When Luo Ling opened her eyes, the sunlight shone through the gaps in the treetops, like white needles, piercing her eyes slightly. She stretched out her hand to block the sunlight, and in front of her was the blue sky that was fragmented by the branches, making her realize that she was lying on the ground.
She sat up and found that what she saw was a pure white. It was a winter forest. The tall trees around her had lost all their leaves. The trunks were covered with snow, and the thinner branches were covered with ice crystals. The ground where she sat was a foot deep with snow.
But strangely, Luo Ling didn't feel cold in her jacket and jeans. She reached out and grabbed a handful of snow, and it felt like she was grabbing a bunch of fine sand on the beach in summer, cool, soft, and very comfortable.
Is this the world in the book
Luo Ling finally read the page in Xiao Chen's hand, and then she appeared here. Everything here was so real and detailed, the crystal clear ice, the rough bark, the occasional falling snow, all made her wonder if she had returned to Earth and was sitting in a forest in the north. Everything before was just a dream.
But soon, she confirmed that this was not the real world. A small light flew out from behind the fir tree next to her. It was so bright even in the sun, emitting a long blue light, flying like a bee among flowers, circling back and forth. Luo Ling stood up and looked at it closely, and found that it was actually a little elf emitting blue light!
The elf was only the size of a finger and looked like a young girl. Luo Ling had seen this kind of little thing in cartoons. She flapped her butterfly wings and flew happily. When she saw Luo Ling noticed her, she came to Luo Ling, flew onto her shoulders, flew across her face, and looked at her from time to time, as if she was playing with her.
"Elf, who are you? Where is this?" Seeing that the elf didn't speak, Luo Ling couldn't help but ask.
"I am the spirit of this book. Follow me." The elf's voice was very ethereal. He waved to her and slowly flew out of the woods.
Luo Ling hesitated for a moment, but decided to follow. She stepped on the deep pits in the snow and the elf flew slowly, taking her up a gentle slope. A magical scene appeared in front of them. The ice and snow stopped abruptly on the top of the mountain, just like a painter used green paint to paint a stroke on the ground, and a green meadow replaced the pure white scenery.
"It's really an imaginary world..." Luo Ling murmured.
Walking down the hillside on the green grass, pink and yellow flowers bloomed all over the grass. At the end of the grass were dense trees, and a stream ran through the forest, the sound of water playing the breath of spring.
Luo Ling walked along the stream. As she walked, the grass and trees became more lush, the ground was covered with huge flowers, and the branches and leaves of the trees became more unrestrained and unrestrained. They stretched out to their heart's content and were full of vitality. Luo Ling looked up and even the sun seemed to be a little hotter, making her feel that summer had arrived.
"Are these four seasons?" Luo Ling walked in the summer, looking forward to the autumn.
Sure enough, after walking a little further, a fallen leaf floated past Luo Ling's eyes. Her eyes passed over the fallen leaf, and all she saw was golden yellow, the color of autumn. She stepped on the ground, and the leaves and dead branches made a crackling sound. This was the end of life, but also the beginning of life.
In ten minutes, Luo Ling went through a year cycle in the illusion.
"You have a beautiful heart, so there is this beautiful world." The elf said, "And ahead is an uncontrolled world, a wasteland without order, and it is also a test for you."
"What test?" Luo Ling asked uneasily.
"You will know." The elf stopped talking and just led the way.
Luo Ling crossed the stream and walked up a high slope, where the trees began to become sparse. When she was about to reach the top of the slope, the view in front of her suddenly became clear.
"This is..." Luo Ling looked ahead in disbelief.
It was a vast wasteland that surrounded the woods behind Luo Ling, and Luo Ling knew that the forest she had walked through, which changed with the seasons, was really small and insignificant compared to the wasteland.
