600: Chapter 600 Guixu Palace

When the two passed through the transparent membrane separating the "Ten Thousand Laws Record" and the "National Destiny Platform," Su Ming felt an extremely subtle sense of resistance.

It was like passing through a layer of thick mercury; this light membrane itself was an extremely sophisticated filtering Formation, only allowing those with specific Spiritual Qi fluctuations to enter.

If not for the tortoise-knobbed small seal of the same origin being nurtured within Su Ming's body, the two of them would likely have been completely shredded the moment they touched the light membrane.

The light membrane closed silently behind them, cutting off the vast bronze bookshelves and the azure Void Realm of the outer pavilion.

What appeared before them was no longer that ethereal space, but an extremely rustic, and even somewhat cramped, stone chamber.

There was no grand atmosphere here like in the outer pavilion; the four walls were all rough, gray-green rock. However, when Su Ming activated his "Micro-Observation" vision, he couldn't help but gasp.

On these four seemingly rough stone walls were densely carved dark golden Array Patterns of extreme complexity. These Array Patterns were not dead objects; they were flickering on and off at an extremely slow frequency.

"One, two, three..." Su Ming silently calculated the flickering frequency in his heart.

Every twelve breaths, the Array Patterns would light up once. This rhythm was actually perfectly synchronized with the faint pulse of the earth's veins that Su Ming had felt outside the rift!

This stone chamber was "breathing." It was connected to the pulse of the entire earth.

In the center of the stone chamber stood a huge bluestone square table. Scattered messily on the table were a few lusterless Jade Slips, as well as the remains of some Magical Artifacts that had lost all spirituality and decayed. In the corner of the stone chamber, there were piles of sheepskin scrolls covered in thick dust.

Luo Feng drifted to the side of the stone table first. He picked up a decayed Magical Artifact, examined it for a moment, and raised his eyebrows slightly.

"Junior Martial Brother, look at this." Luo Feng flipped the Magical Artifact over and pointed to a blurred mark at the bottom. "This is the personal seal of Yan Wuji, the last emperor of the Great Yan. It is rumored that Yan Wuji was an absolute Formation fanatic who even neglected state affairs to deduce Formations. It seems this is not a place for handling state affairs, but his private Formation research laboratory during his lifetime."

"Return to Void Hall..." Su Ming read softly, looking at the three ancient seal characters on the lintel of the stone chamber that were almost worn away.

He did not touch the remains on the table, but instead focused his attention on the "breathing" Array Patterns on the walls.

Su Ming walked to one of the walls, closed his eyes, and slowly released his Divine Sense, attempting to resonate with the rhythm of those Array Patterns. His Water Spiritual Energy, like the softest silk thread, followed the direction of the Array Patterns and seeped in bit by bit.

"Click." A crisp mechanical sound echoed in the quiet stone chamber.

As Su Ming's Divine Sense resonated, a bluestone brick in the center of the wall directly in front of him suddenly indented, then slowly slid open to the sides, revealing a hidden compartment within the wall.

Luo Feng immediately leaned over, and the two looked into the compartment.

The compartment was divided into four layers. The top layer held a top-grade Jade Slip emitting a warm luster; the second layer held an ancient, dilapidated Formation Plate that was almost broken in two; the third layer held a few broken Formation Flags; and on the very bottom layer, a suet jade box with a seal sat alone.

Su Ming's gaze locked directly onto the top-grade Jade Slip on the top layer. Intuition told him that this was the true core left behind by Yan Wuji.

He carefully took out the Jade Slip, pressed it against his forehead, and probed it with his Divine Sense.

"Boom!" A massive amount of information rushed into Su Ming's Sea of Consciousness like a bursting flood. The four gold-stamped characters "Great Yan Formation Canon" shone brilliantly in his mind.

Su Ming quickly browsed the core outline of the Formation Canon. The more he read, the stronger the shock in his heart became.

In this Formation Canon, Yan Wuji proposed a crazy concept called the "Living Formation." He believed that all Formations in the world should not be rigid piles of runes, but should be like living creatures, capable of conforming to the rhythm of the earth's veins, self-repairing, and self-breathing.

In one chapter of the Formation Canon, Yan Wuji used an extremely vivid metaphor to explain how to guide Spiritual Power: he compared complex Array Patterns to "irrigation canals" and violent Spiritual Power to "floodwater." He wrote: "Water control is not about blocking, but dredging. Formations are the same; one should guide Spiritual Qi like digging channels to divert water, managing it through diversion, only then can it be endless."

Su Ming opened his eyes abruptly. This "irrigation canal" analogy was exactly the same as the "water conservancy project" metaphor Lin Yu had used when he first taught him the basics of Formations in the Accounting Room of the Cloud Hidden Sect's Menial Workers!

