The source of the sick palace.

Qiu Shaohu was taken aback.

Yes, isn't where I am now the source of a sick palace?

Obviously, the environment near Cangxian Mountain is pleasant and the vegetation is abundant, but this river valley is dry, as if it is a dead Jedi.

Starting from this, the surrounding plants and trees are constantly withering, so that all living beings stop here, isn't this equivalent to a "source of disease"?

But why is this happening?

Qiu Shaohu was thinking about it, and tried to climb down the cliff of the river valley.

The stones at the bottom of the valley are washed away by water all year round, and the appearance is very smooth, making it difficult to gain a foothold on it. In addition, the valley is flat on both sides, and there is no point to climb, so it is extremely difficult to descend.

Fortunately, Qiu Shaohu had experienced it in the Great Snow Mountain, and this difficulty could not overwhelm him. When I reached the riverbed below, I immediately felt that the desolation here was better than ever.

It is clear that there are dense forests on both sides, but as far as the eye can see, there are bare rocks everywhere, and there is no end in sight.

The pebbles at the bottom of the river, reflected in the pale colors of the moonlight, like a dense skeleton, make people shudder.

Qiu Shaohu's eyes were like torches, and his amber pupils reflected everything around him, searching for something that might be wrong.

With his head turning, his gaze suddenly froze in one position.

In the midst of the rocks there, a green grass grows.

"Wildfires can't be burned, and the spring breeze blows and grows", a poet of the previous dynasty praised the vitality of weeds, but now this green grass is here, but it is particularly eye-catching.

In Qiu Shaohu's eyes, this is a place where a little vitality appears out of thin air in a desolate place, which is extremely wrong in any case.

Maybe the key node is here.

Qiu Shaohu walked over, came to the side of the green grass, reached out and grabbed it, trying to pull it out.

The moment it touched him, Qiu Shaohu noticed something wrong.

This smell is not unfamiliar to him, but it is surprising to appear here.

"Whoa!"

At the moment when the whole green grass was pulled out, a sudden change occurred.

Countless traces of water gushed out from its original position, jumping high like a fountain, and the waves of water soared into the sky, as if a new spring was nourishing the dry riverbed.

The water was violent, but it soon stopped, and after a few moments there was no sign of it except for the wet stones around it.

No matter how fast Qiu Shaohu hid, there were still some traces of water that fell on his body just now, and he smelled the same smell and frowned slightly.

"It's seawater."

Yes, fishy with a slightly salty taste, only seawater does. And the grass just now is actually a seaweed.

But why is seawater here?

"Click-"

It's the sound of falling stones.

Qiu Shaohu turned his head and saw that where the sea water originally spewed out, a swarthy hole appeared at this time.

I can't see all over the cave, and I don't know what's down there.

Qiu Shaohu took out a red sun talisman, lit the fire, and threw it inside.

The flames jumping on the runes slowly drifted to the bottom, and after a few beats, the flames struggled to extinguish without any movement.

Qiu Shaohu leaned his face to the edge of the cave and immediately felt the air flow blowing.

There is air circulation, which proves that there is a passage inside, and maybe there is something hidden.

Qiu Shaohu made up his mind, fastened the iron hat on his head, tightened the placket of Dayu's clothes, and after doing all the protection, he jumped in with the trapbox behind him.

As soon as you jump into the hole, you can immediately feel a humid and hot atmosphere, followed by a biting cold. When you completely fall to the bottom, both of these feelings disappear again, like several invisible compartments appearing in a cave, each layer distinct.

At the bottom end, in a closed environment, Qiu Shaohu saw a hole in a rock wall, and it was pitch black behind the hole, and he didn't know what it was.

Qiu Shaohu took out the Yanling knife and used the knife as a shovel, digging there continuously. The rock wall was already extremely fragile due to the erosion of the sea, and he soon dug a hole through which people could pass.