The sky here was gray, as if it was blocked by layers of dark clouds. The soil was a strange dark purple, and there were no trees or grass, only jagged rocks. There was wind in the wasteland, and it became wild as soon as Luo Ling appeared. The weather was originally calm, but suddenly a storm appeared out of nowhere, mixed with black ice crystals and pounced on Luo Ling, forcing her back several steps.
Luo Ling wanted to run back to the forest to avoid the wind, but the voice of the elf rang in her ears: "Your potential is extremely strong, but the foundation of your cultivation is too low. Forcibly shaping this world has hurt your essence. On the road of magic, you need to pay a more painful price than others to move forward."
"Are you blown by the strong wind?" Luo Ling asked with difficulty while resisting the strong wind.
"If you want to be strong, endure the pain and don't retreat."
What's the point? Luo Ling didn't understand. However, she had a strong intuition telling her not to retreat, and she had to persevere in the wind and snow. So she leaned against a big tree, enduring the impact of wind and hail at the edge of the forest.
The black ice was like needles, and the strong wind was like knives, cutting into her spiritual body. She found that even though she was not a physical body, she could still feel pain and bleed. Only she knew the pain. After an unknown amount of time, Luo Ling felt that she had been frozen into a broken popsicle. The wind and snow had just subsided a little. She opened her eyes and found that the surrounding scenery had changed a little. The grass actually extended from under her feet, eroding a small piece of wasteland.
"What on earth is..." Luo Ling just opened her mouth and felt a sharp pain in her chest and abdomen. A stream of blood rushed to her throat, but she did not dare to be careless in this strange place and swallowed it down forcefully.
"This is your meditation space." The elf leading the way flew to Luo Ling's ear and said to her, "This is the source of your power and the root of your pain."
———————————
"This is your meditation space, kid!" The big man in front of Xiao Chen was wearing a captain's uniform, a wide-brimmed hat, and a pipe in his mouth. The cabin was shaking violently, and Xiao Chen had to hold on to the door frame tightly, while the captain stood in the room with his hands on his hips as if nothing had happened.
Xiao Chen felt that he looked familiar, and after thinking about it carefully, he felt that he was very similar to the Berserker in the underground palace. However, now he was not carrying the big axe, and his beard was not so thick. This modern dress made Xiao Chen feel a little inconsistent.
The captain seemed to guess what he was thinking immediately, and said helplessly: "I look like this because of you!"
"Me?" Xiao Chen suddenly had an idea. "Are you a figment of my imagination?"
The captain grinned and said, "Not bad. I am the book spirit in the Sea of Consciousness. Everything around me is the result of your reading. As for my appearance, temper, and even the way I speak..." He lowered his head and looked at his figure, "Maybe it comes from someone you often think of recently."
"You mean, books created this world and you?"
"No, you constructed this world, or rather, you are this world. And I am just the bricklayer who helps you build this world." The book spirit did not seem to be in a hurry, waiting for Xiao Chen to slowly digest the meaning of this sentence.
"What are we doing here?" Xiao Chen asked after thinking for a while.
"What? Why do you ask such a stupid question? Meditation! Meditation space is of course used for meditation! What's going on? Why are all the people who study these days ignorant? Don't you have a teacher? Moreover, your spiritual world is not peaceful, how come your concentration foundation is so poor?" The captain stared at Xiao Chen for a while, then exclaimed: "Oh! Oh! No wonder! Look what I found, the other world in my memory? An outsider."
Xiao Chen looked nervous: "Can you read my memory?"
The captain shrugged and said, "I am a master in the spiritual realm! But why are you so nervous? I can only read the surface memory. I know what you are thinking. All this is told to me by your mind. He is just a time traveler, what does it have to do with me? My mission is to help the person who reads the book, who cares who he is?"
Seeing that the other party looked indifferent, Xiao Chen breathed a sigh of relief.
"I... feel a little confused and maybe a little seasick." He said with a gloomy face, bending over and holding his stomach.
"Not only do you have a terrible aesthetic sense, but you also have a low mobility." The captain walked to a porthole and looked at his image through the glass with a look of disdain. Then he patted Xiao Chen and said, "Stop talking nonsense and follow me."
