At the western foot of Heifeng Ridge, there is an ancient river that has dried up long ago. The river bed is covered with pebbles that have been washed away by flash floods for countless years.
The farther west you go, the sparser the vegetation becomes, and there is a faint smell of decay in the air - not the smell of a corpse, but more like the smell emitted by some extremely ancient plants that are slowly carbonized deep in the soil.
The jade slip in Su Yu's hand was slightly warm.
The resonance of time has reached an unprecedented intensity here - the marked point shown on the jade slip map is less than three miles ahead, but there is only a rocky cliff covered with withered vines in front of us.
"This is it."
Su Yu stopped and put away the jade slip.
Lin Shuang stood behind him and looked around.
With the spiritual sense of the ninth level of Qi Refining, she could not detect any abnormality within a hundred feet of the area - no fluctuations in spiritual power, no traces of restrictions, no traces of any artificial structures, just an ordinary cliff and stone wall.
If you don't know where the entrance is, you won't take a second look even if you pass by this cliff a thousand times.
Su Yu walked towards the cliff and pressed the seal character "Shi" on the back of his hand onto a seemingly ordinary stone surface.
Dark golden light gushed out from the back of his hand, and circles of golden lines appeared silently on the cliff.
The lines spread in all directions like snakes, outlining the outline of a door about ten feet high on the stone wall.
The stone surface within the door-shaped outline ripples like water waves, revealing a deep hole.
An ancient spiritual energy that had been sealed for countless thousands of years gushes out from the entrance of the cave, and the air that blows towards your face is filled with the faint fragrance of herbs.
Su Yu looked back at Lin Shuang.
Lin Shuang had consciously retreated to a boulder ten feet away, leaning against the stone wall with his arms crossed, his posture relaxed but the hilt of the sword always within reach.
She didn't ask if she could go in, nor did she look toward the entrance of the cave. She just stood quietly on the outside, like a sentinel.
Su Yu withdrew his gaze and stepped into the cave entrance.
The world inside the door is completely different from the desolation outside.
It was a huge medicinal garden covered by a dome, with a radius of no less than a thousand feet.
The dome is made of some kind of translucent jade, and the sunlight shines through the dome and is filtered into a gentle milky white halo.
The concentration of spiritual energy permeating the air far exceeds that of the outside world, and every breath is like inhaling a mouthful of liquid spiritual energy. Su Yu estimates that the concentration of spiritual energy here is at least twenty times that of the outside world, and is richer than the Qingyun Sect's secret cultivation chamber.
The ground is covered with a thick layer of humus soil, which is as soft as cotton when stepped on. It is the spiritual soil accumulated by the alternation of withering and blooming of medicinal herbs over thousands of years.
But there is no magic medicine left in the medicine garden.
As far as the eye can see, there are only stretches of deserted spiritual fields. The outlines of the field ridges are still there, but unknown weeds have grown between them.
The weeds grew wildly under the nourishment of spiritual energy, and then withered because there was no support from the spiritual stone veins. This repeated for thousands of years, and a layer of rotting grass several feet thick accumulated on the ground.