used to it.

Things Master did not say were either because he hadn't thought them through yet, or because saying them would be useless—it wasn't that Su Ming couldn't understand, but that some things must be reached by oneself to be grasped.

Forcing them in would only crack one's Foundation.

The two continued walking in silence.

Lin Yu floated behind him, the luster of his soul body flickering in the mist.

He did not say that—those layered and stacked Array Patterns were not just patterns in his eyes.

They were a system.

Each layer was not independent.

There was correspondence between the first and second layers, succession between the second and third layers, and transmission between the third layer and the deeper parts.

They were like a real tree—roots, trunk, branches, and leaves, each with its own duties, yet sharing the same set of veins.

And those isolated pieces of rune knowledge, those fragments he had scraped together from incomplete ancient texts over five hundred years—the thirty-seven variants of "Lock," the twelve trends of "Flow," the connection between "Solidify" and "Balance" that he had never been able to bridge—were being slowly connected on this road by a power he could not describe.

It wasn't him organizing them.

It was this road helping him connect them.

Those scattered beads were like being strung together by an invisible thread.

He didn't need to arrange them, didn't need to think about "which one should be placed after the other."

The road was doing this itself.

He only needed to walk, only needed to look, only needed to let himself be immersed in these patterns.

In the depths of Lin Yu's heart, there was a very light tremor.

It wasn't excitement.

It was a kind of extremely deep, unspeakable sense of stability.

Suddenly, a light cry came from ahead.

"Chirp!"

Ying flew up from Su Ming's shoulder.

It flapped its wings and darted forward, bouncing twice on the stone road like a ball of black fluff, and landed on a stone slab five or six steps ahead.

Then it lowered its head and dug at the soil in the gap of the stone slab with its claws.

Su Ming looked up.

Ying cried out again, more urgently.

Its claws kept digging in the gap, scraping out some broken leaves and damp soil.

The little thing's actions didn't look like it was playing—its entire body was tensed up, its golden eyes staring fixedly at something in the gap.

Su Ming walked over.

He crouched down.

Ying stepped aside half a step, but still kept staring at that spot.

Su Ming looked down at the stone slab gap.

The soil and broken leaves had been scraped away by Ying, revealing the stone wall deep in the gap.

Embedded on that stone wall was something.

It was very small.

The size of a fingernail.

Under the cover of soil and moss, it was almost invisible.

But Ying's eyes were sharper than Su Ming's—it could see that the object was emitting a very faint light.

Su Ming extended his finger and gently brushed away the remaining soil.

It was a fragment.

The material seemed to be some kind of stone, but it was much smoother than ordinary stone, with rounded edges, as if it had been polished repeatedly by time in the soil.

The fragment was off-white, with a very faint luster on the surface that wasn't dazzling, but rather like moonlight pressed into the stone.

Something was carved on it.

Su Ming wiped the stains off the surface of the fragment with his sleeve and leaned in to look.

Half a rune.

A rune he didn't recognize.

To be precise, it was the upper half of a rune.

The lower half was gone—the fragment had broken off at some unknown time many years ago; the other half was nowhere to be found, leaving only this remnant embedded in the gap of the stone slab, buried by soil for who knows how many years.

Su Ming stared at that half-rune for a long time.

Its stroke style was not quite the same as the 3,600 basic runes he was familiar with.

It was more ancient, more rugged, as if the person who carved it did not use the Spirit-carving method commonly used by Cultivators, but rather a more primitive technique, carving it stroke by stroke.

Yet in the remaining half-structure, there was a turn—a very subtle change in curvature—that made Su Ming feel like he had seen it before.

He thought for a while, but couldn't figure it out.

"Master."

Lin Yu floated over.

His soul body hovered beside Su Ming, his gaze falling on the fragment.

He was silent for three breaths.

"A lost variant of the 'Guide' rune."

Lin Yu's voice was very soft.

Su Ming looked up at him.

He knew the "Guide" rune.

One of the 3,600 basic runes, belonging to the "traction, guidance" category.

He had mastered the basic form and two common variants of the "Guide" rune.

But a "variant" and a "variant" were different.

A basic variant involved making slight adjustments to the original structure to change the traction intensity or direction of the spiritual power.

But a "lost variant" meant—this way of modification itself was something no one knew how to do anymore.

"Only half is left," Su Ming said in a low voice.

"Even half is enough to see," Lin Yu stared at the fragment, silent for a moment, "At least one can see its starting stroke trend and closing intention. The core of this variant is not about what to guide, but how to guide—its curvature turn has an extra layer of buffer compared to the current version, as if it's telling the thing being guided: Don't worry, take it slow."

Su Ming didn't fully understand.

But he remembered it.

He carefully pried the fragment out of the gap.

The fragment felt slightly cool to the touch and was extremely light, almost weightless.

He wiped it again with his sleeve and placed it into the innermost compartment of his Storage Pouch, along with the soul nurturing incense recipe and the longevity jade pendant.

After doing all this, he stood up.

Ying flew onto his shoulder, tilted its head to watch Su Ming's action of putting away the fragment, and then chirped triumphantly.

That cry clearly carried the meaning of "It was all thanks to me, wasn't it?"

Su Ming couldn't help but reach out and flick its forehead.

"I know. You did well."

Ying shook its feathers, raised its little head, and became even more proud.

Su Ming lifted his feet to continue walking forward.

Ying flew up again, this time no longer staying on his shoulder, but fluttering to a stone slab a few meters ahead, lowering its head to look carefully, and then flying up to the next stone slab.

Back and forth, it was actually like it was diligently scouting the path.

Every time it flew a distance, it would land and wait for Su Ming.

Su Ming would follow, and it would fly another distance.

Occasionally it would chirp, as if saying "It's clear here."

Su Ming watched the small black figure jumping around on the stone slabs ahead, the corners of his mouth curving slightly.

Since entering the Secret Realm, this little thing seemed to have grown up.

Not that its size had grown—it was still so small, like a ball of black fluff—but its temperament had calmed down.

When they were outside, it would constantly want to provoke Spirit Beasts ten times its size, but now it had started to know how to scout the path first.

Who knew if it was scared by the fog zone, or suppressed by those ancient trees.

The road was still long.

Su Ming raised his head and looked ahead.

The fog was thinner, the trees were larger.

The Array Patterns on the stone slabs were denser.

The end of the road was still invisible.

But he no longer cared about that end.

He just walked.

Step by step.

Somewhere ahead, Ying cried out again.

"Chirp—"

Crisp, with a hint of showing off.

As if saying: Hurry up, this stone slab is also quite interesting.