Lowering his body, Qiu Shaohu cautiously walked inside. The surrounding rock walls are wet everywhere, and I don't know how long they have been soaked in seawater. The further you go, the more obvious the erosion becomes. A lot of algae have grown on the stone wall, and it is wet and slippery to walk on, and if you are not careful, you will fall.

Could it be that the barren river valley is due to the inflow of seawater under the riverbed?

The seawater that pours under the riverbed seeps into the mountain soil little by little through the ground, slowly destroying everything around it. After all, for plants on land, seawater is tantamount to highly poisonous, and this speculation is not unreasonable.

Qiu Shaohu groped his way forward, his palm touched the rock wall in front of him, and he suddenly paused.

From here, the cave is all dry and no trace of water can be felt.

It was as if there was some invisible force that cut off the flow of the sea.

The surrounding light was extremely dim, and there was no light in the depths of the cavern. If Qiu Shaohu's wolf pupils have no light, they can't reflect light to enhance their eyesight, so naturally they can't see anything like ordinary people.

As a last resort, Qiu Shaohu could only take out another red sun talisman and light it as a light source.

In the firelight, he saw a sight that he would never forget.

The surrounding rock walls are neat and well-organized, like well-maintained houses. The rock walls are painted with ochre, and they are so smooth that they can still be imagined as they were in the past, even though they have begun to dry out and become dull over time.

On these rock walls, there are also various murals, which use a variety of paints to depict various scenes, people, plants, mountains, rivers and fish, insects, although all have faded and weathered, the remaining parts are still lifelike.

Under the Lingchuan Sect, there is actually a cave sky, which I am afraid no one can imagine.

It was also here that Qiu Shaohu saw another familiar thing.

On the dilapidated rock face, some black spots in the cracks were particularly glaring, they were all alive, but most of them were dead, and a small number were barely struggling to die, that is, they were immediately cut off from life.

Those insects with fangs and claws, when they were seen on the ground before, moved in groups, and seemed very majestic, but now they were a little humble.

Qiu Shaohu picked up a dying alien worm, and it was still trying to threaten him with pincers, but it was already weak. Qiu Shaohu could not see any traces of external injuries on his body, but the insect's unique exoskeleton had peeled off, and several claws had broken from the inside, apparently dying of exhaustion.

"It seems that the resting place is actually looking for here." Qiu Shaohu vaguely grasped a key point.

From the very beginning, the resting place knew that this cave was hidden under the Lingchuan Sect, but it didn't know where it was, so he released these insects and tried to help them dig down and find the exact location.

That's why Qiu Shaohu found them from the holes with white flags inserted in them, and those white flags should be used to drive them.

But I didn't expect that this place was buried too deeply, and by the time these insects dug here, they had already exhausted themselves, and of course there was no way to send the news back to the resting place, so the scene was deadlocked.

"If it weren't for the star map, I wouldn't have been able to find this place. But what's on it? ”

The Red Sun Talisman in his hand had burned out, and Qiu Shaohu replaced it with another new talisman when the fire was about to be extinguished.

At the moment of the junction of light and darkness, Qiu Shaohu seemed to see a shadow flashing in front of him.

"Who!" He shouted, scanning his surroundings.

The echo echoed through the empty cavern, and there was no one but himself.

Qiu Shaohu vaguely felt that something was wrong, looked carefully again, and finally saw a "figure" at the end of his line of sight.

The shadow was all white, and its shape was distorted, making it look very strange. It is a mural painted on the rock wall, and it looks like it is about to fly out of the painting. I don't know what kind of paint was used for painting, but after a long time of washing, it can still maintain its white color.

Qiu Shaohu took a closer look, only to realize the reason why he felt weird. This mural is actually two figures, overlapping each other, which of course will appear to be unbalanced.

The person below seems to be sitting cross-legged on the ground in a meditative posture, while the person above is suspended above the head of the meditator, as if there is no connection between each other, fluttering like a scene of ascension.

