Chapter 133: Mending Melodies (Patreon)

Liu Wei observed as Elder Chen began his contemplation upon the Dao. Even from the outside, just from the Qi flow that the meditation caused and the shivers in his soul, one could tell that something about his cultivation was wrong. Liu Wei knew that it had two fundament issues: A permanently damaged soul and flawed foundational understanding of his Dao.

Soul damage was a risk that anyone who broke through to the Realm of Dao Contemplation through the use of cultivation drugs, regardless of their quality, would be exposed to. The best way to mitigate it, if one could not afford the time to break through organically, was the support of a more powerful cultivator during the breakthrough. Elder Chen hadn’t been granted such support, and his soul had suffered for it.

The flawed understanding was a result of Elder Chen’s overreliance on low-quality cultivation drugs. While drugs could speed up the process of gaining the foundational understanding needed to break through to the Dao Contemplation Realm, this process would always leave gaps compared to natural contemplation; the worse the drug’s qualities, the bigger would those gaps be. In Elder Chen’s case, his foundation was so bad that it made any further contemplation of the Dao extremely difficult and though he was aware of the issue, he lacked the insight to be able to revisit and fix it.

To the best of Liu Wei’s knowledge, soul damage of this kind was completely unhealable. While the world of cultivation was so vast that it was very well possible that there was someone or something that could prove him wrong on this, it was extremely unlikely that Elder Chen would ever have the fortune of chancing upon it. He’d have to spend the rest of his life living with the effects of this damage, making him weaker than a cultivator of his level ought to be. The problem of his understanding however… that was a different story.

Liu Wei sat down opposite to Elder Chen, refilled his cup and took another sip of tea, letting the Earth Qi flow through him. He’d excised all regular and Fire Qi from his body earlier and was actively holding it back from flowing back in, so there was plenty of space for the foreign element to occupy.

He took a long look at the Zither in his lap. He’d hypothesized that it was capable of transferring understanding of the Dao from one cultivator to another from the moment he had first realized how it functioned and as he had improved at playing it, he had become more certain of that assessment. He’d been itching to try out this alternative function of his most valuable possession for a while now, but he hadn’t been confident enough in his mastery over it until very recently.

Now the problem was that as a cultivator of the Dao of Fire, he could only transfer his insights to another cultivator of the same Dao. Cultivators only began building their understanding of the Dao those at the peak of the Dao Attunement Realm and while someone of that level may be able to glean some level of insight from the artifact’s melodies, Liu Wei was rather certain that only a Dao Contemplation Realm cultivator could make full use of them. Regardless, no fire cultivator of either level was part of the sect – besides himself, of course.

That left Liu Wei only with a much more difficult method of trying his artifact’s ability. He took another sip of the tea, feeling the Earth Qi enter his body and resonate with his soul.

Most modern scholarship on cultivation was of the opinion that the Daos were ultimately connected, simply an expression of the human interpretation of the larger reality of the world. A cultivator could only ever contemplate one Dao, they spent an entire Realm of their journey of cultivation on attuning themselves to it to make even just that possible, but that didn’t mean that they were completely boxed in. Someone with a well-built understanding of their own Dao that had also reached a very high level would, in theory, have internalized many concepts actually pertaining to other Daos.

So while Liu Wei couldn’t directly transfer his understanding to someone who didn’t match his Dao, he believed that it should still be possible to use this understanding to play a melody that interrogated another Dao instead. To make this possible, he’d have to attune himself to the Dao as best as he could, which is what he had brewed the tea for. While he wouldn’t be able to contemplate the resulting answers himself, it should be possible for someone of the respective Dao to do so.

There were limitations, of course. The most glaring one being that the questions Liu Wei would be able to pose to a foreign Dao would be of a level far, far below his own. That was the reason he’d invited Elder Chen for this exercise in the first place.

He would naturally have preferred to try this with an elder he could fully trust. However, Guang Lai, the weakest elder that fit this criterion, already had a very strong foundation of knowledge due to his master Ma Rong’s sagely guidance and had recently reached the second Realm of Dao Contemplation and Liu Wei believed that even that would be too much for him to be able to provide any further benefit. Perhaps that would change once he had accumulated more practice with the artifact, but for now there was no ally he could feasibly try out this method with.

Elder Chen, on the other hand, a cultivator of the first stage of Dao Contemplation with a deeply flawed foundation was both the perfect subject to try this method on and the sort of person who stood to gain the most from it. Of course revealing the artifact’s abilities to someone outside his inner circle – even if what he was revealing was just a muddled half-truth – was a somewhat risky thing to do.

Perhaps part of why Liu Wei had decided to go ahead with it was that he felt pity for the man. He remembered well how it had felt to lose the ability to cultivate, and he had suffered that fate after being able to achieve so much more than Hu Chen had. To rise to the new world that was the Dao Contemplation Realm only to immediately be robbed of one’s ability to explore it… it was a cruel fate.

It would have been entirely avoidable too. It wasn’t like the Pillar Families wouldn’t have been able to afford raising their new pawn with higher-tier drugs. No, Liu Wei was rather sure that Elder Chen’s predicament was entirely by their design. A stagnant pawn was easier to control than one that continued to grow on its own. It was the sort of pragmatic cruelty that Liu Wei would have defended prior to his change of heart and that he had since learned to despise deeply.

