Transmigrated into a Grandpa, Embracing the Laid-Back Life

Forcing you to slow down.

Lin Yu understood this.

He could have simply told Su Ming directly.

But he didn’t.

Because he also knew another thing—some things lose their meaning once spoken aloud. It’s like the difference between having a basin of cold water dumped on your head versus walking into the rain yourself. The former makes you angry; the latter makes you calm.

Su Ming needed to walk in on his own.

Lin Yu withdrew his gaze and silently followed behind.

Within the mist, only the faintest footsteps remained.

One step.

Another step.Time had completely lost its measure in this thick fog. There was no sunlight to gauge by, no tree shadows to judge from, and even the rate at which spiritual energy was consumed became impossible to estimate due to the interference of that “membrane” layer within the mist.

He only knew that he kept walking.

Each step was excruciatingly slow.

With every step, he first had to reach out and feel the temperature difference, confirm that his direction hadn’t deviated, and only then set his foot down. After placing his foot, he would pause for a single breath, sensing the feedback from the stone slab to verify the path was still there. Then came the next step.

This process repeated hundreds of times. Maybe thousands.

Ying had gone quiet too.

The little one was no longer craning its neck to look around, not even chirping. It simply curled its body into a tight ball, pressed against the hollow of Su Ming’s shoulder, occasionally using the tip of its beak to gently peck at his collar, as if confirming that its master was still there.

Lin Yu didn’t speak again.

The mist was very still.

So still that Su Ming felt he could hear the sound of blood flowing through his own veins.

Suddenly—

He stopped.

Not because something was wrong beneath his feet.

But because he saw something.

To be precise, a shadow appeared within the mist.

Very blurry.

So blurry that at first, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. In this dense fog where he couldn’t even see five steps ahead, his vision had long since grown weary. Countless times already, he had mistaken a slightly thicker patch of mist for a tree trunk or a stone tablet.

But this time was different.

That shadow was moving.

Su Ming came to a complete halt.

He compressed his breathing to the minimum, letting the Aura Concealment Art circulate instinctively, drawing his energy aura inward until it nearly merged with the surrounding mist. One hand stealthily moved to the edge of the survival formation plate hidden in his sleeve, while the other gently pressed down on Ying’s back, signaling it not to move.

Ying gave an extremely slight tremble, then froze.

Su Ming stared fixedly at that shadow.

It was about six or seven steps away.

Its silhouette resembled a person.

Tall, thin, standing extremely upright. The outline of its robes drifted within the mist—impossible to discern the color, impossible to make out the face, only a rough humanoid form, like a silhouette condensed from thick fog.

What was it doing?

Su Ming watched for several breaths, his heartbeat gradually calming.

Because that shadow wasn’t looking at him.

It wasn’t even the slightest bit aggressive.

It was just standing there, doing one thing.

Raising a hand.

A blurry arm lifted slowly, its fingertip extending, suspended in the void.

Lowering the finger.

The fingertip tapped once in the air.

An extremely faint light bloomed from the fingertip—not any kind of spiritual light Su Ming was familiar with. That light seemed to be drawn from the depths of the mist itself. It had no color, only brightness. It flared for a flash, then traced a line through the void.

Su Ming’s pupils abruptly constricted.

That line wasn’t drawn randomly.

It had a trajectory, a curve, a rhythm.

The shadow continued its motion. The second finger descended, another line. Third finger, fourth finger. Line after line appeared in the void, intersecting, converging, diverging, like someone painting on an invisible canvas.

Su Ming’s breathing had completely stopped.

Those lines—

Were formation lines.

Not any kind of formation lines he had ever seen.

Not the lines embedded in the stone slabs of the path, not the naturally grown veins on the ancient tree, and certainly not the basic runes he had repeatedly inscribed on his formation plates.

They were being drawn directly in the void.

Without a carrier.

Without a medium.

