Transmigrated into a Grandpa, Embracing the Laid-Back Life

Around the thirty-fifth day, the path changed.

Su Ming couldn’t pinpoint exactly which step it started with. The stone path still stretched beneath his feet, but that spiritual energy fluctuation that had clung to him like a shadow since entering the secret realm—it was fading. He crouched down and touched the stone surface. It was cold and dry, cold and empty, like a shell whose contents had been hollowed out.

The road ahead showed nothing unusual. The gaps between the ancient trees on both sides widened, and through the crevices, Su Ming saw a patch of light—not sunlight, but something rising from the ground. Extremely faint, extremely soft, carrying a faint hint of blue.

Shadow saw it too. She poked her head out from Su Ming’s shoulder, her golden eyes locked onto the distance, feathers fluffing up, beak slightly parted.

Su Ming didn’t rush forward. He activated the Aura Concealment Art, suppressing his energy aura to its minimum, then slowly walked ahead. With every step, the spiritual energy fluctuation beneath the stone grew thinner. After a few dozen steps, the tree shadows fell away on both sides, and he finally saw what lay ahead.

It was a depression.

On the right side of the path, the ground suddenly dropped, forming an irregular shallow hollow, about four or five zhang in diameter. The depression was filled with water, the surface as smooth as a mirror, without a single ripple. The water wasn’t transparent—it had a color. An extremely faint blue. But it wasn’t the blue of dye; it was the water itself glowing. A very gentle, very soft light emanated from beneath the surface, coating everything near it in a layer of deep blue undertones.

Su Ming’s heartbeat slowed by half a beat, then suddenly quickened. This wasn’t water. This was liquid spiritual energy. Spiritual energy, concentrated to its extreme, had become liquid.

Shadow moved first. She jumped off Su Ming’s shoulder, hopped to the edge of the depression, lowered her head, and took a peck—then her entire body exploded in feathers. Shadow jolted violently. Excitedly, she bounced in place twice before plunging headfirst into the water.

Su Ming reached out to grab her, but the moment his fingertips touched the surface, spiritual energy seeped in through his skin. The sensation was far too comfortable—like a long-dried patch of earth finally receiving a thorough rain. He bent down, cupped both hands, and scooped up a handful of water. Spiritual energy seeped from his palms into his Dantian, and the spiritual energy lake within him rippled faintly.

In his Consciousness Sea, Lin Yu spoke: “Pull Shadow out.”

Su Ming quickly hauled Shadow, still floundering in the water, up. Shadow flapped her wet wings with extreme reluctance, splashing droplets all over Su Ming’s face. Su Ming flicked her on the forehead. Shadow let out an unconvinced caw before shrinking back into the hollow of his shoulder to preen her feathers.

Su Ming circled the depression. On the north side, there was a small patch of bare stone, polished glossy by the water, revealing the patterns beneath—not natural textures. Formation lines.

He stepped back a few paces, picked up a withered leaf, and held it high before letting go. The leaf drifted down, its arc bending toward the water’s surface. Spiritual energy was converging into the depression. The energy aura that should have been flowing steadily beneath the surrounding stone path was all surging toward this hollow.

Lin Yu’s Soul Body drifted out of the ring. He hovered above the water’s surface, gazing down at it, then his gaze pierced through the water to look at the bottom. After a moment, he spoke, his voice very soft, yet it made Su Ming’s steps feel heavy: “This wasn’t formed naturally. This is a Spirit Gathering Array.”

Su Ming crouched at the edge of the depression, sinking his gaze beneath the water.

The water was exceptionally clear—liquid spiritual energy had no impurities by nature. The deepest part of the depression was only three chi, the entire lakebed laid bare. Su Ming’s pupils abruptly contracted. The formation lines at the lakebed weren’t a simple arrangement of a few lines or runes. They were circles within circles, layer upon layer, radiating outward from the center of the lakebed like tree rings. And they were rotating—extremely slowly.

The outer ring rotated clockwise, the second ring counterclockwise, the third ring switching direction again. One waxed while the other waned. Every time each ring passed certain intersection points, a tiny blue light flickered, forming a certain rhythm—like a heartbeat, like breathing.

Su Ming was stunned. Every Spirit Gathering Array he had ever seen was a single layer of formation lines spread on a formation plate. But the lines before him had depth—the outer ring was shallow, the middle ring deeper, and the innermost ring deepest. It was as if someone had carved layer after layer into the stone, each stratum nested with a different structure.

Lin Yu’s voice rang in his Consciousness Sea: “The Cloud Hidden Sect’s Spirit Gathering Arrays should all be simplified versions of this. But the price of simplification was losing ninety percent of the efficiency.”

Ninety percent. Su Ming’s breathing grew light. If the sect’s arrays only retained one-tenth, just how terrifying would the complete version’s efficiency be?

He stood up and circled the depression once more, using his palm to sense the direction of spiritual energy flow in the air. “The convergence of spiritual energy is uneven. It’s stronger on the east side, weaker on the west side, and almost nonexistent on the north side,” Su Ming said.

“Why?”

“That patch of bare stone on the north side has emerged. The formation lines on it have weathered and fractured. That section’s spirit-leading function has failed. So this array isn’t in natural decline—it’s damaged.”

Lin Yu hummed in acknowledgment, carrying a hint of well-hidden approval. He rose slowly, hovering high above to overlook the entire depression from above. “Find a rock. Sit down. Stay here for a while.”

Su Ming found a relatively flat stone on the east side of the depression and sat down cross-legged. He closed his eyes and, using the method he had learned over those days, began to listen—not with his ears, but to the spiritual energy, to the breathing of this depression.

At first, he heard nothing. After about the time it takes a cup of tea to cool, he began to feel a very faint tremor, rhythmic. Roughly a hundred breaths made up one complete cycle—on the inhale, spiritual energy converged and the stone trembled slightly; on the exhale, the energy entered the water and the stone settled. In and out, repeating.

Shadow gradually quieted on his knee, her golden eyes slowly closing.

Lin Yu hovered directly above the depression, also watching. He wasn’t looking at the surface—he was looking at the lakebed. He saw what Su Ming couldn’t—those rings within rings, in his eyes, weren’t just “rotating.” The lines of each ring were transmitting information, compressing, refining, filtering layer by layer from the outermost ring inward, eventually converging at the center into a tiny speck of light. On and off, each flicker releasing a thread of extremely pure spiritual energy into the water.

This was why the spiritual energy had condensed into liquid. A complete, self-operating spiritual energy refinement system.

Lin Yu recognized this structure. He had lived beside the Spirit Gathering Array in the ring for five hundred years, feeling the same operating logic day and night. The formation lines at this lakebed shared the same root and origin as his “home”—the trajectory of the lines was identical.

But the array at the lakebed was incomplete. Three nodes in the middle ring’s filtration layer were empty—not destroyed, but never present from the start. And in the Spirit Gathering Array within his ring, those three nodes were full. It was precisely because of them that the array in the ring could maintain extremely high operational efficiency with minimal spiritual energy consumption, keeping his remnant soul alive through five hundred long years.

If the array at this lakebed was a “test version,” and the one in the ring was the “completed version”… then who had completed it? Why was it in the Shen family’s ring?

Lin Yu closed his eyes. He didn’t tell Su Ming any of this. Not because he didn’t want to—it was because he himself hadn’t figured it out yet.