Chapter 99: Immortal Caves
Shin Sumi left the waterfall cave only a few minutes after speaking to the man renting the Immortal caves.
After taking the bridge back to Long Ring Island, then the bridge back to the valley surrounding the circular lake, she quickly made her way into the mountains.
"That should be far enough," she thought once she was what she believed to be out of the range a higher level cultivator could feel with his divine sense.
She couldn't risk anybody, especially the merchant who had sold her the movement technique, seeing her from afar. The chance of it was really slim but Shin Sumi didn't want to take any unnecessary risk.
In a twist of her body, she instantly changed into another set of robes, puttin her travel outfit in her bag of holding. At the same time the Copper Bell rang, distorting her facial features and changing the aura around her and her divine sense.
In place of Yan Yan now stood Shin Sumi herself, her true face revealed to the world.
Nuan flew onto her shoulder before climbing down her arm and disappearing in her wrist. The leaf pattern on her skin flashed briefly before her sleeve covered it up.
"One more adjustment," Shin Sumi searched her bag of holding.
"I won't need the full formation, just the outer layer for this," she mumbled, engraving a blank piece of jade with her divine sense.
After following the teachings of the Cloud-Formation Pavilion for a year, Shin Sumi had become quite adept at basic spirit formations, to the point she could make simple alterations to some of them with confidence.
The one she decided to use was one of the first she had ever learned, the Hiding Formation. It was a really simple but effective pattern allowing the user to hide their presence and divine sense.
However for Shin Sumi she didn't want to hide her presence, simply alter the level of her cultivation base to any outsider probing her.
"All the inhabitants of Long Ring Island and that merchant are much stronger than me. Simply reigning in my divine sense is not going to fool them."
All the people she had talked to earlier this morning had seen that she was about to breakthrough to the third step of the Liquid Realm. In fact they had seen it so casually that it had felt to her like they could read her soul.
"Going back to the first step should be good enough. With this spirit formation, the Copper Bell and a bit of caution, nobody would be able to tell who I am, right?" she asked herself.
Even though she was doubting herself at the moment, Shin Sumi had full confidence in her plan. Even without that many precautions she had been able to live in the Dark Sky Starry Sect with three different identities for three years.
Even then, the only people who knew who she was were either people she had trusted with her secret or people present at the wrong place and the wrong moment.
Now she was much more prepared and a complete stranger to the inhabitants of Long Ring Island. As long as she was careful there was virtually no way for other people to find out what she had done.
After all of her preparations were complete, Shin Sumi slowly returned to the lake shore by another trail than the one Yan Yan had taken earlier.
The best way for her to test her disguise probably was to go back to the market and speak with the same merchant. By now, there was no doubt he had found out what she had done to his scrolls, considering how much time had passed. However Shin Sumi was never going to take that risk.
Instead she headed straight to the waterfall cave, where she was greeted again by the same man who had talked to Yan Yan a few hours prior.
"Hello there, little lady. Are you here to visit someone or to spend some time meditating?"
Shin Sumi nodded her head in salutation, "Two twenty-four hour cycles in a good cave, please."
"Oh, you are really close to a breakthrough, aren't you? This is the best place you can find in a hundred leagues in every direction. If you can't achieve a power-up in here, then you can't anywhere, I guarantee it."
Shin Sumi smiled at the middle aged man over-selling his business. She shrugged her shoulders slightly before asking for the price.
"Three spirit stones? Hm..." she feigned thinking about it, "For that price, how good are the caves?"
Jumping down from the boulder he was sitting on top of, the man extended his arm and pointed at the rocky face with the hundreds of caves, "You can see for yourself! Follow me, little lady!"
Everything was going perfectly according to Shin Sumi's plan. With her careful choice of words, the man had had no choice but to offer a visit to his caves. After travelling across the River Valley Region, she had picked up on ways to give a different air than usual about herself.
The trick only resided in her posture and her words. By asking about the caves in relation to the price, she had seemed doubtful, a little haughty but also troubled.
Was she saying that the caves were too expensive? In that case, maybe the girl was a poor traveler unworthy of his attention. Or was she saying that because the price was too low, the caves couldn't be any good? That is definitely something the little heiress of a cultivation clan would say.
These were certainly the middle aged man's thoughts at the moment. Unable to decipher her intention and status, he would have to really sell his caves in the best way he could in any case.
"All of the caves here are more or less the same. Some are bigger, for four or five stones a day, but all of them have the same Shinsoo inside."
The man briefly showed Shin Sumi two of the caves at ground level, showing their similarities.
"Some folk prefer light, some others don't. If you have your own light source, feel free to use it or else you can come see me to get a blue crystal like these ones. I considered charging for them once, but since there are thousands of them just lying around it didn't seem appropriate."
Shin Sumi smiled again. The man was cleverly simple. He saw no point in pretenses and remained honest.