It was raining and stormy outside the porthole, and Xiao Chen could not see the outside clearly. He could only follow Shu Ling and move forward with difficulty in the swaying of the ship. He wanted to vomit, but he could not. He just felt like a stick was stirring in his stomach. He stumbled along a corridor with the captain, climbed down the stairs, and found that there was a very empty cabin below, with almost no seats. This was a ferry that Xiao Chen was very familiar with. When he was a child, he often took such a boat to cross the river to visit his grandmother. It could carry hundreds of people and bicycles, and usually only sailed on inland rivers, but at this time it was tossing in the turbulent waves.
Sure enough, when the captain opened the hatch, pouring rain and waves rushed in, soaking Xiao Chen's whole body. He wiped the water off his face with his hand, looked out, and saw the raging sea.
"Are we... going out?" Xiao Chen held the handrail on the wall with both hands. Seeing that the waves were as high as a dozen stories, he was naturally afraid. He had never seen such a terrible scene in his imagination: the boat was sometimes caught in the valley by two huge waves, like a lamb under a cliff; sometimes it was thrown into the air, like a small flower on the top of a peak. Xiao Chen struggled between acceleration and deceleration, feeling the pain of free fall and violent collision. The door frame was his life-saving straw. He grabbed the protruding part of the frame with both hands, wishing he could stick his fingers into the steel plate.
He knew that if it were the real world, the boat would capsize in an instant, but in the meditation space, it was constantly tormented by ups and downs. Xiao Chen didn't know if there was such a thing as drowning in the meditation space, but in such a big wave, the boat was like a speck of dust in the wind. If Xiao Chen relaxed for a moment, he would be thrown into the deep sea.
"You are really extraordinary, kid! You have the potential to be a madman. Haha." The captain has a magical power. Wherever he goes, the waves and rain will naturally avoid him, and the bumps have no effect on him. He stood at the door, and no water could enter the cabin. The seawater invaded the two feet behind him, like hitting a reef, breaking into pieces and slowly receding. "Many people have used this book, but I have never seen such a doomsday scene."
Xiao Chen almost fell to the ground. He panted and asked in a hoarse voice: "What exactly is the "Sea of Consciousness Shadow Scroll"? Why is my world like this?"
The captain thought for a moment and said, "The creator only gave me one task, which is to help those who read the book face their spiritual world. Spiritual power is an indescribable, inexplicable and difficult to control power, originally buried at the bottom of the subconscious. I will use your experience, memory and emotions to visualize this power, so that you can see and touch it, so that it is more convenient to practice it, and then use it to control magic. But..." The captain glanced at the sea behind him with interest, "The more things contained in the subconscious, the more dangerous the world is. I have seen many people die in their own world. Compared with your world, their world is really nothing."
"It seems that this ship saved me?"
"That's right!" The captain patted the bulkhead beside him, pointed to a switch five steps away, and said, "Don't go over there, use your mind to open it."
Xiao Chen was puzzled. He did as the other party said, staring at the switch and thinking "turn on the light". With a click, the lights in the corridor lit up.
"This is?"
"This is control. This ship is the controllable part of your spiritual power. In this realm, you are safe. The sea and the sky are the opposite. They represent the part that has not yet been controlled. Master the uncontrolled part and you will become stronger."
"Is this how all magicians practice?" Xiao Chen simply sat on the ground.
"You should feel honored. Only magicians of the Dream Tower are qualified to practice like this." The captain shrugged and said, "Lucky guy! You should decide quickly. Either go back to your own world and let me go back to sleep. I hate this world that keeps shaking. Or go out and fight the sea and control more and more power. They call this 'forging the spirit'. Magicians spend their whole lives forging their spiritual power."
"Will I drown outside?" Xiao Chen asked.
