In the meditation room, the candle flame flickered.

Su Ming held the small jade bottle containing the “Void Stone Powder” in his hand, his wrist suspended in mid-air, not daring to pour it down for a long time.

“What are you shaking for? Got Parkinson’s?” Lin Yu’s voice drifted up in his mind. “This is Li Kai’s life savings. This one bottle is probably worth several years of savings for an ordinary outer sect disciple. If you tremble and spill it wrong, we’ll be drinking the northwest wind tonight.”

“I understand, Master.” Su Ming took a deep breath, forcibly steadying his mind, and lightly flicked his fingertip.

The “Like Water Art” quietly circulated. Dark blue spiritual energy seeped from his fingertip, warm and gentle, first stroking the patterns on the newly carved formation plate to establish a connection.

Only after sensing a faint, barely perceptible responsive tremor from the formation plate did he lightly tap the bottle with his fingertip.

An extremely fine wisp of silver-gray powder accurately fell into the repaired “flexible node” at the center of the dark gold formation plate.

This was the seventh attempt tonight.

The previous six times, either the spiritual energy output frequency was wrong, or the Soul Stabilizing Sand was sprinkled too early. In short, the delicate “Minor Void Spirit Attraction Formation” gave no face at all, aside from emitting a couple of puffs of black smoke.

“Don’t be stingy. Think bigger.” Lin Yu directed. “Try a different approach this time. Don’t use brute force to ‘push’ the spiritual energy. Use the ‘lead’ principle of the ‘Like Water Art’. Imagine you’re giving this formation plate a massage. Be gentle, got it? Just like when you repair those broken formation plates.”

Su Ming ignored this nonsensical analogy, holding his breath and concentrating.

The dark blue water spiritual energy within his body slowly extended out. This time, it didn’t directly pour in. Instead, it followed the complex, vein-like patterns on the formation plate, seeping in and enveloping them bit by bit.

*Hum—*

The formation plate emitted an extremely faint trembling sound.

The originally dead, dark red patterns seemed to be injected with blood, beginning to pulsate rhythmically.

“This might work!” Su Ming’s eyes lit up. The hand seals in his hands changed, and he finally threw the Soul Stabilizing Sand fiercely towards the area around the formation plate.

*Whoosh!*

The air in the meditation room suddenly grew heavy.

There was no earth-shattering pillar of light, nor a tidal wave of spiritual energy.

Only at the void node in the center of the formation plate, the space seemed to collapse inwards. Then, wisps of dull, gray, utterly unremarkable mist seeped out slowly, as if alive.

In that instant, the temperature in the meditation room plummeted.

The tea on the table visibly formed a thin layer of ice. The candle flame was instantly compressed to the size of a bean, turning into a dismal blue-green color.

Su Ming shivered, a layer of white frost forming on his eyebrows.

“This is… Void spiritual energy?”

He tentatively circulated his cultivation method, drawing a wisp of that gray mist into his body.

*Hiss—*

A chill that pierced to the bone shot up along his meridians straight to the crown of his head. The feeling was like jumping naked into an ice cave in the dead of winter.

What was worse, this spiritual energy was extremely “inert.” Once inside his body, it was like a rock. No matter how Su Ming tried to circulate and refine it, it remained motionless. It even continuously consumed his own spiritual energy to counteract that chill.

“Pfft!” Su Ming’s face paled slightly. He quickly forced this strand of foreign spiritual energy out of his body. His internal spiritual energy had already been depleted by a small portion. “Master, this energy… is indeed as Li Kai said, extremely pure, with almost no impurities. However, its nature is ‘silent, cold, inert, and stagnant.’ The mental and spiritual energy required to refine it far exceeds its benefits. The cost outweighs the gain. It is truly not a good choice for cultivation. It might be useful for purging foreign spiritual energies or creating specific environments, but directly absorbing it is truly not worth the loss.”

“Hmm, it seems Li Kai wasn’t lying. This energy is indeed useless.” Lin Yu’s voice also carried a trace of disappointment. “Unless one cultivates an extremely cold-attribute cultivation method, or refines certain top-tier elixirs or magical tools that require absolute calm and the rejection of impurities, its value is limited. Forget it. Stop for now. What a waste of so much Void Stone Powder.”