"This..." Su Ming called out to Lin Yu in his Sea of Consciousness.

Inside the xuantian ring, Lin Yu was uncharacteristically silent for a long time. The azure soul body hovered in mid-air for a full half cup of tea's time. Finally, Lin Yu's luster flickered slightly, and when he spoke, his voice was much lower than usual, even carrying an indescribable sense of emotion.

"This emperor..." Lin Yu sighed, commenting in an extremely complex tone, "If this emperor lived where we came from, he would be best suited to build dams and be a water conservancy engineer. This theory of his has much more of a future than being an emperor."

Su Ming did not laugh. He could hear the complex emotion in Lin Yu's tone, one that spanned time and space, yet found resonance in these otherworldly ruins. This engineering-based thinking was undoubtedly the greatest affirmation of the path Su Ming had been walking all along.

Su Ming put away the "Great Yan Formation Canon" and shifted his gaze down to the suet jade box on the bottom layer.

The seal on the jade box had lost its Spiritual Power. Su Ming gently peeled off the seal and opened the lid. Inside, there were no peerless Magic Treasures, nor any Heaven-Defying Cultivation Techniques. Only a thin piece of gold foil lay quietly inside.

Su Ming picked up the gold foil and unfolded it. The handwriting on the gold foil was written with some kind of spiritual blood, still bright red and piercing to the eyes after a thousand years. But the handwriting was extremely sloppy, frantic, and even carried a suffocating sense of determination and madness.

"I know that Mortals cannot cultivate immortality, and Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi has its constants. But I do not accept this rule!" The first sentence on the gold foil revealed an emperor's arrogance.

"Rules are made by men, so men can change them. I use National Destiny as the foundation and earth's veins as the network, swearing to lay down this Living Formation that seizes the Heaven and Earth's creation to change the destiny of my Great Yan imperial clan against the Heaven-Defying will!"

Reading this, Su Ming could feel Yan Wuji's ambition back then. But immediately after, the handwriting on the gold foil suddenly became messy, as if the person writing was experiencing immense mental torture.

"But I was wrong... I was terribly wrong!" "The moment the Formation was completely formed, I realized... some things cannot be changed by humans! Behind that passage, it is not at all..."

The handwriting stopped abruptly here. In the bottom right corner of the gold foil, a deep blood handprint was imprinted. Although that blood handprint had been dried for thousands of years, when Su Ming's gaze fell upon it, a faint tingling sensation came from his fingertips; that was the residual, extremely pure National Destiny Spiritual Power.

Looking at the sentence "some things cannot be changed by humans," an indescribable heaviness welled up in Su Ming's heart.

A Mortal emperor, exhausting the power of the entire nation, attempted to use Formations to change his destiny against the Heaven-Defying will, only to fall into utter despair when touching upon some forbidden truth. What a tragic "tear between ideals and reality" this was.

"Junior Martial Brother!" Luo Feng's excited voice suddenly came from the corner, breaking the heavy atmosphere in the stone chamber.

Luo Feng was lying in the pile of dusty sheepskin scrolls, holding a few pages of manuscript remnants that had been mostly burned.

"Look at these manuscripts!" Luo Feng ran over excitedly. "The Spiritual Power conduction model recorded here happens to fill in the missing nodes in that 'Hundred Solutions to Military Formations' from before! These two things are complementary! As long as you give me time, I can completely restore that ancient military Formation!"

Su Ming looked at Luo Feng's face, which was covered in dust but extremely excited, and the gloom in his heart dissipated slightly. For a pure Formation Cultivator, being able to complete incomplete knowledge was the greatest fortune.

"Senior Brother, just keep it safe." Su Ming nodded.

He turned around, took a deep breath, and prepared to put the gold foil carrying Yan Wuji's desperate last words back into the jade box.

Just at the moment the gold foil touched the bottom of the jade box. "Hum!" A sudden change occurred.

The wall Array Patterns, which had been slowly "breathing" at a twelve-breath frequency, suddenly flickered violently like boiling water! The blinding dark golden light instantly illuminated the entire Return to Void Hall.

Su Ming stepped back abruptly, his hand gripping the great teleportation talisman in his Storage Pouch.

He saw that on the surface of the bluestone square table in the center of the stone chamber, the scattered remains were swept away by an invisible force. Immediately after, countless intersecting lines of light lit up on the bluestone surface of the table. These lines of light quickly intertwined and reorganized in mid-air, and finally, an extremely huge and complex three-dimensional Formation Plate projection emerged!

And at the very center of that projection, a demonic red light was beating frantically.