Chapter 626: A Gold Mine in the Void of the Spirit Realm

Lin Yu fell silent.

His ethereal body hung motionless in midair for a full three breaths, his deep gaze locked onto the two crude circles on the ground. The faint blue glow on the surface of his soul body began to flicker at an extremely rapid frequency.

"You're saying..." Lin Yu's voice dropped very low, as if deliberately suppressing some kind of turbulence, "that setting up the Minor Void Spirit Attraction Formation in this godforsaken place is like using a sharp blade to poke through a layer of water-soaked window paper?"

"Not just that." A rare gleam of fanaticism flashed in Su Ming's eyes, the absolute confidence he possessed when he had pushed his formation deduction to the extreme. "If my hypothesis holds, the spiritual energy activation threshold required to tear open the rift will be drastically reduced. And the void spiritual energy that surges out will no longer be that trickling stream, but rather-"

"A waterfall." Lin Yu picked up where he left off, the glow of his soul body blazing brightly all at once, casting the surrounding rock walls in a sea of deep blue.

"Let's do it!" Lin Yu didn't waste a single word of nonsense, making the decision cleanly and decisively. "I'll protect your heart meridian. You set up the formation. This is our last chance to turn things around. If you miscalculate a single step, the two of us will truly end up as fertilizer in these cracks between the rocks."

Su Ming nodded heavily.

He took a deep breath, enduring the tearing pain radiating from the meridians in his right arm, and began clearing a square patch of flat ground, roughly three feet across, on the narrow floor of the crack.

His movements were careful. Every time he moved a piece of rubble, he supported it with his left hand, setting it down with extreme caution, ensuring that not a single sound of impact escaped the range of the breath-concealing arrays.

"Void Stone as the foundation, Soul Stabilizing Sand as the guide."

Su Ming silently recited the mnemonics, his left hand as steady as a mountain as he embedded the few precious Void Stones into the ground according to specific orientations. The depth of each stone, the angle of placement, he had calculated no fewer than ten times within his Consciousness Sea.

There was no excess material to squander. This was the last complete set of formation materials he had left in his possession.

"Cheep..."

Ying, who had been lying in the corner pretending to be dead, seemed to sense the subtle shifts in the surrounding spiritual energy field. She stood up, shook out her metallic-lustered black feathers, and cautiously crept closer, her golden ringed pupils fixed curiously on the stones on the ground.

"Go lie down over there. Don't cause trouble." Lin Yu glared at Ying with annoyance.

Ying shrank her neck with a look of grievance, backed up two steps, and crouched back down in the shadows.

Su Ming paid no attention to the interaction between the two of them. His entire mind was already immersed in the inscription of the formation lines.

"The final stroke."

Su Ming bit through the index finger of his left hand and forced out a drop of essence blood. Without any hesitation, he squeezed out every last bit of the less than ten percent of Ruo Shui spiritual energy remaining in his body, mixing it into the essence blood, and with a sudden motion, inscribed a single ancient and complex "lead" rune onto a Void Stone.

"Hmm-"

The instant the formation was complete, the entire narrow crack space seemed to twist slightly, and a ring of visible, transparent ripples spread outward through the air.

Su Ming didn't hesitate for even a moment. His left hand slammed down onto the formation core: "Activate!"

At that very instant.

Su Ming felt what little remained of his Ruo Shui spiritual energy being drained in an instant, as if sucked dry by a massive bottomless vortex! His vision went black, a violent wave of dizziness assaulted his brain, and his body pitched forward uncontrollably.

"Guard your Spiritual Platform!" Lin Yu's low shout exploded through his Consciousness Sea like a thunderous bell.

Su Ming bit down hard on the tip of his tongue, the metallic, rusty taste of blood flooding his mouth. Using the sharp pain to force himself to stay conscious, he braced the ground with his left hand and lifted his head to look at the center of the formation.

There, above the originally hard rock floor, a pitch-black crack the size of a fingernail had split open from nothing.

The next moment.

"Boom-!"

