"Remarkable, this broken bridge."
Shi Feng took a moment to sense the broken bridge he was standing on, his heart filled with a sense of awe.
The entire bridge was composed purely of mana, and its mana density had reached a level of true solid-state mana.
Though it was solid-state mana, it was granular like sand. The reason he could walk on the bridge was entirely due to the special magical elemental structure that bound the solid sand-like mana particles together.
The reason the bridge had begun to collapse was simply that the power maintaining the magical elemental structure had vanished, causing the structure to break apart.
Realizing this, Shi Feng immediately unfurled his Mana Domain to sustain the bridge's magical elemental circulation.
However, the moment he channeled his own mana to maintain the bridge, he was completely stunned.
"Is manipulating solid-state mana really this exhausting?"
Normally, Shi Feng had no shortage of experience manipulating gaseous mana, and he could even handle liquid-state mana with ease — those fluid streams of mana felt like extensions of his own arms, controllable without any effort.
Yet now, even manipulating a small amount of solid-state mana felt like lifting arms weighted down with lead. It was extraordinarily taxing, and the slightest lapse in concentration would cause the solid-state mana he had painstakingly gathered to slip from his control and begin circulating freely on its own.
And maintaining the solid-state mana across the entire bridge was several times harder than shouldering a weight of ten thousand jin, let alone making that solidified mana obey his commands and flow according to the bridge's designated circulation pattern…
Watching the bridge crumble steadily around him, Shi Feng was only now beginning to grasp the true difficulty of this trial.
Never mind building a bridge — simply preventing the broken bridge from collapsing was already an incredibly daunting task.
The so-called three-day time limit was never about giving him time to build a bridge. It was about whether he could even keep the broken bridge from disintegrating…
And while Shi Feng struggled to hold the crumbling bridge together, a colossal dragon phantom hovering in the thick fog a thousand meters away watched on in silence.
"His mana control is far too naive. Forget lasting three days on this bridge — I doubt he can last even three hours."
The dragon phantom took one look at how Shi Feng manipulated mana, shook its head, then unfurled its wings and vanished silently into the fog, without a sound.
As time trickled by, the bridge, which had originally spanned over twenty meters, had already shrunk to less than half its size, and the rate of collapse only accelerated as the bridge grew smaller.
"No good — at this rate, the entire bridge will collapse within half an hour. I need to figure out how to stabilize at least a small section first."
Shi Feng's head throbbed as he watched the bridge disintegrate. He made a decision — to give up control over the entire bridge and focus only on maintaining the two-meter section around him, letting everything else go.
Two meters was roughly the limit of his ability to wrestle solid-state mana into submission. Anything beyond that, and the mana he tried to control would become stubbornly uncooperative.
Everything unfolded just as Shi Feng had predicted. Within less than twenty minutes, the sections he had abandoned collapsed entirely, leaving only the roughly two-meter area around his feet relatively intact — though even that was still eroding, bit by bit.
"That's strange." Shi Feng frowned at the bridge whose collapse had slowed dramatically, a deep sense of puzzlement settling over him. "The mana that was originally controlling the bridge disappeared ages ago, but at the very beginning, the bridge collapsed even more slowly than it is under my control right now. It only started accelerating later."
"Why is it that now that I'm injecting my own mana to manipulate these solid-state particles, I can't even match the bridge's original rate of decay after it lost its controlling force?"
When the bridge had first started crumbling, Shi Feng had assumed it was simply the trial's way of announcing the start — a timed mechanism before he would fall into the darkness below.
But as he continued struggling to manipulate the solid-state mana, he realized that wasn't it at all. The bridge had simply lost the mana that governed it, and those solidified particles had naturally reverted to their original state.
"Is there something wrong with my method of control?" The question rose in Shi Feng's mind, and he shook his head almost immediately. "No — I'm following the bridge's original mana structure to maintain it. The method itself should be correct; otherwise, the bridge would have collapsed already, and I wouldn't be able to hold even this much together."
A mana structure was like a magic array — if you didn't use the correct method to operate it, the array simply wouldn't activate. Mana structures were the same, and using the wrong approach could even produce the opposite effect, causing the entire structure to disintegrate in an instant. They were far more delicate and fragile than magic arrays.
Shi Feng turned this problem over and over in his mind, searching for where he had gone wrong and why he couldn't stop the bridge's collapse.
In this space saturated with Eternal Energy, his mind was sharper and more active than it had ever been. Countless bursts of inspiration flashed through him as he examined the problem from every conceivable angle.
Just as the bridge had shrunk to less than a meter, Shi Feng stared blankly at the solidified mana that had reverted to its natural state — and suddenly, his eyes lit up.
"So that's it. My approach to mana has been wrong from the very beginning. I shouldn't try to force my will upon mana. Whether it's my own mana or the mana of the outside world, I should be guiding it instead. Forcibly asserting control might have some effect, but magical elements have their own inherent circulation rules. When I force them to move, it's not only exhausting — it creates all sorts of conflicts and energy drain against my own mana."
With that realization, Shi Feng immediately began trying to guide his own mana, no longer trying to impose his will on external mana through sheer force.
But guiding was far more difficult than he had imagined.