He turned around abruptly and looked at Shin Sumi like a father would his young child. His finger pointed forward and the slightest flair of Shinsoo emanated from his figure which immediately seemed more imposing than before.
"BUT NO FIRE. Understand? The smoke ruins everything and the smell is a hassle to get rid of. No magical fire either."
Shin Sumi gulped audibly before nodding as fast as she could. It was only then that the man realized his cultivation base had leaked slightly and the girl in front of him was only in the Liquid Realm's first step.
"Sorry about that, ah-ah! I'll tell you what: because of the fright I gave you, you can have one stone off on your two days rent. Is that fair?"
Shin Sumi agreed, not against the idea but with mixed feelings jumbled inside her head, "the cultivation world is scary... who else than a cultivator can afford to accidentally threaten a client and make up for it so easily afterwards?"
She grew silent as the man continued to showcase his available caves, telling details about how many of them helped cultivators achieve a breakthrough.
"All of that is good but that's not what I'm interested in," Shin Sumi thought, "I'm going to have to direct him a little bit."
Pointing at an occupied cave, she raised her voice her little bit, sounding exactly like a curious girl with spirit stones to spend.
"What is that light curtain I see over these ones? I want that too, can we see them instead?"
The merchant was completely unphased by the sudden capriciousness of the girl in front of him. Adjusting mentally his perception of this potential client, he regretted not having started with a price higher than three spirit stones.
The light curtains were something Shin Sumi hadn't noticed until they got closer to the cave openings. Light seemed to bounce off the caves' openings like sun rays on a waterfall, radiating off an elegant and mesmerizing glow.
"Oh don't you worry young lady, this is not really an optional feature. You see, here we ensure the complete privacy of our clients. That curtain of light is actually a Shinsoo barrier embedded in the face of the rock."
Finally, the man was explaining something of interest to Shin Sumi.
"Once you are inside, there is a spirit formation that anybody at the Shinsoo Gathering Realm and above can use that will lock the barrier in place. It can only be opened from inside and will stop anybody trying to get in, be it physically or with their divine sense. You can try for yourself."
Without a word, Shin Sumi extended her divine sense towards the occupied meditation cave next to them. Sure enough, the room was completely unreachable from the outside, like a large blindspot in her perception.
"I can't guarantee that a late Core Development cultivator wouldn't be able to force it but nobody of that level has entered Long Ring Island in maybe forty years."
Shin Sumi now understood how the cave's locking mechanism worked. It was a relatively simple but strong formation. Because all the barrier's power was focused on the outside, it didn't need a lot of energy to manage and the high quality of Shinsoo in that place ensured it constantly had power to draw on.
"From the inside, however, you are free to probe the outside. This is important when our customers have visitors. Essentially this is a one-way barrier that will never break as long as you are inside."
Shin Sumi now had the information she desired about the caves. She was free to assume Bai Fulong or Yan Yan's identity once she was inside but more importantly, she could take out the techniques she had stolen from the market earlier without fear of being noticed by someone.
And with the high quality of Shinsoo, her cultivation would advance by leaps and bounds even in a few days' time.
She and the middle aged man talked for a while longer, going over more details of the caves while Shin Sumi was listening only with one ear.
She learned that from the inside, one could either choose to keep an eye on the outside or completely block it off for meditation purposes. In that case the only communication from the outside left was an emergency formation system allowing the middle aged man himself to send a simultaneous message to every occupant of the caves. As he had told her, this feature had been used only twice when the waterfall had flooded the caves many years earlier.
After what seemed like an eternity to Shin Sumi but had only been a stick of incense's worth of time in reality, the man stopped talking. By this point they had reached the entrance to the large circular cave again.
Shin Sumi paid the man five spirit stones, three per day minus one as per their agreement, and she immediately took off into one of the opened caves near the bottom level.
She put her hand against the cold stone on top of a dim glowing formation, putting a small amount of Shinsoo into it and watched the barrier appear.
Stopping the effects of the small formation she had used to hide her true cultivation base, Shin Sumi let her Shinsoo radiate out of her freely.
"Alright Nuan, you can come out now. Have you had time to refine the movement skills?"
With a happy yap, Nuan turned into the book, using her mysterious ability to show all the techniques and information she had gained.
"Hmmm, not yet? I guess I could wait a few hours more. In the meantime I now what to do. This place has great Shinsoo, maybe there is some kind of vein or spirit stone quarry underneath the rock. Unfortunately it is not Yin type Shinsoo."
Letting Nuan transform back into her furry form and explore the small cave, Shin Sumi produced two items off her bag of holding.
One was the Copper Bell and the other the Moon Stone, shining like a small astral body in her palm.
"I wonder if I can get the Copper Bell to replicate the Shinsoo produced by the Moon Stone..."