No formation plate, no stone wall, no wooden board, not even a solid form condensed from spiritual energy. Those lines simply hung in the air, as fine as spider silk, yet as if carved into the fabric of space itself. Once drawn, they never dissipated.

The shadow’s movements weren’t fast—in fact, they could be called slow.

Before each finger descended, there was an extremely brief pause, as if confirming something. Only then did it move. The path traced by the fingertip wasn’t a straight line, nor a simple curve, but a kind of trajectory Su Ming had never seen before—it would suddenly accelerate at one point, then abruptly halt at another, as if the rhythm of breathing had been compressed into the movement of the finger.

Su Ming stood frozen, not moving an inch.

He couldn’t see the details clearly.

The mist was too thick. The shadow’s finger was only a blurry outline, and those lines were merely faint traces of light. But he could perceive the broad movements—lifting the hand, lowering the finger, guiding the line, turning, withdrawing the finger, raising the hand again.

A complete set of procedures.

Over and over again.

Su Ming watched, forgetting time.

He even forgot that he was still in the thick fog, forgot his loss of direction, forgot the existence of the survival formation plate in his sleeve. All his attention was captured by that shadow.

Not because of shock.

Though it was indeed shocking.

But because there was something in the shadow’s movements that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

Composure.

The posture with which the other party arranged formations was far too composed.

No hesitation, no struggle, no sense of “let me try to see if this works.” Every finger descended with a certainty, as if this set of movements had been performed millions of times, had been carved into the bones, and could be completed with eyes closed.

Yet at the same time, it wasn’t mechanical repetition.

The details of each repetition were subtly different—the curve of a certain line was off by a hair, a certain pause lasted half a breath longer, the angle of a certain turn was slightly larger. As if within the same framework, it was constantly being fine-tuned, optimized, and polished.

This wasn’t some earth-shattering display of ultimate technique, nor a torrent of power, nor a flash of genius inspiration.

It was just a person, on a path, doing the same thing repeatedly.

For a very long time.

So long that even the mist had memorized his movements, leaving light at the places his fingertips passed.

Within the Consciousness Sea, Lin Yu’s breathing suddenly changed.

Su Ming didn’t notice.

But at that moment, Lin Yu’s entire Soul Body trembled slightly.

Because what he saw was far more than what Su Ming could see.

Su Ming could only see a blurry shadow drawing lines in the void.

But Lin Yu saw everything.

The angle of each gesture’s rise and fall. The path of each strand of force—no, it couldn’t even be called spiritual energy—each “force’s” flow trajectory. The sequence in which each node lit up, the speed of its dissipation, the mutual resonance between them.

Those lines weren’t drawn casually.

They formed a three-dimensional, layered, self-consistent structure.

Void Formation.

Lin Yu’s Soul Body hung silently in the mist, his gaze unblinking.

This term—he had seen it in a crumbling ancient text so damaged that barely a complete sentence could be read.

Only sixteen words remained.

“The void is paper, intent is ink, the spirit is the brush, connecting heaven and earth.”

He had tried to reconstruct it in his mind countless times. Every attempt failed. Not because it was impossible to deduce, but because he could never imagine how a person’s finger, passing through the void, could make that mark “linger.”

Now he had seen it.

Not through imagination.

But with his own eyes.

The reason the shadow’s fingertip could leave lines in the void wasn’t because its power was immense, but because every single one of its fingers precisely stepped on a certain extremely fine “crack”—the cracks in the void itself.

Space wasn’t a solid slab.

It had texture, trends, density and sparseness.

The shadow’s finger slid along those textures, like a sewing needle following the warp and weft of cloth—it didn’t require much force, only precision.

Precision to the point of not missing by a hair.

Lin Yu was completely stunned.

Absolutely dumbstruck.

His three thousand six hundred basic runes, all the theories he had painstakingly pieced together from fragmentary ancient texts—at this moment, every single one of them came alive. Like a pile of dry firewood, with someone striking a match and tossing it in.

The theoretical edifice he had built finally had its first real pillar of support.