Before dawn, the urgent tolling of bells and chimes tore through the morning mist of Qingming Mountain.
It wasn't the usual morning bell, but a series of nine short, one long, progressively louder "warning tolls." The servants' quarters erupted into chaos, like an anthill tossed with a boulder. Li Wei quickly rolled up his bedding, kicked the bundles under his bed deeper, and surged out of the courtyard with the panicked crowd.
"The Azure Spring has dried up!"
The news, like a biting wind, swept through everyone's ears. The Azure Spring, one of the seven manifested springs of the main spiritual vein of the Qingming Mountains, was also the core place where outer disciples absorbed spiritual energy and refined magical artifacts. It had flowed continuously for three hundred years, but today, overnight, the water had receded, revealing a pale, bone-like spirit stone deposit beneath.
The "Shuyu Valley," where the spring was located, was already overflowing with people. Outer sect elders and deacons, their faces ashen, surrounded the dried-up spring. More servants and lower-ranking disciples were kept at a distance, craning their necks, the air thick with fearful whispers, like the buzzing of a swarm of startled bees.
Li Wei squeezed to the edge of the crowd, his gaze passing over the jostling heads to the dried-up bottom of the pool.
The scene was even more shocking than he had imagined. The pool, once shrouded in milky white spiritual mist and gushing forth like pearls, was now nothing but a damp, dark pit. The intricate veins of spirit stones at the bottom were exposed; the once warm and luminous spirit jade, brimming with vitality, was now grayish-brown, its surface even covered with fine, spiderweb-like cracks. The remaining spiritual energy in the air was thin and chaotic, carrying a faint "rust" smell when inhaled—the stench of exposed minerals after the spiritual energy had completely dissipated.
Several inner sect elders dressed in star-patterned Daoist robes had already arrived. Leading the group was Master Xuan Gu, who oversaw the "Earth Vein Monitoring." He held a jade tablet, its seven "Pulse-Fixing Needles" trembling wildly, pointing in all directions without any discernible pattern. Master Xuan Gu's expression was grave; his fingertips constantly made calculations, and he chanted incantations. Pale golden runes flickered around him as he attempted to communicate with the earth veins and trace their depletion.
"The earth's energy is reversed; the dragon veins have shifted?" one elder murmured.
"Or perhaps demonic energy has corrupted the spiritual source?" another questioned.
"Investigate! Report on all disciples who have been in contact with Biluo Spring within the last three days—their cultivation methods, recent whereabouts, and any unusual activity!" Master Xuan Gu's voice carried suppressed anger, and deeper, a barely perceptible trace of panic. The spiritual veins were the foundation of the sect; such unprovoked deterioration was a grave omen.
Li Wei watched quietly. The elders' deductions, the disciples' panic, the discussions about feng shui, karma, and calamity surged like a tide, then slipped away from the edge of his consciousness. His attention was firmly gripped by the cracks in the gray, decaying spirit stones at the bottom of the pool, and the abnormally weakened spiritual energy gradient in the air.
A strange, cold clarity rose in his mind. Similar to the focus he had when observing the starry sky last night, yet even more… surging.
He unconsciously moved forward a few steps, hiding behind an ancient pine tree with withered, yellow leaves. His gaze locked onto the area at the bottom of the pool where the cracks were most concentrated. The rhythmic, pulsating twinkling of Gamma Star last night, and the deathly, broken veins before him now, formed a cruel contrast deep within his consciousness. The "pulse" of the stars seemed to still be steadily transmitting, while the "pulse" of the earth had abruptly ceased.
The instant this thought arose—
The chaotic vortex of energy within his dantian, the faint, exotic spiritual energy generated last night by the interaction with the stars, suddenly began to circulate on its own without warning. It didn't flow along any known meridians, but rushed directly into his eyes!
The world before Li Wei's eyes instantly changed.
It was no longer ordinary vision. The thin, chaotic, rapidly dissipating specks of spiritual energy in the air—previously only vaguely perceptible at a certain level of cultivation—now became incredibly clear in his eyes, and…orderly.
They were no longer randomly drifting dust, but rather individual "dots" trailing faint shadows. These dots, escaping from the cracks at the bottom of the pool, their speed, direction, and distance from one another in the air… suddenly began to rearrange, recombine, and connect in his field of vision.
It was as if an invisible pen, using heaven and earth as paper, dipped in these specks of spiritual energy as ink, began to write.
Line after line, column after column.
It wasn't runes, nor seal script.
It was symbols. It was numbers. It was equations.
His pupils contracted slightly, reflecting a scene utterly incomprehensible to mortals: beside the escaping specks of spiritual energy, illusory characters were automatically marked:
∂ρ/∂t = -∇·J + Σ
This was an equation. An equation describing the change of a certain "quantity" over time (∂ρ/∂t), equal to the negative divergence of its spatial flow (-∇·J) plus the internal source-sink terms (Σ). He had seen a similar form in the tattered mathematical texts from his mortal homeland, which he secretly perused during his spare time from his chores; it was called a "continuity equation," used to describe the conservation of fluids or electric charge.
