265: Chapter 265 Those outside were extremely disappointed, while those inside were extremely excited.

Late at night on the second day, the Taihu Clan Clan Chief stood up once again, her clear and cold voice tinged with a hint of undisguised disappointment: "It seems that the Supreme Elder and I overestimated him."

"An ancient Legacy cannot be obtained without great wisdom and great Opportunity."

"Perhaps he has peculiarities in other areas, but when it comes to the path of Dao... he ultimately lacks the necessary depth."

She looked toward the Supreme Elder: "Supreme Elder, why not forcibly open the Legacy site and bring him out? To prevent him from falling into a demonic obsession while inside."

The phantom of the Supreme Elder remained silent for a long time, eventually letting out an almost inaudible sigh: "Forget it."

"Perhaps this is his limit."

"At this time tomorrow, if there is still no movement, I will take action to open the Restriction."

The Taihu Clan Clan Chief nodded slightly, her figure turning into moonlight and dissipating in the hall.

She had left.

The third day, at the first light of dawn.

The phantom of the Supreme Elder still hovered at the side of the hall, but it was a few shades dimmer than before, as if even she had lost most of her expectations.

The Grand Elder shook his head and sighed, already preparing to go handle other clan affairs.

Elder Lan Yi patted Lady Qingli on the shoulder, silently offering comfort.

Most of the clansmen watching outside the palace had also dispersed, leaving only a few particularly curious ones still gazing from afar.

Everyone believed that Xu Ruyu's trip to the ancient Legacy site would end in a disappointing and anticlimactic manner.

...

However, what they did not know was that inside that ancient space which formed a world of its own within the Legacy site, Xu Ruyu was experiencing an unprecedented, exhilarating "storm of knowledge" and a "creative carnival"!

The moment he stepped through the giant bronze gate, Xu Ruyu found himself in an incomparably vast, seemingly boundless grey space.

The sky was eternal Chaos grey, without sun, moon, or stars. The ground was flat, also in the same grey tone.

And in the center of this grey land, over a hundred massive stone steles, towering like mountains, stood in a formation that seemed chaotic but actually contained profound mysteries!

Each stele was dozens of zhang high, their entire bodies presenting a dark gold color that had weathered the vicissitudes of ages. Their surfaces were covered in traces of erosion by wind and rain, yet they still emanated a heavy, ancient, and vast aura.

On the steles were engraved dense, ancient characters and patterns of varying sizes and shapes.

Some were pictographic runes, some were twisted Dao patterns, some were lines like star trajectories, and some were vivid, lifelike human figures practicing movements...

But these characters and patterns were mostly incomplete, either partially erased by some unknown power or broken and missing due to the damage to the steles themselves, resulting in the information they recorded being fragmented, incoherent, and full of contradictions and gaps.

The air was filled with a strange atmosphere that was desolate and tragic, yet contained endless wisdom and mysteries.

It was as if the sighs and whispers of countless sages were echoing among the steles.

Xu Ruyu stood at the entrance of the stele forest, and after just a rough scan, he was deeply shocked.

These were not just over a hundred incomplete Cultivation Techniques; they were more like "Heavenly Books" torn apart by time, recording the brilliance and mysteries of ancient cultivation civilization!

He did not rush to comprehend any single stele; instead, he spent about an hour quickly walking through all the steles, using his powerful memory and the unique perception brought by the True Explanation of Taixu Source Energy to imprint the incomplete content of every stele into his mind as much as possible, forming a macro, fuzzy overall impression.

He soon discovered that although these ancient Cultivation Techniques were incomplete, had different attributes (metal, wood, water, fire, earth, wind, lightning, ice, illusion, poison, body, soul, etc.), and their cultivation philosophies differed vastly, they had subtle commonalities at some of the most fundamental levels of "energy cognition," "body development," and "resonance with heaven and earth"—or rather, they were attempts to explore the same essence through different paths.

Moreover, the missing parts of many Cultivation Techniques were not completely untraceable; often, they could be logically deduced and completed from the context, similar techniques, or even the philosophy of "Dao" they expounded.

"This doesn't look like simple memory loss or physical damage..." Xu Ruyu rubbed his chin, his eyes flashing with thoughtful light, "It's more like... during the transmission process, due to changes in the environment of heaven and earth, misunderstandings by practitioners, or the loss of certain key 'concepts,' systematic 'distortion' and 'discontinuity' occurred when later generations copied or understood them."

"And my advantage is—" He hooked his lips into a confident arc, "I possess a completely different knowledge System and analytical tools from another world!"

"The True Explanation of Taixu Source Energy allows me to view cultivation from the perspective of the most fundamental 'energy acquisition and conversion.'"

"Modern scientific logical thinking, Systems theory, cybernetics, and even the idea of mathematical modeling allow me to conduct more effective 'pattern recognition,' 'inference of missing information,' and 'System reconstruction' when facing this fragmented information!"

"More importantly," he looked at those steles with burning eyes, "I don't need to be limited to the inherent cultivation framework of this world to understand them like the sages of the Taihu Clan."

"I can jump out of it, and use my 'Dao' to interpret, verify, and even... upgrade them!"

Having figured this out, Xu Ruyu no longer hesitated. He came to the stele numbered "One."

What was recorded on this stele was a remnant of a Cultivation Technique called the Mystic Moon Condensation Art, which seemed to be the ancient source of some Taihu Clan moonlight cultivation method, but it was missing the most critical middle section of the "condensation" Mind-Cultivation Technique and the latter half of the "transformation" application technique.