Chương 191: Divine Spirit Reclamation

The Sacred Grove was different from what it had been before. The massive ancient trees were still there in a sense, but they weren't the same anymore, their trunks had twisted and curved into shapes that formed perfect arches over the path we were walking on. Their branches had grown together above us into a canopy that covered everything overhead. And every single leaf on those trees had turned a deep blood red color.

It was as if autumn had decided to visit only this one specific place and nowhere else in the entire forest.

"It was not like this before," Su Yue whispered.

"No," I said, looking at the transformed grove with awe and dread.

"It wasn't." As we carefully moved into the grove, I noticed that the spiritual energy that had been so thick in the trees before was now moving in clear and distinct patterns, like a network of rivers all connected to each other. The formation-like quality that Azure and I had both picked up on earlier was now so obvious that even the people in our group who had no formation training could see it plainly.

"It is activating," Yan Ziheng murmured, his formation training was letting him pick up on the same things I was sensing.

"The entire grove is part of a massive formation, and it is beginning to wake up." Liu Chang's face became serious.

"Can you tell what it is meant to do?" Yan Ziheng shook his head.

"The structure is nothing like what I have studied before, it is ancient but also somehow alive and responsive to things around it, I can tell that it is gathering energy, but what the energy is actually for I can't tell." He looked at me for confirmation, and I shook my head as well, because the complexity of what we were looking at was well beyond what either of us could fully understand at our level.

"We move with extreme caution," Liu Chang said.

"We stay together, we maintain defensive formation, and everyone needs to be ready to retreat immediately if I give the word." Nobody argued with that. We moved forward as a tight group with every one of our senses pushed to their limits, the red leaves above us rustled and whispered even though there was no wind at all, and the sound they made was almost like words but not quite close enough to actually make out.

The spiritual pressure got heavier and heavier with every step we took toward the center of the grove, and by the time the shrine came into view, some of the weaker disciples were clearly having difficulty staying on their feet. The shrine itself had changed just as much as everything else.

The crumbling old platform we had looked at before was now whole and clean, the stone surface looked like it had just been cut, the partial walls and columns had all fully reformed into a complete circular structure with twelve evenly spaced pillars holding up a domed roof. At the center of the platform, there was a large stone altar covered in the same script Azure had been trying to translate before.

But now the writing wasn't just carved into the stone, it was glowing with a pulsing red light that was the exact same color as the leaves in the grove.

"The script," I said, reaching out toward it with my spiritual sense.

"I can read it now."

"How is that possible?" Liu Chang asked.

"You said you could only make out pieces of it before."

"I don't know," I said honestly since Azure was doing the hard work for me.

"But it's clear now, it's as if it wants to be read." The others gathered around me as I started reading out what the text said, and I could hear the surprise in my own voice as each line came out.

"Here lies Ke Jun, First Ancestor of the Ke Lineage, who reached beyond the stars and touched the face of eternity. Born of humble origins, he ascended to the Civilization Realm through unmatched determination and insight. Though his body returns to dust, his spirit watches over his descendants for all time. May his wisdom guide them through darkness, and his strength fortify them against adversity. The cycle continues; what sleeps shall awaken when the time is right." Stolen novel; please report.

Nobody said anything for a moment after I finished reading.

"Ke Jun?" Su Yue was the first one to actually speak.

"As in..."

"As in my ancestor apparently," I said, and I was as surprised as anyone else standing there looked. The original Ke Yin had no memories of anyone remarkable in his family history, let alone someone who had reached the Civilization Realm, which was something most people considered more of a myth than an actual thing a person could achieve. And yet here was a shrine to exactly that person hidden in the mountains above the village.

No wonder the villagers had kept making offerings here even after the imperial authorities tried to ban the practice, they hadn't just been worshipping some local spirit, they had been honoring their own ancestor this whole time.

"The Civilization Realm," one of the younger disciples said quietly, sounding awestruck.

"I always thought that was just a legend."

"Every realm seems like a legend until somebody actually reaches it," Bing Lan said without looking away from the glowing text.

"But a Civilization Realm cultivator coming from a village that small is still very difficult to accept."

"But why is his grave here?" Liu Chang said, mostly to himself it seemed.

"Someone who reached that level should have a monument at one of the major sects, not hidden in a mountain grove."

"Unless he did not want to be found by them," Yan Ziheng said.

"Unless he wanted to only be remembered by his own descendants in the place where everything started for him." Before I could say anything in response to that, the glowing script suddenly became so bright that everyone had to cover their eyes, and the entire shrine began shaking, the altar vibrating so hard that cracks started appearing across its surface.

"Get back!" Liu Chang shouted, and everyone scrambled away from the altar as fast as they could, and Zhang Wei managed to get a jade barrier up quickly enough to stop the larger pieces of stone from hitting anyone when the altar exploded outward a moment later. The rest of us threw up personal qi barriers to handle whatever the barrier didn't catch. Where the altar had been there was now a rectangular opening in the floor of the shrine that was dark and deep enough that I couldn't see the bottom of it.

For several long seconds nothing happened at all. Then a massive stone coffin began rising up out of the opening, slowly floating upward until it was hovering about three feet off the floor. The coffin was made of some black stone that I didn't recognize, and its surface had been polished until it reflected our faces back at us. Covering its surface were countless tiny formations in gold and silver that were so intricate and complex that I couldn't begin to understand most of what I was looking at.

"Those formations...," Yan Ziheng whispered, and the tone of his voice said everything. The lid of the coffin began to move before anyone could respond, there was no sound, no visible force acting on it, it simply shifted sideways as if the rules that applied to solid matter didn't fully apply to it, and then it was gone, and the coffin was open. Nobody spoke and nobody moved. Inside the coffin was a shallow pool of liquid.

Then the liquid rose up on its own and began forming itself into the shape of a person, building itself into a torso and then limbs and then a head with recognizable features, until what was standing in front of us looked like a tall man in ancient robes that I recognized from historical texts as belonging to the pre-imperial era. The figure floated upward out of the coffin and hovered above it.

He looked like a man in his thirties, with a presence that made even Liu Chang seem somehow smaller by comparison, and his features were clearly similar to the original Ke Yin's. He had the same cheekbones, the same nose, the same shape of the eyes, but that was where the comparison ended because what radiated off of this being was power on a scale that I had no real frame of reference for. He didn't look dead but he didn't look fully alive either.

There was something about the way he moved and the way light seemed to pass through his skin that wasn't how a living person looked or moved. His qi signature was something I had never encountered before, not evil exactly, but fundamentally different from anything human.

"Divine Spirit Reclamation," Bing Lan whispered, and it was the first time I had ever seen her composure actually crack.

"I thought it was only a myth."

"What is Divine Spirit Reclamation?" I asked, not moving my eyes from the figure.

"An ancient technique," she said very quietly.

"Used by the highest-level cultivators to preserve their consciousness after the body dies, it is not true immortality, but it is the closest thing to it, a way to continue existing after the physical form is gone." The figures eyes opened and they were solid red with no whites and no pupils, just crimson from edge to edge, and those eyes moved slowly across our entire group before they stopped and fixed on me.

The moment they did I felt something connect, something deep in the body I was living in that recognized what it was looking at in a way that had nothing to do with my own memories or knowledge. This was a bloodline connection. The figure smiled at me, and it was a smile of recognition that settled somewhere cold in my chest, and when he spoke, his voice didn't come through my ears at all but arrived directly in my mind.

"My child," he said, and the age behind those two words was something I could feel pressing against me.

"At last."