Still, Liu Wei’s reasons for helping Elder Chen were not a purely philanthropic gesture. Not only did he want to test out his artifact’s abilities and limitations, he also assumed that it would help him further improve his mastery over it, bringing benefit to his own cultivation in turn. And while he didn’t believe that Elder Chen would find the courage to stand up to the Pillar Families any time soon, sowing the seeds of possible defiance still couldn’t hurt.

Liu Wei took another sip of tea. Once more, his soul’s resonance with the Earth Qi strengthened. He finally closed his eyed and dove into the Dao. Unlike usually, however, he didn’t climb high into the branches of his tree of understanding, to move to the edge of its crown and expand it. Instead, he returned to its roots, his own foundations.

They were well-formed and profound, having perfectly crafted only by the manual cultivation of a truly generational genius. Since then, as the tree had sprouted from them and reached for great heights, they had grown alongside it – slow and rarely noticed, but reliably and continuously. Now they reached deep and far, having expanded to cover grounds far beyond the foundational principals of the Dao of Fire.

Here, deep in his foundations, Liu Wei listened carefully to the resonance of his soul. Soon, he found what he was looking for and finally, his fingers moved over the zither’s strings to play a note. Not one of fire, but one of earth.

…

Hu Chen contemplated the Dao – or perhaps it was better to say he attempted to contemplate it – with deep concentration. Ever since he had broken through to the Dao Contemplation Realm, cultivation had been feeling like trying to wade through neck-deep molasses for him. It required his utmost effort to make even the most incremental bits of progress. He’d gradually become able to maintain this amount of concentration, but his speed of progress had never increased.

Compared to that, his current progress was truly brisk. The earth Qi inside him carried insights into the Dao of Earth that had been contained in several valuable cultivation resources, which helped him further his understanding of the Dao despite his broken foundations.

While his improvement was still slow in absolute terms, he was making noticeable, quantifiable progress, which was a massive step up from what he’d grown accustomed to. However, this measurable progress also made it clear just how long the road ahead of him still was. He’d spent over half a century, the better part of a normal human’s life, clawing himself forward and yet, from what he was seeing now, he was not even remotely close to reaching the next stage. Even if he could keep moving forward at his current speed, it would be difficult to make it there in what remained of his life.

So while the feeling of finally getting to move forward a little, finally widening his understanding of the Dao of earth by a meaningful amount was blissful to his tired soul, it also brought to the thinking part of his mind a deep despair.

If his struggle was truly so meaningless, his suffering so worthless, his chances so nonexistent… then why continue to struggle at all? Why continue to wade through molasses when he was destined to drown in it either way?

It was a depressing thought, but it was also cathartic in a way – he could end his journey of cultivation on a high note. Right now, for the first time in over half a century, he was feeling like he was truly cultivating. Why not keep that feeling and cherish it instead of regressing into stagnancy as the effects of Elder Wei’s gift wore off? Perhaps, today should be the last time he cultivated.

Before his thoughts could condense into a final decision, they were interrupted by something unexpected. Something that managed to penetrate right through the barrier of his concentration. It was a sound. A single, deep and yet clear tune that rang through the shut-off world of his mind and soul. And then, the Dao moved.

Inside him, around him, everywhere at once, the Dao of earth responded to the sound. It twisted and turned in ways Hu Chen had thought impossible. Before he could comprehend what, he was sensing, another tune rang out. Once again, the Dao moved in its wake. Soon, the tunes joined into a melody and Hu Chen witnessed the Dao of Earth dance to its notes.

As his mind caught up to his astonishment, Hu Chen realized that this was Elder Wei’s doing. This had to be the effects of the instrument he had carried. If that was the case, then what was his part in it? What did Elder Wei want him to do? For lack of an answer, Hu Chen allowed himself to be immersed in the melody. He felt the Dao’s dance envelop him, gently pulling at his soul.

And then, he finally understood. The Dao’s dance wasn’t just a dance – it was a response.

Every tune was a question. A question the Dao of Earth would answer. Hu Chen almost broke out of his meditative breathing rhythm to gasp for air. This was no mere melody; it was an interrogation. An interrogation of the Dao itself!

Now that he had realized what it was that Elder Wei was doing, Hu Chen’s own part in it was clear as well. His soul hummed, spurring him on as began following the first question he could get a hold off and trying to comprehend its answer. His understanding wasn’t enough to fully do so, but this was a melody for a reason. Every tune gave context to those before and after it. So he began to follow along, contemplating the melody and the Dao’s dance as a whole.

Soon, he felt a realization form. But it wasn’t the kind he usually felt. It didn’t push his knowledge of the Dao forward. Instead, it corrected something. In the confusing mess that was his foundation, Hu Chen felt a connection made, a flaw corrected.

Surprise was the last thing he felt, his thoughts drifting away as his instincts as a cultivator took over and he lost himself in the melody.

Hu Chen didn’t think as he learned to follow the melody. He didn’t think as his soul began to join the Dao’s dance. He didn’t think as, one by one, the fractures in his foundational understanding of the Dao began to mend themselves. He didn’t think as he was healed by the hands of one of the men he had feared most in the world.

He didn’t think, and yet he felt the bliss all the same.