Chapter 614: The Ruo Shui World Gate

"Bang!"

On the greenstone floor of the stargazing platform, centered on Su Ming, seven or eight bottomless fissures split open in an instant! Debris flew in every direction, and Su Ming was blasted backward, sliding several zhang before coming to a halt, his face turning as pale as paper in an instant.

"Failed." Su Ming swallowed the blood that surged into his throat, staring fixedly at the stone carving that remained utterly unchanged.

Su Ming did not lose heart. He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and stepped forward once more.

Half an hour later.

"Boom!"

Another thunderous roar. This time, violent spiritual energy detonated right at Su Ming's fingertips. The extreme, biting cold intertwined with the savage spatial slicing force, nearly severing Su Ming's right index finger clean off at the root!

Had he not used his lifebound formation plate to forcibly deflect most of the force at the last moment, this hand would likely have been crippled.

Second failure. The gentle, yielding nature of his water spiritual energy had provoked an intensely violent repulsion when it came into contact with that pure, destructive spatial turbulence.

Su Ming gasped for breath, beads of sweat pouring down his forehead. The Golden Core within his body was spinning at a frantic pace, yet the consumption rate of his Ruo Shui spiritual energy was terrifyingly fast.

"Again!"

An hour later, the third attempt.

This time, Su Ming learned from the mistakes of the first two tries. He no longer forced the runes to fuse together by brute strength. Instead, he employed a delicate "bridge-building" technique, using his water spiritual energy to construct a fragile transitional bridge between the human runes and the spirit race's formation principles.

The blue rune array slowly took shape, and miraculously, it managed to embed itself into the gaps of the stone carving.

"It worked?" A glimmer of joy flashed through Su Ming's eyes.

Yet this joy lasted barely five breaths.

"Crack, crack, crack..."

A teeth-grinding, splintering sound echoed from within the formation lines. That fragile transitional bridge simply could not withstand the torrential flood of information generated by the World Gate's underlying operations. At the tail end of the fifth breath, it collapsed with a resounding crash!

"Pfft!"

Su Ming spat out a massive mouthful of blood and collapsed limply to the ground. He gasped for air in great heaves, his vision even starting to blur. The spiritual energy within his Golden Core had been nearly half-depleted, and his meridians throbbed with needle-pricking pain.

"Stop it, you fool."

A ghostly blue Soul Body drifted before Su Ming, looking down at him from above.

"Three attempts, three explosions. Have you caught the madness from that explosion addict, Luo Feng?" Lin Yu's tone was filled with the frustration of a mentor watching his disciple make the same mistakes.

Su Ming leaned against a stone pillar, letting out a bitter laugh: "Master is right. But the repulsive force of these laws far exceeds my imagination. They simply cannot be merged into one."

"Who told you to merge them into one?" Lin Yu snorted coldly, his Soul Body tracing a sharp arc through the air. "You're far too fixated on the word 'restore'!"

Lin Yu's gaze was like twin swords, piercing straight into Su Ming's heart.

"Yan Wuji, with the full might of an entire empire, only dared to build this World Gate halfway. What makes you think that with a thousand-odd basic runes, you can craft a perfect World Gate in one go?"

Su Ming was stunned. He stared at Lin Yu, a flash of lightning seemingly striking through his mind.

"Your entire approach is wrong! Completely wrong!" Lin Yu's voice thundered through the Consciousness Sea like a thunderous bell. "Stop thinking about how to fix this broken door! What you need to do isn't restore it, it's—graft!"

"Graft?" Su Ming murmured.

"Yes! Graft!" Lin Yu said with absolute finality. "Since the laws of the two realms are as incompatible as fire and water, then don't try to make them compatible! Treat this World Gate as a withered, poisonous tree, and take your soft, force-yielding water spiritual energy structure and wrap it around it like vines! Don't repair its wood—use your vines to sheath this poisonous tree in a shell of your own making!"

"Turn this incomplete World Gate into a part of your water-attributed formation system! Use your rules to encase its chaos!"

A single sentence awakened the dreamer.

Su Ming's eyes lit up instantly. His previously exhausted thoughts, invigorated by those brutally vivid metaphors, surged back to life like a withered tree meeting spring.

He understood now.

Before, he had been trying to use his own materials to repair a palace built in a foreign style. The materials rebelled. The palace rebelled.

Now, what he needed to do was build a massive, soft greenhouse around the outside of that broken palace, using his own materials, sealing the entire palace—along with the raging storms within—inside!

"Ruo Shui World Gate..."

Su Ming muttered those four words under his breath.

He sprang to his feet, ignoring his injuries, and grabbed handful after handful of spiritual energy-restoring elixirs from his storage pouch, shoving them into his mouth like candy beans.

This time, Su Ming completely abandoned any attempt to analyze the operational logic of those three thousand six hundred miniature runes. He didn't even touch those broken chains of laws anymore.

He stepped back three paces and formed an ancient, complex hand seal with both hands.

"Water benefits all things without contending..."

Su Ming chanted the general outline of the Like Water Art in a low voice. Within his Dantian, the cyan-white lifebound formation plate began to spin with unprecedented speed.

A vast torrent of Ruo Shui spiritual energy surged forth, but this time, it did not transform into threads, nor did it condense into runes. Instead, it became a vast, surging expanse of ghostly blue water mist.

The mist spread outward, completely enveloping the entire "Spirit Court Boundary Route" stone carving.

Su Ming's hands danced through the air like he was strumming the strings of a zither.

"Embrace without rejecting."

An extremely soft water membrane, capable of deforming freely under internal pressure, adhered to the surface of the stone carving. This was the first layer of defense Su Ming constructed—the shock absorption layer.

"Flow without ceasing."

The second layer of water membrane dissolved into countless tiny streams, weaving through the first layer like blood vessels. Their purpose was to rapidly conduct and disperse the violent pressure generated by the conflicting internal laws to every corner of the entire water membrane.

"Purify without blemish."

The third layer, and the most crucial one. Su Ming took all the filtering and purifying formation lines from his one thousand and eighty basic runes, shattered them, and infused them into this layer of the water membrane. This layer would serve as the final line of defense, blocking the erosion of foreign laws against his soul.

It was like forcibly encasing the original, battered door frame inside a massive, thick, soft glass dome with a triple-layered filtration defense mechanism!

Time flowed rapidly as this meticulous, mentally taxing construction progressed.

Ying perched obediently on a stone pillar not far away, tilting her head, her golden eye rings fixed unblinkingly on Su Ming's busy figure. Occasionally, when Su Ming's spiritual energy showed the slightest sign of instability, she would let out a crisp "cheep," as if cheering him on.

Lin Yu, meanwhile, hovered in midair, maintaining a rare state of absolute silence. His ethereal eyes were locked onto Su Ming's techniques, only speaking up with brief reminders about rune directions at the most critical spiritual energy node transitions.

Six hours later.

"Condense!"

With a slightly hoarse low shout from Su Ming, his hands slammed together in front of him.

On the stargazing platform, the sea of blue water mist instantly collapsed and solidified!

A massive, semi-circular, ghostly blue transparent water dome settled firmly over the "Spirit Court Boundary Route" stone carving.