Throughout the ages, mirages always appear near Penglai on the Jiaodong Peninsula. Someone says that there are three Spirit Mountains overseas named Penglai, Fangzhang, and Weizhou.
Probably the earliest record about the three Spirit Mountains overseas in the history of Huaxia is the book “Records of the Grand Historian”. It says the temples there are all made of gold and jade. This is definitely a fallacy from mortals. Gold may not be highly prized in the eyes of immortals. What’s more, few true immortals have the same taste as the dragon nationality who likes to wrap the whole palace with earthly things like gold—even the world of cultivation has countless treasures. Then how can the Spirit Mountain where true immortals live only uses gold and jade as materials for temples?
Lin Luoran comes all the way to the Bohai Sea. She rents a set of the sea-view house in Yantai beside the Bohai Sea Bay and stays there, overlooking the bay below and observing the sky above.
She doesn’t have to worry about her living expenses with space in hand. She lives a secluded life and spends most of her time immersing in refining bone boat and observing celestial phenomena.
Lin Luoran doesn’t know what Mr. Lin and others had been through before they captured the sea beast. Lin Luoran is refining its bone; however, except for the bone becomes shinier like jade, its contaminant still remains. She brings a lot of gold from the Dragon Palace and purifies it to get the fine gold, which can be used to link up the joints when restructuring the bone boat to make it more stable.
She also engraves Wind-Riding circle, Protection circle, and Miniatures circle, which can shrink the bone boat to the size of the model at the hull bottom. Now the boat is still not enough to attack, so Lin Luoran takes two “diamond of fire” born with Strange Fire as the circle core. In this way, the bone boat is finally equipped with the ability of Fire to attack.
Lin Luoran once tried the boat in the sea in the middle of the night. The sea was turbulent that night, and the small bone boat was undulating with the waves. Waves were rising fiercely, but the boat remained stable against the current. The Wind-Riding Spell can’t make it fly but can make it be extremely fast in the sea.
She is very satisfied with her boat. Now she only has to wait for the opportunity to go to Penglai.
Penglai is definitely somewhere in the Bohai Sea, and the mirages may be real. However, ordinary people do not know the opportunity to enter the real Spirit Mountain waters appears for only 15 minutes once a year.
So Lin Luoran needs to study the celestial phenomena, and an extremely fast boat is also necessary for her.
In 15 minutes, she has to cross the straits in “the Sea of Sin” to enter a different space where the real sea area of Spirit Mountain is.
As the name suggests, immortals may think mortals have so many sinful thoughts so that they have no right to go to the overseas land of immortals. Only by purifying their sin can they have the lucky chance to see immortals.
Information given by Yang Lisha is originally recorded in the ancient book of monsters of wood. It is earlier than when the mysterious ancestor of the monsters of wood went to Penglai and learned powerful arts of nature. How did the ancestor of the monsters of wood survive the Sea of Sin?
Winter soon comes here, and it is getting cold when she is waiting for the chance. Yantai has a mild sea climate, so the temperature difference is not large in winter. However, the temperature here usually falls below twelve to thirty degrees when it snows because of its high latitude.
There is heating inside houses, but people working outdoors have to suffer, especially those who are in places like seaports with blowing winds from the ocean. They are wrapped in thick military coats but still almost frozen by the cold sea wind.
Lin Luoran also wears thick clothes to be less eye-catching.
She wears a thick hat and circles the port again that night. Like always, she gets nothing in the surprised eyes of the night shift worker. The starry sky in winter is not very clear when it is not snowing. To find the special astronomical phenomenon that appears once a year is not an easy thing even if Lin Luoran has a telescope with high magnification.
After months of waiting fruitlessly here, Lin Luoran wants to go home for several times. But she still controls herself.
It is not easy to be so courageous. She is afraid that the journey will be delayed again if she gets nostalgic. During these months, when she lives in Yantai, the Lin family thinks she has been to Penglai. However, she doesn’t even find the entrance.
Lin Luoran also asks the three “kings” in space. For fire phoenix, it is the best in the world, so it has never heard of something called Mount Penglai. Wood wolf has heard of it but immortals have disappeared in its days. Therefore, the so-called Spirit Mountain also only exists in ancient books for the wolf. As for silver fish, its memories are going in and out, so Lin Luoran doesn’t expect it to know anything.
Lin Luoran is so bored that she ranks these three monsters in chronological order according to their different reactions.
Fire phoenix calls her Qi-trainer, which is a really old term. It’s obvious that fire phoenix has lived longer. The fake saintess also called Lin Luoran Qi-trainer. However, the fake saintess came to the Earth in the era of Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, so she was just following the old custom. In this case, fire phoenix might be born before the era of Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
It’s hard to tell how old Silver fish is. It never calls her Qi-trainer, and it knows wood wolf’s parents so that it must be older than wood wolf. Little wolf king only knows Penglai from the ancient book, and there are no signs of immortals in the world in its days. Even if the wolf is the youngest among the three monsters, it is still amazingly old compared to Lin Luoran.
