Chapter 43- One Fifth of Everything

There was a sudden moment of inexplicable dislocation- as though the world had shifted six inches left for no obvious reason. The air tasted different. Still cool, but without that mountain stream or deep well freshness. Tian looked around the cavern. The ugly turtle had vanished.

Tian took a step back into the cavern and nearly tripped. His limbs all felt jerky and uncoordinated. Everything seemed like an annoyance, and worse, like something precious had been stolen from him.

Oh. Oh that’s… yeah.

“Grandpa?”

Just… hang out for a minute. Actually, you might as well lay out your bedroll, I’m pretty sure it’s the null cavern through there. You can sleep in here now.

“Wait, I didn’t beat the guardian.”

Yeah, you did. The whole room was the obstacle for you to overcome. You know this. I know you know this because you said that not even one day ago. “The Guardian” was a naturally occurring manifestation of the place. The water qi that would pacify you, encourage you to sleep, and eventually drown you. Think about how you finally got out.

“I just… went with the flow. Went where the water would go.”

Yeah, but not passively. Bashing against the walls didn’t do it, and not moving wouldn’t do it. Just flowing around the obstacles. Trusting in your understanding of water more than your lying eyes.

“Effortless action. I suddenly wonder what arts Brother Fu practices.”

It might be related. Or it might be that he’s been thinking about this a long time and reading books written by people who have been thinking about it longer than he’s been alive.

“So why do I feel like I’ve just been robbed?”

No dao charm.

“Pardon?”

No dao charm. No… feeling of a higher principle of reality. The qi before was saturated with the Water element. Now it’s pretty pure. The same elemental density that would have killed you was also a major learning opportunity. The longer you could gut it out in the cavern, the longer you could study it. You picked up some things but reached the limit of your endurance. You left the room. The charm is gone. I assume it will reset when everyone swaps rooms, but for you, the opportunity is over.

Well. You can cultivate in this wonderfully qi rich environment, but it’s comparatively nothing.

“Do you think all the rooms are like that?”

To an extent. I can’t imagine it’s that simple, though.

Tian thought that was reasonable. Most things are more complicated than you would expect. For all the talk of returning to simplicity and emptying your mind of complicated thoughts, actually doing it was pretty damn complicated.

“How long do you think we have until they swap us around?”

Six days.

“Really?”

Five chambers, thirty days, you do the math. Assuming that everyone gets an equal amount of time in each room and why wouldn’t they?

Tian nodded and laid out his bedroll on a flat stretch of rock. Lost dao charm or not, his brain was cooked. There was just so much that was felt rather than understood. Like trying to put it in words would never really convey the meaning of what he experienced.

His hands suddenly stilled, his pillow suspended over the blankets. This is why so many cultivation and combat arts manuals sounded utterly cracked. They were trying to put into words something they mostly understood through feelings. They were playing that literary reference game that Brother Long was going on about. References to shared interests so that people would understand what you were getting at.

It was entirely possible that the writers were just bad at writing. But maybe they were just doing their best to explain something inhuman- how they were able to make a tiny twist of the universe do what they asked it to.

He put the pillow down, and put his head on it shortly afterward. Maybe he had figured it out. Maybe not. Either way, he was tired.

The next morning, he investigated the null chamber. He stepped boldly in, and launched himself right back out again like he had just stepped on an exploding talisman.

“KWVRACH!” Tian swore.

What’s that?