Patriarch Mui's lost artefact was a treasure without a match in the entire world, as far as Shin Sumi knew. It had the capacity to see through all sorts of illusions, alter Shin Sumi's physical appearance as well as her Shinsoo imprint, and regulate her environment for her.
With the bell at her side, Shin Sumi could see in perfect darkness, which was its first ability she had ever discovered. Only she knew it was capable of even more mind-boggling miracles.
Her fingertip slowly ran along the surface of the bell. She remembered when she had found it deep in the dark chasm in the sect's training grounds.
Then, the tiny bell had been a pure white in color until a drop of her own blood had touched its surface, linking the artefact to her and staining it in a copper tone.
"If I remember right, these engravings respectively are for sound, sight, touch and smell. The last two rows are the mysterious ones," her finger traced the rows of unknown characters.
Shin Sumi had already tried to test her conjectures with the bell a dozen times along the years but to no avail. It was a bit saddening to her that the corresponding row didn't show any noticeable change when an ability was used.
The only gauge Shin Sumi could rely on was the order her senses had been affected when she had activated the Copper Bell the first time.
Focusing her divine sense onto the bell, Shin Sumi made it ring once. Instantly the sound of voices appeared around her, as if she had been outside of her cultivation cave.
"Oh? The man who rented me the cave would be so mad if he knew I could bypass his elaborate Shinsoo barrier just like that..."
Shin Sumi checked the cave's barrier rapidly. Sound should not have been able to go through the curtain, in one direction or the other. It just went to show how unexpectedly powerful the Copper Bell was.
"Let me see through it now" Shin Sumi said, ringing the bell a second time. The moment the crystalline ringing appeared in her ears, the curtain became transparent like a piece of polished glass and a diffuse light illuminated the cave. The light wasn't coming from the outside. In fact it wasn't coming from anywhere. Produced by the bell, the light simply was.
"No use testing touch. It's neither cold nor hot here. Same for the smell."
Stopping her quick experiment, Shin Sumi retracted her divine sense from the bell. Instantly, the Shinsoo barrier turned back to normal, blocking light and sound while the cave went dark once again.
"One of the last two rows has got to do with Shinsoo itself. At least change the type of Shinsoo within me, allowing me to change into Bai Fulong or Yan Yan."
This was definitely the ability Shin Sumi had used the most but also the one she understood the least. Somehow turning into Bai Fulong made more sense, as her Shinsoo went from Yin to Yang type. Yan Yan, however, had Yin type Shinsoo just like Shin Sumi herself. Was there more to it than just Shinsoo type?
"Can it also affect another well of Shinsoo and not just my Shinsoo Sea?" Shin Sumi asked herself as she fidgeted with the Moon Stone, "If I could make the bell change the energy in this cave to match the stone, it would mean I could cultivate the Moon Severing Ephemeral Shadow anywhere."
Shin Sumi's cultivation technique was different from most of the others by the strange requirements on the type of Shinsoo she needed to absorb. Only the Moon and special artefacts like the Moon Stone given by the Ghosts allowed the cultivation technique to be successful.
For now, these requirements were fine because she was out in the open world and she had a Moon Stone with her for daytime cultivation, but she was only in the Liquid Realm's second step. As her cultivation would advance, she would need more and more energy and a place like the Dark Sky Starry Sect's always clouded skies and hidden Moon were not a good match for her technique
Shin Sumi had considered changing techniques more than once but had always decided otherwise. In Nuan's book, the page about the Moon Severing Ephemeral Shadow said that past a certain level, the perks greatly exceeded the hardness of cultivating it.
Materializing an illusory shadow, harnessing the darkness and stealing the light, such were the main steps of the techniques.
Besides the temptation of being able to materialize a shadow, Shin Sumi had also not managed to find another technique which suited her best in terms of Shinsoo apertures. Because all of her sixty-four Shinsoo Doors were opened, the more of them her technique would circulate through, the stronger her cultivation base would become.
Unconsciously, as soon as she started thinking about the Moon Severing Ephemeral Shadow, her energy began circulating within herself. After weeks of travel with conscious effort on that part, she was now able to rotate her energy almost all the time.
With the Moon Stone in hand, Shin Sumi soon lost herself in cultivation, her Shinsoo roaring as her internal Sea bubbled with golden waves.
Soon the large lake that still couldn't quite be called a Sea started rotating along with the waves. Or rather there was only waves in the infinite void of her dantian. No part of the lake was still as it churned and crashed around like an oceanic storm.
With every rotation of the Shinsoo Sea, the waves seemed to reach a bit further outwards, each time bringing a few drops of sweat on Shin Sumi's forehead.
Cross-legged on the ground, Shin Sumi hadn't even realized she had slipped into a meditative trance and was about to breakthrough to the third step of the Liquid Realm.
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