A stream of void spiritual energy, pure to the extreme and devoid of any attribute, erupted wildly from that tiny crack like a volcano that had been suppressed for ten thousand years!

There was no sound, yet the terrifying surge of spiritual energy blasted Su Ming's hair straight backward. Even the rough rock walls around the crack became coated in an instant with a thin layer of spiritual energy frost.

Su Ming's eyes flew wide in shock.

A waterfall? This wasn't a waterfall at all. This was the Milky Way itself pouring down from the ninth heaven!

The purity and volume of this surging spiritual energy were not merely dozens of times greater than when he had used it in Clear Stream Valley at the Cloud Hidden Sect. This was a gap of a hundred times or more!

The originally inert void spiritual energy, now at such an incredibly high concentration, had even formed a visible, dense white mist above the formation, so thick it seemed ready to condense into water droplets at any moment.

"This... how can the difference be this vast?" Although Su Ming had anticipated this before setting up the formation, he was still stunned into an involuntary murmur by the utterly unreasonable concentration of spiritual energy before his eyes.

Within the Xuantian ring, Lin Yu's soul body had completely drifted out of the ring. His illusory, aged face was also etched with the kind of shock one felt upon seeing a ghost. But after all, he was an old monster who had lived for who knows how many years. It took him only half a breath to recover his composure.

"Your deduction was right!" Lin Yu's voice was even trembling slightly from sheer excitement. "The spatial barrier here is so thin it's like a layer of cheap window paper! The rift was torn deeper and more thoroughly by the formation, so it's only natural that the spiritual energy surging out is unimaginably vast!"

"Don't just stand there gaping! Absorb it!" Lin Yu whipped his head around and shouted at Su Ming, his tone like someone watching another person squander a priceless treasure.

Su Ming snapped back to his senses as if waking from a dream.

He immediately twisted his body, settled into a cross-legged position, didn't even bother to regulate his breathing rhythm, and sent the Like Water Art into a frenzied circulation within his body.

This time, there was no obstruction, no rejection whatsoever.

The pure, flawless void spiritual energy flowed in through the pores all over his body, surging into his meridians like a hundred rivers returning to the sea. The meridians, which had been shriveled and even covered in fine cracks from spiritual energy depletion, greedily drank in every drop of life-saving nectar the moment they came into contact with this energy, like sun-baked, cracked earth finally meeting sweet rain after a long drought.

Within his Dantian, the dim, lusterless Golden Core began to spin once more, faster and faster, its surface brilliance visibly restoring its bright, deep blue glow.

"Ahh..." Su Ming let out a genuine sigh of satisfaction from the depths of his heart.

But just then.

Lin Yu's soul body, suspended in midair, suddenly froze.

His deep, azure eyes were locked unblinkingly on the dense white mist above the formation core.

The glow on the surface of his soul body began to fluctuate violently at a high frequency, uncontrollably. It was an instinctive reaction of extreme craving, of extreme greed, like a starving beast that hadn't eaten for three days and three nights suddenly laying eyes on a feast of the century.

"Master?" Su Ming noticed the anomaly in Lin Yu's aura and cracked his eyes open slightly.

Lin Yu didn't look at him. Instead, as if bewitched by something, he slowly extended an ethereal hand, trembling as it reached into that thick white mist.

The next moment, through his "observation micro state" vision, Su Ming witnessed a scene he would never forget for the rest of his life.

Within that grayish-white sea of void spiritual energy mist were mixed countless silver threads, a hundred times finer than spider silk! And even among these densely packed silver threads, a few points of brilliant golden light occasionally glittered like stars in the night sky!

This was Void Source Substance!

The most primitive, most fundamental material that formed the soul, perceptible only to pure soul bodies!

Su Ming had seen Source Substance in the human realm before. That was when he had cracked Li Kai's ancient formation plate. But back then, the Source Substance had only been the most impure, grayish mist-like form, and being able to strip out a single silver thread or two was enough to keep Lin Yu smiling for days on end.

But now...

These densely packed silver threads, and even golden lights! The density and quality far surpassed any spatial node in the human realm! This was practically an untouched, fully exposed super gold mine!