It looks like an out-of-body soul.

"Geist arts?" Qiu Shaohu remembered what Lianmo had told him about this long-lost cultivation sect on the Island of Forgetless Forgetting, using his own soul to leave his body, become enlightened independently, and escape the world, that is, the essence of the method of wandering souls, which was exactly the same as the picture drawn in front of him.

But this method is also very different from what the Lingchuan Sect practiced, so why is it buried in the ground of the Lingchuan Sect?

It should be said that although Lianmo told him that the method of wandering souls still exists in the outside world, Qiu Shaohu has never heard of any sect or sect of cultivation of this strange Shinto cultivation so far.

It is impossible for a secular dynasty to exist, and even the Three Spirits Sect, which represents the evil of the Resting Place, the True Pond Sect, and the Zhenkang Shrine, are not such cultivation methods.

Perhaps, will it be that even the Lingchuan Sect does not know the secrets buried under their feet?

"It's no wonder that the resting place is so enthusiastic, and the information contained in these murals alone is of great value."

Qiu Shaohu saw that the mural depicted a scene of exercising the purity of his soul, in which the person in the painting used his soul to leave the body and burrow into the stone, and tempered his soul based on the number of broken stones.

It was also at the bottom of that painting that Qiu Shaohu saw countless stone fragments, presumably someone tried it himself against the content on the mural.

There are also murals depicting in the mountains and wilderness, where some people use their own souls to integrate into the bodies of tigers, leopards and beasts, bearing their fierce blood, which can be regarded as tempering themselves with animal nature.

The murals are engraved with all kinds of peculiar ways to exercise the soul, which makes people dizzy.

Following the direction of the mural, Qiu Shaohu kept walking forward, and immediately stopped under his feet.

The mural he was facing at this time should be said to be the most incredible.

Because most of the contents on the mural have been destroyed.

Even though the color of other murals is dull, you can probably still see some clues. Only here, most of them have been changed beyond recognition.

Qiu Shaohu stretched out his finger and tried to test it, "There are no traces of burning or water invasion, just simple weathering." Qiu Shaohu thought, "If this place is the most weathered, it proves that the murals here are much older than the others." Well? There are still words here? ”

Qiu Shaohu saw some mutilated small characters in the corners of the mural, which was a unique thing.

The font is crooked, not unneat, but the unique ancient seal characters in the past, compared with the current horizontal and vertical square words, the words at that time were more like simplified symbols, so there were not too many specifications for writing, which also caused difficulties in identification.

Qiu Shaohu prides himself on being knowledgeable, but he knows almost nothing about ancient characters, and he can barely recognize some of them by comparing and guessing some fonts.

“…… At...... Mountain, line ...... Etiquette, Ancient ...... Divide...... The Taoist system is five, and the name is ...... The five paths are the right ......"

After that, it was incomplete, and even this information was reluctantly pieced together from the rest of the mutilated handwriting.

"Five Paths?" Qiu Shaohu pondered: "Is this a record of the situation in ancient times?" In the past, I don't know who divided the Tao into five types in a certain way. Are these five realms the root of the practice? But what exactly is the basis for the division? It's a pity that the handwriting is incomplete, and I don't know which five kinds these five refer to, and whether they are still in circulation. Five Dao, Dao System, Dao ......"

A spiritual light suddenly appeared in his mind, Qiu Shaohu hit a spirit, originally just a sentence that was inadvertently mentioned, but now it suddenly appeared in his memory again, it was extremely clear-

"The practice of the island of forgetfulness is classified as 'Shinto'."

That's what Mercy Mo had told him.

At the beginning, he was still a little puzzled, why Lianmo and others called themselves "cultivating immortals", but the method of cultivation was "Shinto".

It's just that this matter was quickly left behind him, and it seemed that because what Lianmo said was too reasonable, he didn't care.

Now that I think about it, could it be that "Shinto" was one of the "five realms" in the past?