Weeks later, Lin Feng almost got lost as he entered somewhere unusual. It was a wolf that led him there, not intentionally.
Lin Feng had been tracking a wounded Cloud-Tooth Wolf through the steep hills for nearly an hour, following its blood trail through a narrow ravine, when the animal suddenly changed direction and vanished through a section of rock wall that should not have had an opening.
He spent twenty minutes searching before he found the gap. A vertical crack in the stone face, barely wider than his shoulders, hidden behind a curtain of hanging moss. The wolf had gone in and not come back out.
Lin Feng stood at the entrance wondering how the wolf had easily gone through such a tight space. Then he paused for a long moment, listening to the wind in the trees behind him, his own breathing, slow and controlled. The faint sound of moving water somewhere beyond the crack.
After that, he went in.
The crack opened after about ten meters into a narrow passage that sloped downward for another twenty before spilling out into a valley.
He stopped at the passage mouth and looked.
The valley was not large, perhaps three hundred meters across at its widest point, but it was enclosed on all sides by sheer cliff walls that rose high enough to catch the wind and funnel it down in slow, spiraling currents.
The floor was lush, covered in thick grass and clusters of pale blue flowers that Lin Feng did not recognize. At the center of the valley was a lake.
The water was dark, almost black in the afternoon shadow, completely still except for a faint shimmer on its surface.
Lin Feng felt the Qi before he took another step. Dense and old and layered in ways that the Qi outside felt thin compared to. Like stepping from a light breeze into the pressure of deep water.
He found the wolf on the near bank of the lake, already dead. Not from its wounds, but from something else. Its body was rigid, the fur standing on end, and the expression on its face was the frozen grimace of something that had been terrified in its final moments.
Lin Feng did not touch it. He crouched beside it and observed. Then he looked at the lake again.
There was Qi rising from the water in slow, visible pulses. Not visible to normal eyes, perhaps, but his years of cultivation had made him sensitive enough to feel and partially see strong Qi movements.
Whatever was at the bottom of this lake, it was significant.
He thought about it for exactly as long as he needed to, and then he took off his outer robe, folded it neatly on a rock, and walked into the water.
The cold hit him like a wall. The lake was spring-fed and mountain-cold even in autumn. He kept moving, letting the chill sharpen his focus rather than slow him down.
The water darkened around him as he swam deeper.
He went down for nearly two minutes before he found something: an opening in the lake bed, a roughly circular entrance carved into the rock, its edges worn smooth by centuries of flowing water. Stone steps descended inside it, cut by hand rather than formed naturally.
Someone had probably made this a long time ago.
Lin Feng surfaced briefly, filled his lungs, and went back down.
The steps led into a chamber.
It was smaller than he expected, a single room about the size of the Qingyun Clan's main hall, with walls that gleamed with a faint, persistent luminescence coming from crystalline veins in the stone.
The air inside, breathable despite being underground and submerged above, carried a dry, ancient smell, like dry paper and stone dust and something else beneath that, sharp and electric.
At the center of the chamber stood a stone pedestal. On it lay three things.
The first was a manual. A thick volume bound in what appeared to be black beast-hide, its cover marked with a single symbol that Lin Feng did not recognize, a circular design that looked like a sun and a moon overlaid on each other, one dark and one bright.
The second was a ring. Plain, unadorned, carved from an unfamiliar deep grey stone, with a faint warmth that radiated through the air even from two meters away.
The third was a sword. It was massive. A greatsword meant for two hands, nearly as long as Lin Feng was tall and wide as he was. But what arrested his attention was not its size. It was the blade itself.
The metal was split cleanly down the center from hilt to tip: one half obsidian black, the other silver-white. The two colors did not mix or blend at the dividing line. They met at a perfect edge, clean as a mathematical boundary.
Lin Feng looked at the sword for a long time. Then he looked at the black and white lotus blooming quietly in his dantian. They shared similarities appearance.
He picked up the manual first. He was a careful man. He always read before he acted.