But just after he sighed, inspiration flashed through his mind.
"Man follows earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Dao, and the Dao follows nature..."
He murmured those thirteen characters over and over, more than a dozen times.
With each repetition, his eyes grew brighter.
Those thirteen characters were not merely principles of cultivation; they also described the structure of this space.
They were both a cultivation method and a map.
"Upside-Down Mountain? Profound Dao Mountain!"
"Hahaha!" Li Bufan laughed aloud. "So that's how it works!"
"What an Upside-Down Mountain! What a word, 'Dao'!"
He finally understood. This Profound Dao Mountain-or rather, Upside-Down Mountain-was itself an enormous magic treasure.
Its internal structure consisted of permutations and combinations of those thirteen characters.
Man followed earth, earth followed heaven, heaven followed the Dao, and the Dao followed nature-these were both the steps of cultivation and the layers of space.
And his current location was the core of the layer corresponding to "the Dao follows nature." As long as he fully comprehended this layer's laws, he could find the exit to the outside world.
The next instant, this space began to convulse.
The entire empty expanse shuddered violently, its gray-white mist churning like boiling water.
The ground cracked, space twisted, and countless golden characters rose from the fissures like fireflies filling the sky, illuminating the entire space.
Those characters grew ever denser until they filled the whole sky.
Once the sky was filled with golden characters, they began moving toward Li Bufan in an orderly stream.
Like a golden river, they converged from every direction, finally flowing into the point between his brows and entering his sea of consciousness.
"The way of heaven takes from excess to replenish deficiency."
"The way of man takes from deficiency to serve excess."
Sentence after sentence rang