Su Ming nodded, also feeling it was a pity. He reached out, intending to cut off the spiritual energy supply and dismantle the formation.

Just as his fingertip was about to touch the runes at the edge of the formation plate, at the moment his spiritual energy was about to be cut off but hadn’t been yet—

“Wait!”

Lin Yu suddenly roared, startling Su Ming so much his hand shook, nearly flipping the formation plate over.

“What is it, Master? Is the formation going to explode?” Su Ming immediately assumed a crouching, head-covering defensive posture.

“No… Don’t move! Absolutely do not move!”

Lin Yu’s voice became extremely strange, carrying an unprecedented urgency, and even a hint of… the sound of swallowing saliva?

“Disciple, do you smell something?”

“Smell something?” Su Ming sniffed. Besides the cold air, there was nothing. “No, there’s only a chill.”

“No… It’s fragrant.” Lin Yu murmured to himself. “This formation… seems to have smuggled in something extra? This feeling… why is it so like someone who’s been starving for three days suddenly smelling braised pork?”

Su Ming was utterly bewildered. “Master, you’re a soul body. How do you have a sense of smell? And braised pork?”

“Less nonsense! This is an instinct! An instinct from the depths of the soul!” Lin Yu grew anxious. “Quick! Bring the ring closer! Right in the center of that gray mist, there’s something a little different!”

Seeing Lin Yu so flustered, Su Ming didn’t dare delay. He hurriedly extended his left hand wearing the ring towards the center of the formation plate where the rolling gray mist was.

For safety’s sake, he wrapped three layers of water spiritual energy shields around his hand.

Closer.

“There! Grab it!” Lin Yu shouted.

Su Ming focused all his divine sense, carefully searching within that gray, hazy mist.

Finally, in the microscopic view of his divine sense, he captured an utterly shocking scene.

Hidden within the gaps of the vast, dead, cold gray “waste gas,” there were actually a few wisps of gray-brown “filaments” a hundred times finer than the thinnest spider silk, nearly impossible to detect with the naked eye.

They were mixed in with the Void spiritual energy, utterly inconspicuous, not even emitting spiritual energy fluctuations, like dust.

But this was exactly what Lin Yu wanted!

*Slurp—*

An extremely faint sucking sound rang out.

Those few wisps of gray-brown airflow were precisely peeled away by the Xuantian ring and swallowed in one gulp. As for the remaining bone-chillingly cold Void spiritual energy, it was disdainfully “spat” aside.

The next second.

A long, utterly ecstatic groan from Lin Yu sounded in Su Ming’s mind.

“Ah— That feels amazing!”

The sheer bliss in that voice gave Su Ming goosebumps.

“Master… are you alright? Don’t tell me you’ve been poisoned?”

“Poisoned, my foot! This is a tonic! A peerless, supreme tonic!”

Lin Yu’s voice trembled. The soul body phantom manifested in the Consciousness Sea was actually a tiny bit clearer than before. His originally somewhat illusory and indistinct facial contours could now make out the bridge of his nose!

“Disciple! This thing can nourish the soul!”

Lin Yu was so excited he was incoherent. “Not the kind of ‘nourishment’ that relies on spiritual energy, but… it reaches the very source! Like a long-dry spring suddenly receiving a downpour of sweet rain! Although the amount just now was very small, its essence is extremely high! It’s ten thousand times better than any Soul Nourishing Wood or Soul Stabilizing Pill!”

Hearing this, Su Ming’s heart was also greatly shaken.

Soul nourishment!

What this meant for Lin Yu, who only had a remnant soul left, was self-evident.

“Master, what exactly is this ‘filament’? Li Kai never mentioned the formation would produce such a thing!”

“I don’t know. This is beyond my knowledge base.” Lin Yu calmed down a bit and began to analyze. “But this thing seeped out from a void rift. It definitely doesn’t belong to this world. The ‘Beyond the Heavens’ fragmentary scroll Li Kai’s family obtained is incomplete. Perhaps they also didn’t know that this ‘Minor Void Spirit Attraction Formation,’ aside from attracting that silent, cold spiritual energy from the void, also attracts this kind of ‘source substance’ that can nourish the very source of the soul!”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep