Transmigrated into a Grandpa, Embracing the Laid-Back Life

At some point, the fog had thickened.

It wasn’t a gradual buildup—at least, Su Ming hadn’t noticed the transition. One moment he was walking, the next, he realized the tree shadows ahead had faded a layer.

At first, he could still see ten steps ahead.

A few more steps, and that shrank to eight.

After walking a bit longer, the outline of the nearest ancient tree began to dissolve into the white haze.

Su Ming slowed his pace even further.

Shadow perched on his shoulder, her feathers pressed tightly against her body. Normally, this little creature feared nothing, but in this thickening fog, she remained silent, as if even her breathing had lowered. Her golden eyes darted left and right, alert as a young beast cowering at the mouth of its den.

Su Ming reached out and gently pressed Shadow’s back.

”It’s okay.”

Shadow didn’t chirp.But she didn’t relax either.

Su Ming withdrew his hand and kept walking.

The stone path beneath his feet was still there.

It was the only thing he could confirm.

The texture of the stone didn’t lie—with every step, the faint fluctuation of spiritual energy transmitted through the soles of his feet remained unchanged, alternating between light and heavy, sinking and floating, just like the sections he had walked in previous days. The path hadn’t broken; it was still there.

But the problem was, he was starting to lose his sense of direction.

It wasn’t the simple kind of disorientation where you didn’t know north from south.

It was something far more unsettling.

The stone path was clearly under his feet, stretching straight ahead, yet as Su Ming walked, he kept feeling like the road beneath him was ”turning.” Not a physical curve—he had looked down; the stones were still neatly arranged, one after another, their direction unchanged. But his body was telling him something else: You’re veering left.

He stopped.

Closed his eyes.

Tried to sense his surroundings with his divine sense.

The flow of spiritual energy should help him determine direction. In recent days, he had spent a lot of time using falling leaves to test the movement of spiritual energy, gradually figuring out the general pattern of its circulation within the Ancient Path—heavy on the left, light on the right, the main current on the left, the tributaries on the right. As long as he could sense the main flow of spiritual energy, he could confirm whether he had strayed off course.

He spread out his divine sense.

And then—nothing.

Not truly nothing.

But everything had become blurred.

Su Ming’s divine sense should have spread like a fine net, clearly perceiving the density, direction, and rhythm of spiritual energy. Yet in this thick fog, when he cast it out, it was like throwing a handful of sand into cotton.

No feedback.

No reflection.

Spiritual energy was there—he could vaguely sense it—but its flow, strength, and rhythm were all wrapped up by something, reduced to a shapeless chaos he couldn’t distinguish.

Like a membrane.

An extremely thin, extremely uniform, yet omnipresent membrane, covering the space between his divine sense and the outside world, filtering everything into a single color.

Su Ming opened his eyes.

The fog was still there.

Even thicker now.

He looked ahead—five steps out, and there was nothing but white.

He looked back—also white.

Left and right—white.

Beneath his feet—the stone path.

Above his head—the branches and leaves he could occasionally glimpse earlier were now swallowed by the fog. The entire world had shrunk to a circle with a radius of five steps, himself at its center, nothingness beyond.

Su Ming stood still, not panicking.

He silently counted a few breaths, confirming that his *Like Water Art* was circulating normally, that his meridians weren’t being eroded, that his spiritual energy wasn’t being drained. He checked the location of his Grand Teleportation Talisman, then his survival formation plate.

All there.

He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

”Master.”

There was a brief silence in his Consciousness Sea.

Lin Yu’s voice came through, unhurried.

”Mhm.”

”I can’t probe outward with my divine sense anymore.”

”I know.”

”Is there a way?”

Lin Yu didn’t answer immediately.

Su Ming waited.

He knew what this kind of silence from his master meant—either he was thinking, he was observing, or he had already seen the answer but wasn’t ready to say it yet.

Sure enough, after a long pause, Lin Yu finally spoke.

”First, stop using your divine sense.”

Su Ming was momentarily taken aback.

”Stop using my divine sense? Then what do I use?”

”What else do you have?”

The question was odd.

Su Ming thought about it. ”Spiritual energy... eyesight...”

”Is your eyesight any use in this fog?”

”No.”

”And your spiritual energy?”

Su Ming tried sending a wisp of spiritual energy to his fingertip, feeling it out. The energy was still circulating normally inside his body, but once released, it was devoured by that ”membrane” just like his divine sense, unable to perceive any direction.

”It’s useless too.”

”Then don’t use any of it.”

Su Ming fell silent.

No divine sense. No external release of spiritual energy. No eyesight.

What did he have left?

”You’re a cultivator,” Lin Yu said, his tone even. ”But before you became a cultivator, you were first a living person. What does a person have?”

Su Ming froze for a moment.

Then he suddenly understood.

Physical sensation.

The most primal physical sensation.

He closed his eyes.

Not to circulate his energy, not to enter a meditative state—just simply closed his eyes.

The mist clung to his face, damp, carrying a faintly cool touch. And that coolness wasn’t uniform.

The left side of his face was cooler than the right.

Su Ming’s heart stirred slightly.

He slowly turned, facing the direction of that ”cooler” side. Then he extended his left hand, palm open, facing outward.

Cold.

He switched to his right hand.

Not as cold.

He adjusted his angle by a fraction.

His left hand grew colder.

He turned again.

The chill began to even out.

And so, like a sightless traveler, Su Ming used his skin to ”see” the direction.

The fog wasn’t uniform.

Though his eyes couldn’t distinguish its density, though his divine sense was hopelessly scrambled, his body didn’t lie. The differences in temperature, humidity, and even air pressure on his skin were telling him things his eyes couldn’t.

He spent a long time, rotating little by little, reaching out little by little, sensing little by little.

In the end, he fixed a direction.

Not by sight, not by calculation, but by that faint, barely-there difference in coolness on his skin.

He opened his eyes and took a step.

The stone beneath his feet hummed softly.

The sound was exactly the same as before—faint, steady, carrying a hint of awakened vibration.

He hadn’t gone wrong.

The path was still under his feet.

Su Ming didn’t relax.

He just closed his eyes again, reached out, and felt the temperature difference around him.

Then, one step.

Another step.

Each step was agonizingly slow. So slow that Shadow thought he was standing in place, poking half her head out from his shoulder to give him a puzzled look.

Su Ming ignored her.

All his attention was focused on the changes in temperature at his fingertips and palm.

In this thick fog where even his divine sense couldn’t penetrate, Su Ming for the first time discarded every means of a cultivator, and like the most ordinary mortal, relied on his body alone to measure his direction.

Clumsy.

Slow.

But every step landed on the stone.

Lin Yu drifted behind him, silent all this time.

His soul body flickered in and out of visibility in the fog, its edges blurred as if soaked in water. But his eyes were clear, quietly watching Su Ming’s back as he groped forward step by step.

What he didn’t tell Su Ming was—

He had seen through this fog at a single glance.

The patterns of the mist were to him like flipping through an old book he had read countless times. That ”membrane” disrupting his divine sense wasn’t some prohibitive rune or formation attack at all. It was a technique deliberately left behind by whoever created this path... a kind of method.

He had read about similar records in books.

In ancient times, some great Formation Masters, when laying down important roadways, would deliberately release an extremely uniform thin mist of spiritual energy in specific areas to ”blind” those walking the path. Not to kill, but to trap.