The Tide of the Homeward Journey
Long Tian sat in the stone house for the entire evening, doing nothing else.
He spread the silk map on the table and used charcoal to draw the arrangement and correspondence of the complete structure in the pillar of light in the blank space of the map. After finishing the drawing, he added a brief note below, recording the location of the final marker and the correspondence between the sea area where it was located and the entrance of the vortex. Long Tieshan did not come over to watch from the stove. He only brought a bowl of hot water and placed it on the corner of the table after he finished drawing, and then retreated to sit on the threshold.
As dusk fell completely, Long Tian closed the map and put it into his leather pouch. He stood in the courtyard for a while, his Dragon Shadow hovering in the twilight behind him, its wings half-spread, its four eyes slightly lowered, and the light layer on its forehead maintaining the same brightness as during the day as the sky gradually darkened.
Yu Jin came out of the house and squatted down by the well next to him without saying a word. The two stood in the yard for a long time until the night wind blew down from the slope and made the withered branches of the pomegranate tree sway slightly, before they went back to their houses to rest.
The next morning, Shen Mo came again. He walked slowly, as if he had already confirmed what he was about to say during that journey, so he said directly as he entered, "The last page of that incomplete copy was completed before I came. The completed passage reads: 'Beneath the sea eye, the Imperial Seal is the key; those of the same origin of light and darkness open it.'"
Long Tian sat on the threshold, not standing up after hearing those words. He lingered there for a moment, comparing the words with the complete structure within the pillar of light, confirming that they pointed to the same thing—the core conditions for the final entrance, things he, Yu Jin, and the Origin Return Pearl already possessed. He stood up, walked to the table, tightened the straps of his leather pouch, stopped at the threshold, and glanced towards the house. Long Tieshan was wiping a clean pot with an old cloth by the stove, not looking up. As Long Tian stepped across the threshold, his boots made a clear sound on the stone floor, like a screw being tightened. Under sustained torque, they had reached their final position. Yu Jin tied the straps of his bundle in the open space outside the door, the light from the dark gray beads shining through his collar, as if he had already calibrated to the state before departure. The two descended the slope, passing through the main road and side roads in the morning light, and reached the top of the slope on the outskirts of Longfish Bay again around noon. The people at the stern were washing the seams of the boat planks on the water by the dock. Seeing them come down the slope, they put the brush into a bucket, wiped their hands on their trousers, untied the rope from the iron stake, and after they boarded the boat, they used a pole to push the boat away from the shore.
After leaving the shore, the ship followed its usual route through the dark waters and light-colored bands, arriving at the end of the long wall that evening. Long Tian squatted at the bow to confirm that the orientation of the end had not changed, then let the ship continue forward in the direction the end was facing for a while, stopping at the edge of the eddy in the center of the light gray sea. He flipped into the water, followed the path on the upper layer of the eddy, passed through the light-layered interface, and entered the main hall again through the sloping passage.
The main hall was in the same condition as when he left. The stone platform had sunk, and the base of the pillar of light in the recess remained in a state of readiness to be triggered. Long Tian walked to the edge of the recess and squatted down, his palm against the bottom. The Origin Return Pearl, the new core, and the Imperial Seal that had been completely integrated into his body were each operating at a fixed frequency. He reactivated the pillar of light along the longitudinal conduction path at the bottom of the recess, causing it to rise from the bottom of the base. After the pillar of light lit up again, it did not present the complete structural diagram layer by layer as before. After rising, it directly stabilized at an arm's length, and the mark that appeared in the center during the final stage continued to light up at the end of the pillar of light, like the final node ready to be read, waiting only for the final touch.
Long Tian placed his palm on the surface of the pillar of light, and the aura of the Origin Return Pearl traveled longitudinally along the pillar to the location of the mark. The mark began to spread outward along its outline the moment his aura arrived, like a container that had been continuously filled and was now expanding outward along a predetermined overflow path after reaching its maximum capacity. After the diffusion was complete, a continuous beam of light began to condense at the end of the pillar. The beam shot out from the center of the mark, pierced through the stone layer at the top of the main hall, passed through the stone structure covering the water layer, and rose from the surface of the water at the center of the vortex. In the twilight, it formed a continuously upward pillar of light, piercing through the air layer above the sea, like a navigational beam fixed at a certain coordinate position, pointing directly to the clear sky above. It maintained its constant brightness and orientation in the continuous twilight, like a final coordinate point that had been marked but had not yet closed, maintaining a stable working state before the final step was completed.