Brocade Not Worn by Night

The Universal Stars Chart was not the only one of its kind; in truth, every grandmaster could paint a corresponding visualization chart. Once a martial artist set foot in the Dharma Realm, every one of them could bring spirit, intent, and qi into union, and once those were set down at the brush's tip, they could form a chart with their intent, encompassing the matching method and the profound principles hidden inside it. That was where the name "Dharma Realm" came from. Grandmasters' versions of the same visualization chart carried slightly different spirit-intent, each bearing a personal mark—like the sword rhyme within Ding Songyan's white jade token. It held no power to wound, yet it concealed Tao Wenshu's spirit-intent alone, and could serve to verify identity. Naturally, such small differences in spirit-intent did not affect the actual aperture refinement: how true qi circulated and condensed within the corresponding apertures was fixed. What different spirit-intent chiefly brought was a difference in the speed of refinement and in how much was consumed. The Universal Stars Chart Wang Zhou had given Ding Songyan was painted by Tao Wenshu's own hand, and after generation upon generation of Xiaoming Sect disciples passed the flame along, Tao Wenshu was the one who had walked farthest on the martial path since the sect's re-establishment. After thanking the Grand Elder, Ding Songyan picked a meditation chamber in a corner at random, closed the heavy iron door, lit the oil lamp, and sat down cross-legged on the rush cushion. This dim and deep setting was exactly right for visualizing the Universal Stars Chart and the Chart of the Candle Illuminating the Long Night. That was also the reason the Xiaoming Sect set its visualization chambers underground. Ding Songyan unrolled the chart in his hands and saw a field of brilliant stars. To paint it, Tao Wenshu had smudged out the night sky with sooty ink, then dipped into silver powder to dot one star after another. The arrangement did not correspond to the positions of the stars across the sky; it was more like a miniature of the human body. Ziwei was the Ancestral Aperture, Taiwei the Crimson Palace, Tianshi the dantian, and the remaining constellations stood in their own places—three hundred and sixty apertures in all. Just looking at the visualization chart, Ding Songyan felt several apertures in his body give an inexplicable throb. "The Book of Universal Stars actually asks for three hundred and sixty apertures of the human body to be refined—no wonder it takes two to three years. That Ten Bodies, Hundred Hands, Faultless Mystic Art only refines forty-nine, and most of the other martial arts in the Scripture Pavilion stay under a hundred... Hundun's are more numerous. Besides the normal apertures of the human body, it includes extraordinary points beyond the meridians and shifting points, so there have to be more than a thousand..." Ding Songyan had not yet counted carefully how many apertures of the human body corresponded to Hundun. He closed his eyes and tried to sketch in his mind the Ziwei Star, the most important of the Universal Stars Chart. As that silver-bright star gradually emerged, the dark true qi flowing through the Ancestral Aperture between his brows was stimulated and gave a light tremor, then, following some unique principle and an arcane route, began to circulate within the aperture. In a dozen breaths or so, the Ancestral Aperture between his brows was suffused with brilliant radiance. One aperture refined. For an ordinary practitioner of aperture refinement, completing the refinement of a single aperture took two to three days, sometimes longer; but Ding Songyan's apertures had already been condensed and fixed by the power of Hundun long ago. He was merely using the Derivation of the Way and Virtue to encompass the aperture-refinement method of the Book of Universal Stars, so naturally it went quickly. But there was a problem with this. Once Ding Songyan stopped visualizing the Ziwei Star of the Universal Stars Chart, the brilliant radiance of the Ancestral Aperture between his brows would disperse on its own and return to darkness. "For this kind of refinement to become one of the apertures' instincts, changing at a mere thought of mine, it would take at least two days—about the same as an ordinary Xiaoming Sect disciple refining apertures. Finishing the entire Universal Stars Chart would probably take two to three years... Such encompassing and deriving is meaningless for me. I should be putting more of my energy into 'aperture crafting,' 'meridian condensation,' 'organ installation,' and 'storing the void in apertures'... "I can't be pulling out the visualization chart for a look every time I need to derive Xiaoming Sect true qi, can I? How would that go in the middle of a fight? Just practice Xiaoming Sect's martial moves alone?" Ding Songyan sank into thought. Over the past month or so he had worked out that the crucial step into the Dharma Realm was called "storing the void in apertures," while the Dayan Realm divided into three parts: "aperture crafting," "meridian condensation," and "organ installation." The order of those three was not strict, though, because some foreign apertures had to be preceded by "organ installation" before they could be crafted, while others, the moment they were crafted, required condensing qi meridians and running true qi through them, or they would gradually dissipate—and only after that could other foreign apertures be crafted. As the thought drifted past, Ding Songyan suddenly made a connection to something: "Turning it into an aperture instinct... 