Sleep that follows entering stillness through the Visualization Method is 'Spirit Preserving, Body Nourishing,' also known as 'Embryonic Breathing.'
This is the optimal mode of rest. With consciousness settled into stillness, in the state between dreaming and waking, the just-right awareness works in concert with the body's instincts, consuming the nutrients stored within to repair and shape the body in a perfect way.
A sleep of one or two shichen in this spirit-preserving state can satisfy an ordinary person's daily needs. Even injury and depletion can be nursed back through a longer stretch of sleep.
When An Jing awoke, he felt full of vigor and clear-headed. Though some muscles within still ached faintly and his wounds had not fully resolved, that was only because his body lacked enough nutrients and the time had been too short.
"I'm in good shape."
Heart beating strongly, An Jing rose to his feet and leapt smoothly from the beam down to the floor. "Anything unusual?"
At his forehead, the Sword Spirit's mark slowly withdrew back into his skin. "No. Nothing has happened."
"Good." An Jing's eyes were now bright, his spirit fully restored once more, and he scanned his surroundings. "If I had been ambushed right when I arrived, I could have brought less than half my strength to bear. If I had been struck while I was resting, at most sixty or seventy percent."
"And now, I can bring at least ninety percent of my power to bear."
Whether or not that mind-specialized monster even existed—whether it was cautiously observing from the side or waiting for its prey to step into the trap—at least An Jing had already recovered his condition to the best it could be.
After resting, An Jing began to inspect the two roads, the one he had come by and the one that led on.
The road back was, naturally, the one the corpses had come along—in other words, a road leading to the 'ruins' exit.'
The road ahead was the one the corpses had wanted to explore further when they came to this place—a road leading to the 'depths of the ruins.'
Both An Jing and the Sword Spirit felt that going deeper into the ruins was a bad idea: "Even professional exploration teams have met their doom here. With strength like ours, going deeper is suicide."
Still, it was necessary to probe the situation along the road ahead a little.
The road ahead lay behind and to the side of the ancient attic of the ruins—a deep, winding corridor descending into the depths of the earth. An Jing sensed gusts of humid, hot wind pulsing out from within it. "Is there a hot spring underground? Seems there are other ventilation openings too..."
He shook his head slightly, with no intention of exploring deeper—where there was heat and water, there was very likely life.
The deeper one went, the greater the danger.
And as for the road back...
"Something has been here."
Just as he reached the edge of the passage behind the corpses, An Jing suddenly stopped in his tracks, and the Sword Spirit asked with some curiosity, "Oh? How can you tell?"
Frowning deeply, An Jing looked at a corpse he had searched. "When I finished looting this one, I deliberately placed its bones here and stacked them up."
"But now the bones are scattered, and there are marks of something trampling them."
An Jing warily crouched down, Jade Ritual Dagger in hand, and examined the trampling marks, but he could not make out what sort of creature's footprints they were. "Strange. Not animal tracks, not hoofprints, not shoes, not some ape or the like..."
"They look more like some crawling creature, some tentacles climbing... Could it be an octopus from the underground hot spring? An octopus that eats brains and souls?"
"No, not an octopus either. This looks more like..."
Grass blades and vines.
On the crushed remains, An Jing saw scattered spots of a luminescent mark.
He thought of the luminescent vines in the underground cave behind him.
He had hidden inside the attic of the ruins, avoiding those luminescent vines, and so had rested undisturbed for three shichen.
—Whoosh.
A cold wind, almost imperceptible, brushed past.
Without the slightest hesitation, An Jing spun around, and at the same time drew the Jade Ritual Dagger across his palm!
The Blood Killing Aura sword instantly re-formed. Then, drawing on the force of An Jing's turn, the twist of his waist, and the stretch of his arm, it became a full, rich arc of crimson light and slashed straight at the black shadow that had appeared behind him at some unknown moment!
Thud! The sound of something being cut open and liquid splattering rang out, but along with a strange, furious howl, the scattered vines instantly turned into seven or eight whipping shadows that lashed toward where An Jing stood!
But at this moment An Jing advanced instead of retreating—a whip's lashing only carried great destructive power at its tip, and up close it was powerless.
And the Blood Killing Aura longsword in his hand was incomparably sharp; as he swung it, root after root was severed on the spot, as easily as slicing paper, parting oil, or trimming grass. In a single breath, four or five vines were cut through.
Then An Jing gripped the longsword with both hands in a proper hold, sword light flashing, and thrust straight at the very center of the black shadow's body.
Immediately after, with a crisp, clean cutting sound, An Jing pulled and drew the sword, slicing the monster's body in two across the middle!
But at that very instant, as An Jing's mind relaxed just slightly, he heard the Sword Spirit's warning: "Focus your spirit, stay alert!"
"This monster isn't dead yet!"
"Right—these are vines!" And An Jing immediately caught on: if everything was as he had guessed, this monster simply could not die from having its body cut apart!
Just as expected, the next instant, every luminescent vine in the whole cave suddenly flared bright!
Their color was a blazing white, their shape like a net, lighting up the dim, gloomy underground cave as bright as day!
In the instant the light burst forth, an invisible shockwave of the soul spread out, and a soul-quake sufficient to kill an Inner Breath Realm martial artist in an instant filled the entire cave.
At the same time, the vine amalgam, cut in two across the middle, began to writhe again, about to pounce at An Jing!
But aside from his body swaying, An Jing still gripped the sword tightly in his hand.
A disc of blood-colored light flashed and vanished.
The arm gripping the sword hilt then swung, tracing an arc of scarlet flame, its edge surging in and out, and slashed out three sword strokes—one vertical and two horizontal.
Where the sword's edge passed, the vine amalgam rushing at him was cut into four pieces, then six, then eight.
These streaks of sword qi were just like that strike An Jing had unleashed when he broke through to the Inner Breath—power crisscrossing, bursting out from the blade, carving line after line into the ground and kicking up dust all through the air.
Cut apart once more, the vine amalgam collapsed limply to the ground, and the many luminescent vines that had unleashed the mind shockwave dimmed as well, plunging the entire cave into darkness.
Only An Jing's eyes remained, and the fiend sword in his hand, flowing with flame-like blood-red light.
"A little easier to deal with than I imagined—an ambush-type monster."
Having finished off his opponent completely, An Jing let out a great sigh of relief and shook his head wearily.
With the Sword Spirit's protection and the blessing of the Destiny Pattern, An Jing's mental resistance was truly not low.
Especially since he had been on guard all along, wary at heart, so even when this vine monster struck his soul with full force, he merely froze for an instant and felt a stabbing pain inside his skull, but it was not enough to leave him unable to move.
This guaranteed-kill trump card had little effect on An Jing, so what followed was naturally a slaughter. After catching his breath, An Jing meant to finely dice these vine amalgams into mince and kill them for good.
But halfway through the cutting, An Jing discovered something out of the ordinary.
A human skull.
Chapter 54