Chapter 446 - 419: Marketplace Structure

Chapter 446: Chapter 419: Marketplace Structure

Mist Forest Marketplace, the headquarters of the Mingyuan Commerce Association.

Li Yuan sat on a wooden chair in a side hall, accepting a deep blue jade slip from Xu Zhang.

"A Tier Two Low Grade spell, the Ice Seal Skill." Xu Zhang picked up his teacup and gave a simple introduction. "It’s a variant of Water Magic. It uses extreme cold energy to lock down a target area or immobilize living creatures, making it excellent for crowd control in actual combat. Since you needed Water Magic, Pavilion Master, this one is the most suitable. Forty-five Mid-grade Spirit Stones."

"Put it on Yuanming Studio’s tab," Li Yuan said, putting away the jade slip.

He bought this magic to meet a requirement for making his Frost Armor’s ability permanent. That Tier Two Middle Grade defensive Magical Artifact required him to cultivate a Tier Two Water Magic to the Perfection stage in order to permanently solidify its entry.

After returning to his stone house, he activated the Concealment Array.

Li Yuan sat cross-legged on a meditation mat, his Divine Sense probing into the jade slip to quickly read the cultivation method for the Ice Seal Skill.

The underlying logic of this magic was not complex, with its core principle being ’condensation.’ It involved taking gaseous or liquid Water Spiritual Power and, at the instant it left the body, forcing it through a specific meridian circuit to rapidly compress and cool down, transforming it into solid ice.

Li Yuan closed his eyes and slowly mobilized the Spiritual Power within his body.

His Tier One Cold Stream Skill had already reached the Great Success stage, giving him an extremely solid foundation in Water Spiritual Power. The Spiritual Power surged from his Dantian, circulated once along the path of the Cold Stream Skill, taking on a layer of profound coldness, and then precisely cut into the specific meridian points for the Ice Seal Skill.

CRACK—

An extremely faint freezing sound echoed in his palm.

Li Yuan opened his eyes and held out his right hand, palm flat. Half an inch above his palm, a fist-sized pocket of air was instantly drained of its temperature, coalescing into a sharp-edged, azure ice crystal.

’Too fast.’

An ordinary Foundation Establishment Cultivator first learning a Tier Two magic would need several days just to grasp the critical point of Spiritual Power transformation. But Li Yuan possessed two permanent entries: "Water Flow Acceleration" and "Water Vein Insight." The former directly increased the casting speed of his Water Magic by ten percent, while the latter enhanced his perception of Water Spiritual Power by thirty percent.

Under this dual enhancement, the structure of the Ice Seal Skill was as if transparent in his eyes.

The panel popped up right on cue.

[Ice Seal Skill: Uninitiated → Novice]

Li Yuan clenched his fist, and the ice crystal in his palm shattered into dissipating blue Spiritual Light. Reaching the Novice stage was only the first step; the road to Perfection was still extremely long. But as long as his progress was being tracked, reaching Perfection was just a matter of time.

Over the next few days, Li Yuan continued to expand his intelligence network using Spirit Detective Talismans in the Marketplace, the old paths of the Ghost Mist Forest, the Border Hills, and the outskirts of Skeleton Ridge, all while maintaining the supply of goods for Yuanming Studio.

The number of retrieved Spirit Detective Talismans steadily accumulated, the Cold Attribute Magical Artifacts and talismans in the Marketplace sold extremely fast, and his Spirit Stone reserves continued to rise.

Until one night, in a few of the Spirit Detective Talismans he retrieved from the outskirts of Skeleton Ridge, he captured a set of unusual fluctuations.

That night, after finishing a new round of patrols, Li Yuan returned to his stone house.

Over a dozen Spirit Detective Talismans, just retrieved from the outskirts of Skeleton Ridge, lay on the table. He probed them one by one with his Divine Sense, reading the chaotic fluctuations stored within.

Most were just the natural Spiritual Qi disturbances of the wild, cold wind blowing over rock formations, or the traces left by a few passing Low Tier Demon Beasts.

But when he read the third Talisman, Li Yuan’s Divine Sense paused.

This Spirit Detective Talisman had been placed on a mountain cliff about half a mile east of the entrance to the Skeleton Ridge ruins.

Among the data recorded by the Talisman, hidden beneath the extremely chaotic background fluctuations, was a faint set of pulsations.

Li Yuan immersed his Divine Sense in it, filtering out the surface-level noise and locking onto that set of signals.

"HUM... HUM..."

An extremely low-frequency Spiritual Power oscillation.

The pulsation’s cycle was very stable, appearing approximately every quarter of an hour, lasting for three breaths, then disappearing before repeating.