Soon the New Year of 2019 comes. Yantai Streets are busy and full of people. Lin Luoran cooks a large pot of dumplings and eats them all on New Year’s Eve. She is tossing and turning all night and can’t fall asleep because she misses her families so much. The sea breeze is blowing on the terrace, and the curtains are rattling.
Lin Luoran lies on the chaise longue and looks at the sky. North Star suddenly flashes nine times unexpectedly in the night sky.
Lin Luoran thinks she is dazzled, then she sits up immediately. North Star casts a flash of misty and subtle white light on a certain sea area. It flashes nine times again.
The chance comes so suddenly that Lin Luoran doesn’t even have time to pack her bags. She just makes a Taoist hand gesture to ride the wind and follows it in the air.
There are no fishing activities in the winter of Yantai, so the sea is quiet. A few cargo ships see the light and think it’s the signal light of the beacon. Taking a closer look, the North Star is very normal.
It is a signal light, not from the beacon but from the stars to point out the immortal way for ordinary people.
People who see it do not know the truth. Dutiful North Star does its job every year, but no one seizes the opportunity. Lin Luoran has been in the waters 50 nautical miles offshore in the blink of an eye. Nine is the noblest number. Now North Star sends a signal that flashes nine times each round and nine rounds in total. Every time the light casts in a different place, but it gradually goes to the deeper sea.
Connecting these places, the Sea of Sin will appear when the last signal light goes out.
Lin Luoran follows the light and flies over the sea. The signal flickers very fast. It is mortals’ lucky chance to enter Spirit Mountain, but ordinary people definitely can’t catch up with it—no wonder Emperor Qin and Han had tried so hard to look for Spirit Mountain but gained nothing. Even if they had known the news, they still couldn’t have caught the flashing tail of signal with ancient navigation technology but without the help of cultivators.
Chasing after the light, Lin Luoran still has the mood to think about these things. Her state of mind is really peaceful.
The sea of sin in front is the place where sin is purified, as its name suggests. If she can’t calm down, she will be overturned with the bone boat in an instant. She will become a lonely soul full of resentment drifting in the Sea of Sin and can never enter the reincarnation.
This is why she arranged the family’s things like making out her wills to her two apprentices and her brother Lin Luodong as soon as she got the exact information of Penglai.
She was so scared that she could not see them anymore.
North Star casts the last signal light, and Lin Luoran can see the seawater turns dark where the light disappears. It seems that countless demons are emerging from the crevices of waves—
The bone boat falls in the water and gets bigger. Lin Luoran gets on the bone boat without a mast, and a black wave comes over. She disappears with her boat upon the water.
Someone screams in a cargo ship. It turns out that he sees it and thinks it’s a person falling into the water.
People of that cargo ship are kind, and they come to search and rescue. However, they find nothing, so they think the crew is dazzled. These people will never know someone has found the entrance to the legendary overseas Spirit Mountain under the fleeting black water.
…
A black wave comes over, and the bone boat lights up a transparent magical shield blocking the black viscous water outside.
“One flower is a world” is not only a phrase in Buddhism. Lin Luoran has already seen the Dragon Palace and Bermuda. She is familiar with artificial or natural alternate-dimensional space, which only has a little connection with the Earth. Therefore, she can still keep calm when she opens her eyes and sees herself being in a dark and thick sea with splattering waves and awful straits.
This is the Sea of Sin. Lin Luoran is silent, and she keeps driving the bone boat forward.
The boat is sailing against the turbulent current. Thick black seawater is like a diluted asphalt solution, and it is likely to catch her boat firmly. At a glance, Lin Luoran can know there is a long way to go, but she only has fifteen minutes. She definitely has no time to think about other things except crossing the endless straits.
Black waves rush against the hull continually. Lin Luoran focuses on sailing for five minutes, and nothing happens. Her tension can’t be released, so she still feels very nervous.
At this moment, she hears a beautiful sound coming from the dark misty sea in torrential rain. Lin Luoran is even more frightened.
She can’t understand what the lyrics are about, but the voice is ethereal and moving. Maybe the song of immortals in heaven sounds just like this. She is afraid that it is an evil song that can hold people spellbound, so she dares not to listen to it carefully. However, when the boat passes several waves, she sees a large cobblestone emerging from the middle of the turbulent and black waves. A long-haired woman with a naked upper body is singing and sitting on the cobblestone. Her bottom half against the cobblestone is not legs but a fishtail glowing faintly blue—is this a mermaid?
The blue pearl inlaid on Sword of Bright Snow is sorrowful tears from mermaids who always represent beauty and charm.
It is still a while before her bone boat comes close to the cobblestone. Lin Luoran has seen the mermaid with the beautiful face of a human woman who is crying silently with great sorrow.
The mermaid is just singing her song and never asks anything from Lin Luoran. However, the sad song and her sad eyes have revealed her purpose.
—Take me away… take me away… the water of the sea of sin is so cold that it can freeze my soul. Please, take me away…
