Chapter 618: The Unknown Realm

Su Ming immediately complied, sealing his ears with spiritual energy.

But that falling sensation of weightlessness, he simply could not shake off.

Time lost all meaning here.

Perhaps only a few breaths had passed, or perhaps he had been falling for days and nights on end.

Su Ming could feel the Golden Core within him gradually dimming. Though its rotation remained frantically fast, that withering sensation of depletion spread through his entire body like gangrene clinging to bone.

His consciousness began to blur.

The stark white light in his vision gradually dissolved into a murky gray chaos.

The protective layer of the Like Water Art on his body had thinned to its absolute limit. His body had been sliced by spatial fragments countless times, leaving wounds deep enough to expose bone. The blood barely had time to flow out before it was instantly vaporized by the spatial currents surrounding him.

"Am I... going to fall forever into this void?"

A desperate thought rose irresistibly from the depths of Su Ming's heart.

"Don't sleep! I'm telling you, don't sleep!" Lin Yu's furious roar seemed to come from somewhere impossibly far away.

Su Ming wanted to respond, but his eyelids felt as heavy as if they had been filled with lead.

Just as he thought he would completely lose consciousness and let the darkness swallow him whole...

"Whoosh—"

A warm, richly concentrated force of vital essence suddenly surged up from the void below, like an enormous, impossibly soft swaddling cloth, instantly wrapping around his battered, broken body.

The force of his fall was abruptly cushioned by this power.

The nauseating spatial dislocation around him vanished in an instant.

Su Ming forced open a sliver of his eyelids. Through the blur, he heard a distinct sound of wind, along with the gentle gurgle of flowing water.

Even stranger, he seemed to hear the faint "rustling" sounds of some kind of plant growing wildly—branches stretching, leaves unfurling.

"Thud!"

A dull impact.

Su Ming felt his body slam heavily onto a patch of soft ground. The texture wasn't like hard rock; instead, it felt like a thick layer of velvet moss.

The violent impact finally became the last straw that broke the camel's back.

Su Ming's vision went black, and he fell completely unconscious.

...

No one knew how much time had passed.

Su Ming's Consciousness Sea was a complete mess.

The once vast and brilliant galaxy was now dim and lifeless. That Reflection Lonely Lamp had been reduced to a single dying ember, barely clinging to existence.

Lin Yu's Soul Body rippled violently, its surface sheen so faint it was almost transparent.

He sat cross-legged beside the lone lamp, his hands forming a strange hand seal, carefully injecting strands of soul power into the lamp to stabilize Su Ming's collapsing Consciousness Sea.

Watching the gradually stabilizing spark, Lin Yu let out a long sigh of relief, his tense Soul Body relaxing ever so slightly.

While maintaining the soul power transfusion, he split off a wisp of divine sense and, through the faint perception channel of the Xuantian ring, anxiously observed the outside environment.

When he "saw" the scene outside clearly, Lin Yu's illusory brows instantly twisted into a tight knot.

This was a completely foreign, even bizarre and outlandish world.

The air was thick with an essence of vitality so dense it almost seemed to condense into substance. But Lin Yu quickly and keenly noticed that the structure of this vitality was fundamentally different from the spiritual energy of the human cultivation world. It was wilder, more primal, carrying a nearly demonic sense of devouring.

Su Ming was currently lying at the edge of a patch of grass that emitted a faint blue glow.

All around him were enormous plants the likes of which Lin Yu had never seen even in the ancient texts of the mortal world.

Not far away stood a "tree" with no leaves. Its thick trunk was like a transparent glass tube, and inside it flowed some kind of glaring golden liquid light. Even farther off, several bizarre mushrooms the size of ordinary houses grew, their caps covered in purple spots that pulsed open and closed with some kind of breathing rhythm.

Looking up.

The sky was not blue, but a strange, unsettling pale purple. There was no sun, no stars—only several bands of gorgeous aurora-like light drifting slowly across the heavens.

