The Gathering Immortals Hermitage was complete, and the Dao fire had just been kindled.
True Immortal Ruyi sat upright inside the hermitage, cultivating with his eyes closed. The Dao Resonance around him was more concentrated and lucid than when he had guarded the spring.
The five members of the Preaching Squad sat outside, quietly awaiting his enlightenment.
They sat there for several days.
Dawn and dusk alternated among the mountains, and clouds and mist gathered and dispersed.
The Numinous Mechanism on Jieyang Mountain seemed to slowly gather anew within that stillness.
That day, True Immortal Ruyi suddenly opened his eyes.
His gaze was utterly clear, like the first glimmer of pure light when a spring first welled forth.
He slowly raised a hand and gently drew a fingertip through the air.
The five members of the Preaching Squad sensed it at once and looked over in unison.
They saw the Dao Resonance around True Immortal Ruyi suddenly begin to flow. The true meaning of "transformation," awakened, cleansed, and rekindled by the Preaching Squad, surged from the depths of his Dao heart like living water boiling up from underground, unstoppable once unleashed.
He did not draw upon the earth veins or gather spiritual energy.
He simply sat cross-legged inside the hermitage, making himself the spring's source and channeling the true meaning of transformation, inch by inch, into the dried-up spring pit beneath him.
At first, nothing stirred at the bottom of the pit.
Gradually, however, an exceedingly fine thread of water seeped through a crack in the rock.
That thread of water was bright and clear, without a trace of sediment, as though it had lain hidden within the stone since time immemorial and had now been awakened by the true meaning of transformation.
The thread thickened, gathering into a trickle.