Chapter 50 — What is a Hole?

Lin Che skimmed the first few pages of the Boundless Intake Sutra, as they were mostly filler fluff designed to give wider context to the reader. Wider context, which, as much as he didn’t have and seemed important, consisted of names he didn’t recognise — he would have to send this excerpt to someone much more knowledgeable than him in this regard. He made a mental note to go back to the first few pages and share them with Xu Fang.

The next few pages listed a couple of prerequisites, of which Lin Che, and, honestly any cultivator would have been able to tick off: the technique assumed a practitioner with established pathways, a functional foundation method for Qi circulation prior to this one, and, notably, a body with some degree of resistance to foreign Qi intrusion.

For Lin Che, the Hollow Bell Purification Art made his body inhospitable to foreign Qi by design, which, he supposed, was meant to act as a sort of filter for when his body accepted anything and everything around him into it. The Boundless Intake Sutra required its practitioner to open every pore simultaneously for outside absorption, whilst the Hollow Bell was meant to eradicate anything too foreign.

If he had been blessed with a different purification art, things may have been easier. The text addressed his thoughts in a section titled On the Question of Resistance and Invitation.

The body that has learned to refuse will not easily learn to welcome. The cultivator who carries both must understand that resistance and absorption are not opposites, but instead neighbours two sides of the same coin.

He kept reading off his phone.

The first major concept the technique introduced was ‘the hole’.

A hole, as concerns this method, is not an absence. The common error of early practitioners is to conceive of a hole as a void from which something has been removed. This understanding produces a cultivator who attempts to empty themselves in order to receive, which is both incorrect and dangerous.

A hole is instead a structure of relation defined entirely by what surrounds it. The hole in a vessel is not the absence of clay, but rather the shape that the clay has chosen to describe. The hole in a needle is not air, but instead that which makes the metal itself useful. To cultivate a hole, therefore, is not to remove anything from the self. It is to arrange what is already present into a shape that describes a space.

Lin Che read to the end of this section and then looked at the wall for a while.

***

Outside, it was mid-afternoon, and Shen Yue, judging from the lack of shoes by the front door, was still at work.

He knocked on her study door anyway, just in case, and was met with confirmation that she was out. Lin Che opened the door and found the incense on the second shelf of the study bookcase, right where it was when she first offered it to him.

He took out his phone and sent a message: Would you mind if I borrowed some of your incense for cultivation? I can replace it.

The reply came about a minute later.

Cabinet in the study, second shelf. There are spare sticks in a green tin. You can have three.

He paused. Just three?

Those three cost more than your rent. That’s a month’s supply.

He found the green tin and counted out three sticks before returning to his room.

***

Lin Che placed a stick of incense in a pot and clicked his finger next to it to ignite it.

Nothing happened.

He sighed, thinking he really should have learnt how to ignite his own Qi into sparks by now just like how Shen Yue had done so. It seemed like a relatively simple application of his energy, but he couldn’t wrap his head around exactly how to get it done. He thought it would be like rubbing two sticks of drywood together, except replacing the drywood with Qi, but there was no friction between the two sections he was manipulating.

The lighter would have to do.

The incense was high-grade, immediately apparent from how quickly the Qi content of the room shifted. It was slightly stronger than the one he’d previously used, and he assumed she had offered him the stronger one simply because he would receive little benefit from the weaker incense. Either that or she hadn’t stocked it at all, as there were no weak cultivators in her house before he moved in.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Lin Che put on some headphones and listened to the audio of him reading.

The cultivation of a hole begins with the surface…

He had read this section aloud without much attention, but now with the incense active and his attention fully present, it landed a bit differently.

The skin is not a boundary. This is the foundational error of boundary-thinking cultivators, who conceive of the self as ending where the air begins. The skin is instead a conversation between inside and outside, where they meet to negotiate their terms. He who can feel this negotiation and can subtly interfere with it will improve drastically with Boundless Intake.