Chapter 308: Breathing

【Stretching】

Like the genie of legend, once the seal is broken, the spirit coiled within for a thousand years bursts forth; no one is not astonished that such a towering, mighty, and boundlessly magical thing was trapped in a small bottle no larger than a palm's grasp.

When linking to the mental perspective, that is exactly how it feels.

The depth and breadth of perception extend, while the boundary of the self blurs, stretching elongated fingertips toward every corner within reach, tasting every inch of matter and space filtered through them.

The senses "touch" the mist, the drifting sand in the air, heavy and fine, moving in strands and sheets, revealing a general upward airflow trajectory. Like a boiling pot, things below struggle to rise together; this area is stirring and brewing something.

The thing causing the anomaly still hasn't been found, though he has indeed been striving to stretch his spirit—if not for this, he would not have known it had expanded to such a degree; even the ships carrying the team and supplies appeared somewhat tiny within it, let alone the people inside.

It is not merely a range, but something that truly exists.

In the open perspective, a strange question arises in consciousness: is he the vast, empty spiritual entity looking down on things, or that creature which needs a few small wooden planks for protection to avoid drowning in the water?

This dislocation is quite ominous, but now is not the time to stop; he tries to speed up, to filter out disguised signs of activity as quickly as possible. Whatever actively tracked and attacked them cannot be small; even if it were swimming underwater, it should cause clear, distinguishable disturbances.

Ripples undulate, their amplitude showing a trend of increasing, mixed with water spray kicked up by freezing rain, unexplained ripples, and bursting bubbles. Only swimming traces are absent.

After the oarsmen stopped, the boat slid forward a distance under inertia, sticking to the water surface and drifting with the waves. By all rights, they should have been caught up to by now, yet apart from the approaching tension, nothing was found closing in on them.

The humming in their ears never ceased, gradually growing shrill, as if it contained not just one voice line, but was completed by different people alternating and continuing one after another.

Kraft turned his attention to beneath the water, hoping it was a clever creature clinging to the underside of the boat to avoid detection, but he was disappointed again.

Apart from bubbles carried by the undercurrent and a little silt, there was nothing moving.

【Bubbles, silt?】

Are these things that should appear in the lake water?

It was not just beneath the boat; the water bodies within sensory reach had all become different from what was remembered. The dim light deliberately maintained to avoid attracting attention obscured vision, while the senses focused on searching for the imagined pursuer ignored this.

In the water body originally pure as black crystal, cracks and bubbles rapidly increased, transforming into frosted glass.

"Where is it?" someone asked. They had already prepared for battle, but the observer's prolonged lack of movement and the rising sound in their ears indicated the situation was different from usual.

Accompanying this was dizziness and nausea, as if sitting in a severely jolting carriage; the severe imbalance caused by shaking and swaying was no less than the first-ever experience of seasickness for the cultivators who had lived by the water since childhood.

The reaction was particularly obvious in some; Green gagged violently, wanting to vomit up a meal long since digested, his pupils like flicking picks, trembling up and down incessantly.

This place is an endless riddle; just when one feels they know it well enough, it reveals a completely new aspect.

"Nothing is following us!" Kraft did not explain; like bending down and stretching an arm to reach a small object fallen into the gap between tables, he strained to control his spirit to extend downward.

Water flow, silt, bubbles; the deeper one goes, the murkier it becomes.

Until the spirit stretched to its limit, the perception area almost pulled into a long, downward-pointing spindle shape, yet still failed to touch the lake bed.

What lay below could hardly be called lake water; solid components accounted for nearly half the proportion, more suitable to describe as churning, viscous mud, constantly emitting strings of bubbles.

Still a bit short; the lake's depth far exceeded reason, but even without seeing what happened, one could know the lake bed was in violent turmoil.

"Nothing is following us; there is a problem with this place." Kraft made his judgment. "Row fast!"

"Where to?"

"Anywhere, as long as we don't stop!"

No longer caring about concealment, the cultivators grabbed spare wooden oars and thrust them into the water together, straining to push the boat away from the increasingly treacherous currents.

Kraft did not cut off his mental senses. Deep within the silt, he felt something familiar.

The layer was being plucked; the boundary between the present world and the deep was no different from a drumhead, being hammered and resonating with a booming vibration.

Reflected in ordinary senses, this was translated as abnormal spatial awareness, causing severe swaying that made people dizzy, nauseous, and unsteady; the deeper one understood that side and the more sensitive one was, the more intense it became.

If he were to disconnect his mental senses now, it would be much the same as being thrown into a blender.

A cry of alarm reached his ears; Kraft struggled to spare a bit of mental energy for vision and found it came from the cultivator looking out over the gunwale.

The gradually turbid water body had caught their attention.

On what grounds could they see? In the time the thought flashed through his mind, an oar lost its power; the person holding it, at this critical moment, seemed suddenly attracted by the silt and bubbles in the water and ceased moving.

【See?】

A small lamp in the boat's belly could not illuminate the water below; it could only be a new light source.

The lighting improved imperceptibly; it was still that pale, thin illumination, but it came from below, from the lake bed hidden beneath the mud.

And at this moment, the mental senses also touched something beyond the silt and water.

A straight edge, absolutely not the approximate straight line of natural lake stones or jointed rock pillars, but a completely artificial creation.

A second, a third, until the sixth, forming a standard shape; it was the base of a certain prism, being lifted upward.

And then more, like a movable type printing plate; the lake bed, composed of fitted prisms, rose unevenly, vibrating, and emitting extremely penetrating light.

"Look at the boat's belly, do not turn your head."

The cultivators executed this order, locking their eyes on the flame of the oil lamp inside the boat's belly, doing nothing else but mechanically moving their arms.

If they had looked out the side at this moment, they would have witnessed a sight seen only once in a lifetime.

Beneath the muddy water, countless hexagons like a honeycomb rose, radiating threads of Bai Guang. It was a pale, gloomy, soul-stealing celestial light; the boat seemed to row upside down in the air, sailing across a treacherous lunar surface.

Between the prisms filled amorphous supporting biomass extended fine tendrils and web-like filtration structures, churning the silt and undercurrents, exhaling strings of bubbles like breath.

The humming merged into one, then split into myriad tones, issuing an invitation.

Accompanied by a muffled, prolonged sucking sound, large and small vortices tore through the water surface behind; the nearest even pulled the stern off course, dragging the hull back a distance.

But their response was timely enough.

When this breathing, which perhaps lasted over ten minutes, reached its end, the boat had basically sailed out of the glowing waters, avoiding the lake bed's recruitment activity.