Chapter 3963: Learning With Time And Effort

Lin Mu smiled faintly. "I could do this with my ring."

"Obviously." Xukong chuckled while Lin Mu gave a helpless sigh.

The ring allowed him to manipulate spatial storage and interact with spatial structures at a level Zhenyu could never reach through his own method. There was little reason for Lin Mu to reproduce such a crude technique.

Yet that was not what interested him. The fascinating part was how Zhenyu had reached the conclusion. He had essentially reverse engineered spatial behavior through observation. He lacked talent, proper guidance and even lacked a complete spatial cultivation inheritance.

But what he had was time... Thousands of years of it. And a spatial environment so unusual that even Xukong had considered the Dual Dimensional Vacuum Compression Art exceptionally rare.

Lin Mu leaned against the wall and continued reading. ’Spending time in this compressed space must have been what allowed him to achieve this.’

The thought felt increasingly certain. The space within the hidden inheritance was effectively a specialized environment for studying spatial principles. Everywhere Lin Mu looked, space existed in a compressed and layered state.

The walls contained nested spatial pockets and the floor itself had been transformed into a medium capable of maintaining spatial structures. The entire hut existed within a configuration that would be incredibly difficult to reproduce.

Simply existing inside such an environment for thousands of years would gradually change the way a cultivator perceived space. Zhenyu had essentially been placed inside a gigantic spatial laboratory.

The problem was that entering that laboratory already required considerable spatial understanding.

Lin Mu found the situation amusing. "It is like putting the cart before the horse."

"Indeed," Xukong replied.

To learn the Spatial Dao from the compressed space, one needed enough understanding to survive inside it and recognize what one was observing. A normal cultivator could spend thousands of years inside that place and learn nothing.

They might simply see strange spatial fluctuations. They might experience pressure. Or they might sense something moving around them. Without the ability to interpret those changes, the environment would remain incomprehensible.

Zhenyu had already been an exceptional cultivator when he entered the Mad Demon Depths. His comprehension was high enough that, after countless years of observation, he eventually began recognizing patterns.

Once he recognized those patterns, he could experiment, once he experimented, he could make discoveries and once those discoveries accumulated, his understanding gradually became deeper.

Lin Mu continued reading and learned that Zhenyu had even tried applying spatial principles to his body. One experiment involved creating microscopic spatial folds around his muscles to reduce the amount of force required for certain movements.

Another involved using spatial distortion to redirect the force of an attack while a third attempted to create a temporary spatial buffer around his organs when taking a hit from an enemy.

Most of those experiments had failed, and several had injured him. One had even destroyed a portion of his internal meridians to the point where if he did not have the array helping him, he would have simply become a cripple.

Yet Zhenyu had continued and Lin Mu could not help feeling impressed. "His persistence was ridiculous."

"That is one way to describe it," Xukong said while Lin Mu smiled.

Zhenyu’s obsession had ultimately produced something useful. His spatial applications were crude, yet they contained principles that Lin Mu could potentially improve. For example, the idea of using the body as a spatial anchor had potential.

Lin Mu had a vastly stronger physique and his understanding of spatial Dao was also much deeper. Most of all he had the spatial perception necessary to see the true structure behind spatial fluctuations.

If he combined those advantages with Zhenyu’s observations, he could perhaps develop an entirely different method.

Lin Mu began mentally reconstructing the elder’s experiments. He first removed the inefficient portions, then replaced crude Qi circulation methods, altered the spatial anchor concept and then considered how his own body, cores and spatial perception interacted.

Soon his thoughts began moving faster.

The Shifting Earth, Churning Sea Dual Refinement Art itself might be useless to him, yet the research surrounding it had given him several interesting ideas. This was why cultivation knowledge could rarely be judged simply by looking at the final result.

A technique could be inferior while the principles used to create it remained valuable. Zhenyu had spent thousands of years digging through a wall and Lin Mu had arrived after the tunnel had already been opened.

He simply needed to see what could be done with it. After another hour, Lin Mu finally closed the section containing Zhenyu’s cultivation research as he had learned enough for now.

There were still countless records remaining inside the jade token, and the deeper he explored, the more obvious it became that Zhenyu had documented almost every aspect of his existence.

Lin Mu glanced at the token. "Senior, this jade token really is impressive."

"Zhenyu spent thousands of years modifying it and he probably had nothing else to do."

"That certainly helped." Lin Mu chuckled before he opened the next section and his expression slowly became serious.

This section had a different title and it was simply called:

"Observations of the Mad Demon Depths."

Lin Mu’s eyes narrowed.

"Now this," he muttered, "might actually be useful."

Lin Mu spent a considerable amount of time going through the observations that Junior Elder Zhenyu had accumulated about the Mad Demon Depths. Compared to the cultivation records, these notes were far more scattered.

Zhenyu had clearly written them whenever he made a discovery, sometimes recording several pages worth of information in one sitting and then going hundreds of years without adding anything substantial.

There were also diagrams, rough maps, descriptions of formations and occasional guesses that Zhenyu himself had later crossed out after discovering that his original assumption had been wrong.

Lin Mu read all of it carefully and the more he read, the more the Mad Demon Depths began to make sense. Though half of what he found merely confirmed things he had already deduced after arriving here.