This wasn’t a trace of the Evil Slaying Sect’s probing, nor was it feedback from the Celestial Peak Sect’s monitoring array, and it certainly wasn’t a continuous wave transmission from the Abyss Sect. This kind of pure, low-frequency pulsation, with its machine-like precision and regularity, could only have come from the Tier Three Top Grade Restriction itself, deep beneath Skeleton Ridge.

’The ruins’ Array is breathing.’

Li Yuan isolated the data from this pulsation, analyzed it several times, and came to a conclusion.

’This isn’t normal.’

Any sealed Restriction Array, when not triggered, should have a Spiritual Wave that is a stable, flat line. The appearance of periodic pulsations indicated that there was some kind of leak or blockage in the Array’s internal energy cycle, forcing it to release excess pressure through these periodic oscillations.

’The Skeleton Ridge Restriction has a flaw.’

Li Yuan’s gaze fell upon the remaining Spirit Detective Talismans on the table.

Including the batch he had just read, the number of successfully retrieved Spirit Detective Talismans had reached a critical point.

He picked up the last Spirit Detective Talisman, retrieved from the Border Hills, probed it with his Divine Sense, and finished reading.

The panel suddenly popped up before his eyes.

[Sufficient uses of Spirit Detective Talisman detected]

[Spirit Detection Sense (Green) has become a permanent entry]

In the equipment slot, the illusory image of the Spirit Detective Talisman silently shattered, transforming into motes of eerie green light that merged into Li Yuan’s sea of consciousness.

It was an exceedingly strange and wonderful experience.

His sea of consciousness felt as if it had been pulled outward by an invisible hand. The barrier of his Divine Sense, previously limited by his Early-stage Golden Core realm, instantly expanded by a large margin.

The effective range of his detection-type magic increased by thirty percent.

But that wasn’t the most crucial part. The most crucial part was the second half of the entry’s description: ’Can obtain more information from certain magic.’

Li Yuan stood up and, without the slightest hesitation, directly activated his Earth Escape Technique and left the stone house.

An hour later, he was once again at the outskirts of Skeleton Ridge.

The night wind threaded through the deathly pale, weathered rock formations, making a whimpering sound. Li Yuan stood in the shadow of a low hill, his aura completely concealed.

An invisible net of perception spread out from him as the center, crashing down toward the earth beneath Skeleton Ridge.

The thirty percent increase in range demonstrated a terrifying advantage at this moment. Where his perception had previously been able to barely touch the outer edges of the ruins, it now flooded across the area like flowing mercury, effortlessly covering the entire dome of the Restriction four hundred feet underground.

Furthermore, the resolution of his senses had taken a qualitative leap.

Previously, from the perspective of his Dark Evil Insight, the Tier Three Top Grade Restriction had been like a solid iron plate, its three layers of seals stacked one on top of the other, with no visible gaps.

But now, the additional information-gathering ability granted by his Spirit Detection Sense made fine-grained textures appear on that iron plate.

Li Yuan locked onto the low-frequency pulsation that appeared every quarter of an hour.

The pulsation wasn’t coming from the center of the Restriction, but was instead radiating from a junction point in the Array Patterns on the Restriction’s eastern edge.

He compressed his Divine Sense to its limits, focusing intently on that junction point.

The operational trajectory of the Array Pattern gradually became clear in his mind. The flow of Spiritual Power there was an imperceptible fraction slower than in other areas. It was precisely this slight sluggishness that caused the periodic buildup and release of energy.

Li Yuan extended his perception outward from the junction point, penetrating the rock strata to compare it with the surrounding terrain.

Slightly to the east of the area directly above the junction point was an old, deep mining zone. The veins had long since been exhausted, leaving behind a complex, crisscrossing network of hollow geological structures.

The two pieces of the puzzle clicked together in Li Yuan’s mind.

The geological fault line of the old mining zone was pressing directly down on that seam in the Restriction Array Pattern’s junction.

Hundreds of years of minor crustal shifts, coupled with the subsidence of rock layers after the mineral veins were depleted, had subjected this once-perfect Array structure to continuous external physical pressure. Although a Tier Three Array was powerful, it couldn’t withstand hundreds of years of geological change, day in and day out. Finally, a slight deformation had occurred at this very point.

’A weak point.’

’A breakthrough point that doesn’t require Tier Three Perfection-stage Array mastery to exploit. One that could be torn open through physical destruction or a targeted explosion.’

Li Yuan retracted his perception, erased the faint traces he had left on the cliff face, and his figure melted backward into the soil, silently retreating from Skeleton Ridge.