"That old bastard Yan Wuji left a back door, and of course it's goddamn unreliable!"

Lin Yu withdrew his divine sense and cursed quietly in the Consciousness Sea.

"'This door can be opened,' my ass! We almost didn't even leave a single bone fragment behind!"

He looked down at Su Ming, still unconscious, and floated his Soul Body above the phantom of Su Ming's consciousness. In his voice was a hint of anxiety he himself hadn't even noticed.

"Disciple, you'd better wake up quickly. In this godforsaken place, this remnant soul of mine that dies in daylight can't protect you for long."

Sweet.

It was a cloying, suffocatingly sweet fragrance, as if thousands of overripe, rotting flowers had been crushed together and forced to release their scent.

The fragrance shot straight up his nose and slammed into his brain, making Su Ming, who had just regained a sliver of consciousness, feel a violent wave of dizziness.

"Hiss..."

Su Ming sucked in a sharp breath and struggled to open his heavy eyelids.

What greeted his eyes was a hazy pale purple. He instinctively raised a hand to rub his eyes, only to find his right arm as heavy as a thousand jun. Every movement brought with it agonizing pain like muscles being torn apart.

"Cheep! Cheep cheep!"

A series of rapid, light pecking pains struck his fingers.

Su Ming turned his head and saw Ying crouched on his chest, her small black beak frantically pecking at his fingertips. Seeing that Su Ming had finally woken up, Ying flapped her wings excitedly, and her golden eye rings actually showed a human-like gleam of relief.

"Stop pecking, I'm not dead yet," Su Ming said, his voice hoarse and dry, as if it had been scraped across sandpaper.

He clenched his teeth and, using his uninjured left hand to push against the impossibly soft moss-covered ground, forcibly propped his upper body up.

The bizarre scene before his eyes made even this formation cultivator, known for his calm composure, involuntarily narrow his pupils.

Giant glowing plants stood around him like primeval beasts from an ancient era. Strange trees flowing with liquid light, house-sized purple-spotted mushrooms, and the faintly glowing grass beneath his feet.

Everything here carried a sense of absurd, otherworldly prosperity.

Su Ming closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and began rapidly assessing his own condition. This was an instinct he had developed since stepping into the cultivation world—when in a desperate situation, first calculate yourself, then calculate the enemy.

"External injuries are severe. The spell robe is almost completely destroyed. There are spatial laceration wounds up to an inch deep on my right arm and back, but fortunately no damage to bones or internal organs."

"Meridians have minor vibration damage—a side effect of forcibly squeezing out spiritual energy."

"Golden Core..."

Su Ming sank his mind into his Dantian, and his brows instantly knitted tight.

"Spiritual energy is nearly seventy percent depleted. The Golden Core's luster is dim."

However, what truly made his hair stand on end was not his injuries.

He instinctively circulated the Like Water Art, attempting to absorb spiritual energy from the surrounding air to recover his expenditure. But after the technique ran through three full cycles, his body remained completely empty.

There was no spiritual energy.

This space was filled with that dense, unshakeable vitality essence, but his human body was utterly incapable of absorbing or converting even the slightest trace of it!

It was like a man dying of thirst falling into a pool filled with mercury. He could see the liquid all around him, yet couldn't drink a single drop.

"This is a serious problem." Su Ming opened his eyes, a helpless bitter smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "It seems we really have arrived at the Spirit Realm. And more than that—it's a Spirit Realm where spiritual energy replenishment has been stripped away."

In the human cultivation world, spiritual energy was the foundation of every cultivator. Once one could no longer replenish spiritual energy, even a mighty Nascent Soul elder would eventually exhaust their reserves and be reduced to a mere mortal.

"Don't start lamenting just yet."

In his Consciousness Sea, Lin Yu's voice sounded heavily.

Having gone through that life-and-death struggle the night before, Lin Yu's soul voice was somewhat weakened, but that wariness in his tone was ten times heavier than usual.