And now, this equation was being "demonstrated" before his eyes by specks of spiritual energy.
ρ, the density of spiritual energy here, was rapidly decreasing (∂ρ/∂t is negative). -∇·J represents the rate at which spiritual energy diffuses and dissipates into the surrounding space.
And Σ… Σ is the "source." It's the source that generates spiritual energy. At this moment, the value of Σ is zero, or even potentially negative.
"The source… is shut down. No, it's been… sucked away by something more powerful," Li Wei murmured to himself, his voice so low that only he could hear it. He seemed to "see" that deep within the Azure Spring spiritual vein, which had been steadily providing Σ, was connected to a vast and dark "convergence," forcibly extracting everything at a speed far exceeding natural diffusion.
This wasn't divine retribution, nor demonic contamination. This was… plunder. A precise and efficient plunder based on some deeper rule.
"Hey you, janitor! What are you daydreaming about! Hurry up and help count the spiritual materials lost in the warehouse!"
A shout jolted Li Wei from his mystical state. The illusion of the equations before him receded like the tide, and the world returned to its noisy original state. He lowered his head, concealing the lingering shock in his eyes, and replied with a "Yes," turning to follow a group of assigned laborers towards the storeroom.
His steps were unsteady, and a fine layer of cold sweat seeped from his back. Not from the reprimand, but from what he had just "seen."
What was it? An illusion? Or… was his own body, this strange spiritual root, revealing another "grammar" of the world to him in an incomprehensible way?
He recalled the mysterious symbol in the bronze mirror last night. He recalled the regular fluctuations of the gamma star. He recalled the increasingly clear curves on the parchment connecting stars and ley lines.
Scattered fragments, at this moment, seemed to be faintly strung together by a cold thread called "mathematics."
On his way to the storeroom, he passed several secondary spiritual springs and small spiritual fields. The sights were shocking. Not only the Azure Spring, but almost all the spiritual vein nodes were decaying, only to varying degrees. The once vibrant green "jade marrow seedlings" in the spirit field were now withered and yellow. The outer sect disciples responsible for tending them were frantically trying to salvage the situation with the most basic "spirit gathering array," but to little avail.
Li Wei slowed his pace, forcing himself to detach from the shock he had just experienced, and observed the scene in the simplest way. He crouched down, pretending to adjust his shoes, his fingers lightly touching the dry soil. He felt a subtle, continuous vibration at his fingertips—not an earthquake, but a deeper, more profound "groan" from the disruption of energy flow deep underground.
At the same time, he noticed that the water levels of the spirit springs that hadn't completely dried up seemed…not uniform. Fast at first, then slow, then slightly accelerating again? He involuntarily began to sketch a decay curve in his mind. Without paper or pen, without tools, the shape of the curve grew increasingly clear.
It resembled…a diagram he had seen in a miscellaneous book about the decay of all things in the mortal world, describing the reduction process of some kind of "radioactive substance." Half-life. Exponential decay.
A crazy thought, like lightning in the dark night, struck his mind:
"Could the decline of this spiritual vein... also follow some kind of 'half-life' pattern? And perhaps that pattern is hidden in the pulse of the stars, the divergence equation of spiritual energy, and the mournful cries emanating from the depths of this soil?"
If that's the case... then what exactly is the "external force" that causes this "half-life" to shorten so drastically, almost instantly "decaying"? Where does it come from? Is it the Demon Realm, as the sect elders speculate? Or... a more distant, more unknowable place?
The heavy wooden door of the storeroom opened before him, and the manager's exasperated shouts came from inside. Li Wei took a deep breath of the still rusty air and stepped into the dimly lit room.
Outside the door, in the Jade Valley, the Xuan Gu True Person's deductions seemed to have hit a bottleneck; the golden runes flickered and eventually faded away. The elders' faces grew even more grim.
Inside the door, Li Wei sat down before a mountain of spirit stone materials registers and picked up a pen. In an inconspicuous corner of the register, he wrote a string of symbols in the smallest characters that no one could understand:
"Azure Sky Incident. Suspected unnatural decay. Decay curve to be fitted. Correlation terms: gamma star phase (perigee last night?), spiritual pressure gradient divergence anomaly. Hypothesis: Existence of an external high-energy sink (coordinates unknown). More data needed."
After writing, he calmly raised his head and began to check the pile of dull-colored low-grade spirit stones in front of him, as if what he had just written was merely the most ordinary cargo annotation.
Only he knew that the heart in his chest was pounding against his ribs with unprecedented force.
Not fear.
It was an almost trembling… thirst for knowledge.
Springs can dry up, spiritual veins can sever.
But those cold and beautiful equations that had just flowed before his eyes… those silent truths hidden behind the anomalies of heaven and earth…
They were calling to him.