Night had deepened.

The Cloud Hidden Sect’s clamor gradually quieted, leaving only the low hum of the mountain-protecting formation, like the breath of a giant beast.

Su Ming stared at the surging sea of clouds, stared at the vast starry sky overhead, and that awe and unease toward the unknown, buried deep in his bones, quietly crawled back into his chest.

He had reached Foundation Establishment.

To others, this was a leap to the heavens, a divide between immortal and mortal.

But to him, it only meant he now had the qualification to face far more terrifying dangers, to be swept into far deeper whirlpools.

“Master.” 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Su Ming suddenly spoke, his voice so soft only he could hear it, “Would you say my Foundation Establishment… is stable now?”

A faint light flashed on the ring.

Lin Yu’s voice came through. It still carried that world-weary tone, but underneath it was an unmistakable weakness. Reforging Su Ming’s Dao foundation had consumed most of the soul power he had painstakingly accumulated.

“Stable, stable. Put your heart down in your belly.”

Lin Yu said grumpily, “More stable than that fish you just burned. Those seven pieces of Star Pattern Steel plus the Earth Vein Spirit Milk — if you had any less help, I’d have to give you the ‘Strongest Concrete Engineering Award in All of Cultivation’. Hurry back and sleep. Standing in the cold at this hour, do you think you’re the protagonist of Some Mortal Cultivation Tale, out there contemplating life?”

Su Ming’s mouth curved slightly; the tension in his shoulders eased.

He stood up, brushed the dust from his Taoist robe, ready to return to his cave dwelling.

“Your scolding is received, disciple will—”

Before he could finish,

Su Ming’s movement abruptly froze.

Not just the movement.

The foot he had just lifted hung in midair, the hem of his robe flapping in the breeze stopped.

Lin Yu saw it: a withered leaf falling from an old pine at the cliff’s edge had stopped and hovered three inches in front of Su Ming’s nose. The leaf veins were clear; even the little curled yellowed edge could be seen.

It did not move.

The wind stopped.

The fierce wind that once howled across the cliff felt as if an invisible giant hand had instantly clamped its throat; not even a ripple of airflow remained.

Sound vanished as well.

The hum of the mountain-protecting formation, the chirping of distant insects, even the beating of Su Ming’s own heart, were all stripped away in that instant.

The whole world felt like a silent movie paused on a single frame.

The distant lights on Formation Peak, which should have flickered in the night, were frozen into a dead, golden-red stillness, like oil paint on canvas, exuding a chilling sense of distortion.

Su Ming’s pupils violently shrank to pinpoints.

That sensation…

“Ma…ster…”

The faint light on the Xuantian ring froze as well.

It was an indescribable sense of removal.

Su Ming felt like an insect sealed in amber. One moment the pine wind and night insects roared in his ears; the next, all sound in the world had been forcibly sucked away by an invisible hand.

There was no oppressive pressure, no murderous intent, not even any detectable fluctuation of spiritual energy.

And yet he could not move.

The liquid spiritual energy in his body, which had just surged like quicksilver upon Foundation Establishment, was now like a frozen lake, not a single ripple stirring. The only things that could move were his thoughts and those eyes that still rolled in their sockets.

Three zhang away, beneath the old pine, a gray-robed elder appeared.

The gray-robed elder did not look at him.

His gaze pierced the night, pierced Su Ming’s body, and settled directly on the Xuantian ring on Su Ming’s left index finger. The look was indifferent, like an ancient well dried up for thousands of years—no waves, but unfathomable depth.

Su Ming clearly felt the breath within the ring vanish.

Not the usual withdrawing of a presence, but a complete, deathlike silence. It was like a turtle encountering a mortal enemy: not only retracting its head into its shell, but forcing its heartbeat to stop, as if trying to disguise itself as a lifeless stone.

“…Don’t look up.”

A very faint thought exploded in the depths of Su Ming’s Consciousness Sea. The voice trembled violently, like chaff being sifted, carrying a shudder from the very soul that Su Ming had never heard from his master before.

Su Ming could not lift his head.

His neck stiffened as if filled with lead.

The gray-robed elder moved.

He took a step.

That step made no spatial displacement ripple, no folded-space trace. He moved like an ordinary mortal old man, strolling casually in his backyard garden.

But Su Ming’s pupils shrank sharply.

Because with that step, the elder immediately crossed the three-zhang gap and stood right before him.

So close he could have touched him.

Su Ming could even see the fine stitches on the elder’s gray robe, the tiny pine pollen specks on his sleeve, and smell a faint scent of aged paper.

The elder raised his hand.

The hand was gaunt, covered with brown spots, knuckles thick, not seeming very strong.

He extended one finger and lightly tapped Su Ming’s brow.

“Buzz.”

Su Ming felt a thunder in his mind.

The world before his eyes changed.

It was no longer the night at Gazing Star Cliff, no longer the rolling sea of clouds.

He felt himself pushed into a boundless, bottomless water domain.

Around him were dim flowing lights—his stagnant spiritual energy. Exterior sounds, light, and touch were infinitely stretched and distorted, finally becoming vague shadows behind a thick water curtain.

He “slept” away.

It was a strangely detached state. He knew he was still standing, knew someone stood in front of him, but he had lost all control of his body, like a spectator looking at his own shell through frosted glass.

The gray-robed elder withdrew his finger, and his gaze finally shifted from the ring to Su Ming’s face, which was slightly stiff with terror.

He inspected.

That wisp of spiritual sense swept like spring rain over Su Ming’s limbs, organs, even delving into the freshly reforged Dao foundation, faintly streaked with gold.

Nothing.

There was no domineering Star Bloodline.

There was none of that family-specific madness and stubbornness engraved into bone.

This youth was clean as a sheet of white paper. Apart from the slight water-spirit aura from practicing the Like Water Art and a little bit of earth-vein qi acquired from long exposure to formations, there was nothing else.

“Not her…”

The elder’s lips twitched, uttering three words.

The voice was light, but carried an ancient weariness spanning ages.

Then he smiled.

There was no disappointment, no regret—only a relieved release. As if a promise weighing a thousand years had finally found a reason to be put down.

“Very well.”

Hao Yuan gently shook his head and let his gaze fall back on that ring.