"There is no real death here, but once you are swallowed by the waves, your mind will be drawn into the deep subconscious, and you will never wake up. At that time, there is only one possibility, turning into a walking corpse."
"Vegetative?"
"Yes, I like the words in your mind. 'Subconscious' and 'vegetative' are very descriptive and easy to use. And this strange ship is also very interesting."
Xiao Chen was silent for a while, then decided to take action. Nothing was more important than learning magic.
He lay prone on the ground, holding on to the skirting on the wall with one hand and prying open the gap in the floor with the other, crawling out of the cabin little by little like a spider. He had figured out the pattern of the boat's ups and downs, and every time he took advantage of the moment when the boat stabilized at the top or bottom of the waves, he crawled forward quickly.
The captain looked at him with a playful smile, and he walked out the door, leaving the entire doorway open. Rain and waves suddenly rushed in again. Xiao Chen remained calm, grabbed the door sill, and pressed his face against the ground to withstand the impact of the waves. Then, taking advantage of the inertia of the boat falling from the top of the wave, he threw himself on the railing outside the deck. His head hit the railing post, and he groaned in pain, but he finally managed to rush out of the cabin.
What a vast, gorgeous, and terrifying world this was. The sea was not the deep blue he had imagined, but rather a riot of colors, as if a paint bottle had been overturned. Or rather, it was as if there were some huge, colorful monsters lurking under the water, emitting various colors of light through a thin layer of water. The sky was a chaotic black, with dark clouds rolling across it. Lightning kept striking from the sky, illuminating most of the sky, turning it into a relief sculpture full of cloud patterns. The rumbling of thunder and the pouring rain filled Xiao Chen's senses, making him tremble, terrified, and excited.
"What a big world it is." The captain squinted his eyes and leaned against the outer wall of the cabin. "What a pity, what a pity."
Xiao Chen clung to the guardrail tightly, enjoying the thrill of a roller coaster. He shook his hair, which was wet like a piece of cloth, and shouted, "What a pity!"
The captain spoke in a rare serious tone: "The way of thinking determines the potential of the spiritual world. The creator believes that in order to form a perfect world, a person's thinking needs six qualities: knowledge, activity, calculation, willpower, imagination and stability. No one can be perfect in all aspects. It is good enough for an ordinary wizard to have one or two strengths. I have entered the minds of many people. Some worlds are cramped and small, some are static and rigid, some are simple and rough, some are illusory and dim, and some are ugly and desolate. I have never seen a world like yours...broad, smart, rich, real and gorgeous. It's a pity that your biggest shortcoming is that your mental power is not stable enough. It is too violent, just like that sea! Otherwise, what a perfect world it would be."
"how so?"
"I guess this is the price you pay for opening this book before you can concentrate. Do you think the warning on the page is false? If you don't reach the realm, there must be a price to pay. You are lucky not to die."
Xiao Chen spat out a mouthful of saliva and grinned, "But it sounds like even if the stability is a little worse, my world is still amazing?"
"Humph, I'm only talking about potential... A dead kitten is no bigger than a mouse. A world that has not grown up is worthless in the face of power." The book spirit sneered, "You are still far, far away. Moreover, magic is a precise art. Even if you grow up, your unstable mental strength may make your magic become very weird."
"weird?"
"Imagine a fool picking his teeth with a mace, it's not easy to not hit himself in the face. Haha."
"Hey, then why don't I just pick other people's teeth?" Xiao Chen asked back.
Shu Ling turned away and ignored him.
"Okay, forget about that. What should I do now?" Xiao Chen spit out sea water while speaking.
"The power of the spirit is hidden in the sea and sky of this world. Touch them, feel them, control them with your will, and change them. You can gain this power little by little." The captain seemed to enjoy seeing Xiao Chen get into trouble, and said cheerfully.
"In human terms: being blown by the wind and hit by the waves?"
“Absolutely!”
"Fuck..." Xiao Chen had just opened his mouth when another huge wave hit the side of the boat and submerged him in the silver-white sea water.