Buffer Zone

He simply hadn’t expected it to condense into a White Fox.

He had clearly envisioned the Xiaotian Dog when he made the attempt.

As the White Fox’s face grew clearer, its body rapidly took shape as well.

In the blink of an eye, a White Fox that appeared to be sleeping with its eyes closed had fully emerged atop the stone stele.

The instant its body finished solidifying, the White Fox’s tightly shut eyes suddenly opened!

Its long, narrow eyes fixed on Lin Xiao. There was not the slightest ripple of emotion in its silent expression.

Then the White Fox parted its mouth slightly, and a strange, shrill voice drifted out:

“The sun and moon pass on, cause and effect follow their course. Open the heart, fulfill the wish, soothe the soul, and rest forever in the dark.”

“I am the Tomb Guardian of Changming Mountain.”

“May I ask why you have come? To bury someone, or to offer a sacrifice?”

Changming—also known as Changming’s homonym, Changming—was the burial ground Lin Xiao had specially built for their Lingxian Sect.

In response to the White Fox’s question, Lin Xiao stood upright with his hands behind his back and answered calmly,

“I’m here for a tour.”

The White Fox had probably never expected that the first visitor it encountered after taking up its post would be someone so uncooperative. It stared at Lin Xiao in silence for quite some time.

When Lin Xiao began to wonder whether the White Fox had crashed and started considering whether he should find another way inside to look around first, then thoroughly inspect the creature for problems after he came out, the White Fox lying atop the stone stele finally moved.

It lazily swept its eyes over the man before it, and its strange voice entered Lin Xiao’s ears:

“Your presence was not recognized, Sect Master. This Little Fox was rude. Please, Sect Master, do as you please.”

With that, its large, plump tail gave a gentle flick, and Lin Xiao vanished from his original location. In the next instant, he found himself in another space.

As far as the eye could see, everything was shrouded in mist.

Aside from the gray, drab earth beneath his feet, he could make out only the sparse silhouettes of trees nearby.

The stone stele of Changming Mountain still stood beside him, and the Tomb Guardian White Fox still lay sprawled atop it.

The White Fox, however, no longer paid Lin Xiao any attention. It merely closed its eyes and pretended to sleep.

Seeing its large, plump tail swaying contentedly, Lin Xiao felt a strong urge to give it a tug.

But the Tomb Guardian looked like it would be difficult to deal with, so he decided against it.

It was his own sect’s Tomb Guardian, after all. It deserved some respect.

Without looking at the White Fox again, Lin Xiao walked toward the depths of the fog ahead.

There were many trees here.

They were all still in the form of saplings.

Nearly every one of them looked identical.

Their entire bodies were pitch-black, and even their tender young leaves were black.

If Liao Pantu had been here, he would probably have been stunned.

Every one of these saplings was a soul-nourishing tree!

The soul-nourishing tree saplings had been a system reward he received after researching the Locking Ring.

The soil in which they were planted was the fertile soil of the Spirit River that he had previously instructed Qin Jianghe to purchase as a priority.

Over the past few months, Qin Jianghe had managed to acquire two batches of the Spirit River’s fertile soil and had already delivered them to Lin Xiao.

The soil of the Spirit River was extremely suitable for growing soul-nourishing trees.

The soil itself was easy enough to obtain, but soul-nourishing tree saplings were exceedingly rare.

Moreover, even if one possessed both the soil and the saplings, soul-nourishing trees were still very difficult to cultivate. As a result, soul-nourishing wood was also considered a rare treasure in the cultivation world.

Fortunately, Lin Xiao had already found a solution to this problem.

The system shop sold a cultivation manual for soul-nourishing trees. With that specialized manual, combined with the many skilled cultivators in their sect, he had no need to worry about being unable to grow them.

Not to mention that after gathering the yin energy from all directions, Changming Mountain itself had become an extremely yin place—the ideal environment for soul-nourishing trees.

Lin Xiao had planted the soul-nourishing trees in Changming Mountain not only because the environment was suitable for their growth.

Soul-nourishing trees were themselves objects of extreme yin. Planting them here allowed them and Changming Mountain to complement one another, each bringing out the best in the other.

As Lin Xiao continued deeper inside, the scenery around him suddenly began to change.

The surroundings abruptly became as illusory and distorted as reflections in a water mirror.

By the time he came to his senses, he had already returned to the stone stele where he had first entered.

He knew that he had reached the boundary of this space and been sent back to the entrance by the power of space.

Since Changming Mountain had been built for the purpose of burial and memorial rites, it naturally needed to provide families with private spaces where they could be alone with their loved ones.

Thus, although the interior of Changming Mountain appeared to be one enormous space, it was actually formed by countless small spaces layered over one another.

The spaces seemed to be connected, but in reality, they were independent of one another.

Anyone who entered could only access the specific space where their own family member had been buried. They could not freely enter any of the others.

Within Changming Mountain, only the Tomb Guardian White Fox could travel between the various spaces.

Apart from it, the soul-nourishing trees inside were also unaffected by the division between spaces.

The White Fox could travel freely between the spaces because it was itself a part of Changming Mountain.

As for the soul-nourishing trees, their ability to be planted throughout the interior without restriction was thanks to the buffer zones within the overall spatial structure.

The foundation of Changming Mountain was a complex, multilayered spatial formation created by linking together the small spatial formations Lin Xiao had constructed one by one.

However, because Lin Xiao’s cultivation was insufficient, it was impossible for him to fit the spaces together with absolute precision. Some gaps between them were inevitably left behind.

At first, Lin Xiao had been troubled over how to deal with those gaps.

But later, he changed his way of thinking.

If he stopped wasting effort trying to eliminate the gaps, perhaps he could instead consider whether they might be put to some use.

And so, he began studying them.

After exploring and testing the idea from every possible angle, Heaven finally rewarded his persistence, and he found a solution.

Using a method of compound overlapping, he wrapped those gaps up and, to a certain extent, incorporated them into the overall space.

In truth, however, these gaps were different from ordinary stable spaces. Unlike the other areas, they were not completely sealed off.

They served as a buffer zone between the enclosed spaces and the outside world, creating a certain degree of connection between the outside and the completely sealed spaces produced by the formation.

Lin Xiao had named this place the buffer zone.

The buffer zone could connect to the real world, allowing the originally sealed-off low-level spaces to absorb a portion of the laws of the world. In this way, living creatures could enter and even grow within them.

This design could be considered a stroke of genius for Lin Xiao, accomplishing two goals at once.

Because, truthfully, the greatest problem he had needed to solve from the very beginning had not been the gaps between the spaces or anything of the sort.

It was that, with the abilities of a Nascent Soul cultivator—or even those of a cultivator who had previously only been at the late Golden Core stage—he could not yet create a high-level space that would allow living creatures to enter and exit freely and move about inside.

That was why he had not dared mention the idea to Senior Liao at first.

He knew perfectly well that it was not very realistic. At the time, he had more or less just been acting on a whim, eager to try his hand at it.

Who would have thought that he would actually manage to make something of it?

As expected of him.