'practicing as you walk, practicing as you rest'... Those two are quite alike; both have to do with instinct... "Wait—can't I use that secret method Yan Changqing taught me, the thing called the 'Heaven Heart Formula,' to deceive myself, so that my body takes the aperture refinement method as one of its instincts and naturally derives it whenever I want to use it... "This will cost a bit of root source and lifespan, but surely far less than 'practicing as you walk, practicing as you rest,' since at bottom it's only forced memorization. If I can secure the peak of grandmaster in three to five years and have more than two jiazi of lifespan left, I can afford the expense... "Mm. I can't do this over and over; only genuinely useful manuals are worth it. For now I'll only consider the Book of Universal Stars and the Scripture of Candle Illuminating the Long Night. Everything else I'll do the normal way..." Just yesterday, Ding Songyan had turned up in the Scripture Pavilion a volume recording sights and tales of the jianghu, left behind by a Xiaoming Sect grandmaster two generations back. It mentioned Juesheng Dao, and it mentioned the "Heaven Heart Formula," which deceives oneself and deceives heaven. Ding Songyan suspected that the secret method Yan Changqing had taught him was the first half of the Heaven Heart Formula. He had not yet gotten to the rest of that volume; he planned to read it tonight as a diversion. With the idea in mind, Ding Songyan set about trying it at once. His first step was not self-deception but using the pale, hazy "seed" in his sea of consciousness to split his mind in two: one half carefully studying the Universal Stars Chart, the other half earnestly doing the visualization. That way, Ding Songyan did not have to memorize and refine one aperture at a time. Within his sea of consciousness, in that expanse of darkness, one brilliant star after another was swiftly sketched out according to the visualization chart he was watching, forming the different constellations. In the time it took to drink two cups of tea, the dark ocean of his sea of consciousness had transformed into a quiet, dreamlike starry sky. As the starlight flickered, dark true qi flowed, circulated, and condensed through every aperture in Ding Songyan's body, gradually making them clear and radiant. When all three hundred and sixty apertures were like that, the dark true qi changed swiftly as well, transforming in an instant into clear, limpid starlight. Ding Songyan's eyes snapped open, and a whole sky of stars was mirrored in his dark, deep gaze. He gently pushed a palm out to the side, letting the brilliant, limpid Myriad Stars true qi pour forth. The palm strike landed on the blue-stone wall at the side of the meditation chamber and sank into it without a sound. Ding Songyan drew back his right hand and saw a clear, complete, deeply sunken palm print on the surface of the stone wall. "'Myriad Stars true qi' is 'practiced' to completion, and it took only the time of two cups of tea..." Even in his delight, exhaustion welled up, as though he had gone a day and a night without sleep. He examined and assessed his condition and found that the "split attention" method of memorizing in support of aperture refinement consumed vigor, not root source and lifespan; only the "self-deception" that came next would affect the latter two. While every aperture in his body was in the state of the Universal Stars Chart, Ding Songyan let his divided mind return to one, and then, earnestly, in his sea of consciousness, he began to recite that mnemonic verse with a particular rhythm: "To deceive others, first deceive yourself; the false can become true, and belief makes it so..." As his sea of consciousness shifted and changed, Ding Songyan used the verse and the mind method to keep "telling" himself: this current state of the apertures was one of the states they originally possessed, a state that could be brought forth without recalling or retrying, and the trigger for bringing forth this state was visualizing the Ziwei Star of the Universal Stars Chart. Through recitation after recitation, the figure of Ding Songyan within each thought gradually took on starlight, and that starlight was internalized as instinct. He did not know how long it took. At last Ding Songyan finished, and felt his head swell, nausea rising in him, his body light and floating, as though Brother Youyang had dragged him into seven days and seven nights of wine and courtesans. He steadied himself and recovered with nearly half an hour of seated meditation and breath regulation. Exactly how much root source and lifespan this had cost, he had no way of knowing; judging by his physical condition, he could only make a rough estimate of two to three years. Next, Ding Songyan memorized the Ziwei Star of the Universal Stars Chart in the ordinary way, using it as the guiding catalyst for deriving "Myriad Stars true qi." Relying on his own grandmaster attainment, he needed only a quarter of an hour of focused memorization and a quarter of an hour of repeated trials to remember that "Ziwei Star" completely; a single thought now brought it forth. Ding Songyan blew out the oil lamp, opened the iron door, and walked out of the meditation chamber rubbing his swollen temples and yawning without a shred of dignity. After returning the Universal Stars Chart in his hands to its place, he made his unhurried way back up to the surface. "Well?" Grand Elder Wang Zhou gazed at him expectantly. Ding Songyan smiled and said: "Done." "Done what?" For a moment Wang Zhou did not catch on. Had he refined a single aperture of the Universal Stars Chart, relying on Hundun's Derivation of the Way and Virtue? Less than an hour—when others took two or three days! Ding Songyan gave a light laugh and said: "'Myriad Stars true qi' has reached great accomplishment." "Hah?" Wang Zhou, for all his experience in the jianghu, was utterly lost. Ding Songyan did not explain. Within his sea of consciousness the Ziwei Star was swiftly sketched out, and the Ancestral Aperture between his brows quivered in response. He struck a palm at Wang Zhou. Wang Zhou instinctively met it with his own palm. The moment their palms touched, the Grand Elder leapt up from his chair and blurted out: "You've refined all the apertures of the Universal Stars Chart?" That vast, boundless true qi, brilliant with starlight, was nothing like the thin stuff made by refining merely a few or a dozen apertures—that would still be laced with a great deal of the body's own qi! "Mainly thanks to the Derivation of the Way and Virtue," Ding Songyan explained modestly. "In less than an hour... It took me two and a half years back then." Wang Zhou's expression shifted, and he could not hold back a sigh. "So this is the Hundun lineage... unique in all the jianghu. No—there's also that demoness Ji." In the experience of this Xiaoming Sect elder, there were martial arts capable of reproducing another's methods, such as the Yin-Yang Religion's Great Thousand Myriad Forms Art, but no one besides Ji Hanyi, who was Hundun as well, could possibly do what Ding Songyan had done. Watching Wang Zhou's expression and listening to his marveling, Ding Songyan felt a rush of contentment. He had, after all, deliberately put on a display just now. If brocade were worn on a night walk, wouldn't that be like winning wealth and rank and never returning home in glory? If he did not show off even before someone who knew his secret, then hadn't he practiced all this for nothing?