Chapter Ninety-Six: Transcendence

The Buddha taught that a single instant is a single thought; twenty thoughts make a moment, twenty moments a heartbeat, twenty heartbeats a breath, twenty breaths a flicker, and thirty flickers a day and night.

A single instant—a single thought—lasts only a tiny fraction of a second.

What, after all, is this world? Bound as it is by flesh, the world seen by the human eye can never be the source of all things, nor the truth itself.

If it is not, then what meaning is there in believing in this world at all?

Which matters more: the world you believe in, or the world that is real?

"Wake up! This so-called reality must never trap you! What matters is your choice—choose which world you believe to be true!"

Supreme Little Lord shook Hua Sheng by the shoulders with both hands, his fingers digging in until the ache grew sharper and sharper.

Hua Sheng stood there dazed. Bracing himself on his cane, his injured foot still had not recovered. Every step he took felt like stepping onto the tip of a knife, like the mermaid in a fairy tale whose tail had just been cut open.

That wrenching pain did not feel fake.

He shoved Supreme Little Lord away with all his strength. One cane slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor. He bit back the agony and barely held himself upright on the only cane he had left to lean on.

The sleeve of his hospital gown was tugged up, and he saw the scar on his left arm.

It read: Never trust in immortals.

Yes. This reality was the one he ought to know.

Hua Sheng steadied himself on the cane and hopped backward a few steps. Standing straight, he glared with bloodshot eyes and asked, "Who are you, really?"

"I’m Supreme Little Lord!" Supreme Little Lord looked frantic.

"No! You don’t even exist! There are only two possibilities: either you’re some ordinary person near me whom I imagined to be a immortal, or you’re a completely fabricated character, someone who simply does not exist in this world at all! You don’t exist! You’re an illusion!"

With that, Hua Sheng turned and walked back toward the hospital.

Supreme Little Lord came up and gripped his arm, but Hua Sheng shoved him away. This time, however, Hua Sheng himself stumbled and fell to the ground.

"You all right?" Supreme Little Lord asked, stepping closer.

"Don’t touch me! Stay away from me!"

Hua Sheng stretched out his arm to keep distance between them and said, "I never want to be a patient again! Get lost! I’ve finally become normal! I want to live like a proper person. In the future I want to live well. I’m an orphan, not some rich kid; no one will support me forever. Someday I have to take care of myself! I don’t want to be a useless cripple for the rest of my life, trapped in this mental hospital forever! Please, don’t appear again. Let me be normal again!"

"But this world is fake! Hua Sheng, all of it is fake!"

"Shut up! This is the world I grew up in!"

"This isn’t the real human world, Hua Sheng! It’s a world you imagined!"

"How could a person remain in a world of his own imagining and never know it?" As soon as Hua Sheng asked it, he himself froze.

"Hua Sheng, you’ve been struck by a spell. Don’t you remember what my grandfather said? The Star Sand is not something of the immortal realm. Whoever destroys the Star Sand will fall into utter ruin. That utter ruin is the spell cast over the Star Sand."

"What... what spell?" Hua Sheng stared.

"Do you remember our spells? The lowest is the illusion level, then the clear mystic level, above that the soaring sky level, and at the top the boundless level. Remember?"

Though Hua Sheng did not want to admit it, all of it had long been carved into his mind.

Supreme Little Lord said, "Among all spells, the illusion level is mere sleight of hand. It can fool people, but it cannot create anything real. But there is a spell preserved within the Star Sand. Once the Star Sand is torn apart, the one who destroys it will fall under that spell. That spell is an illusion of the boundless level."

"An illusion of the boundless level."

An illusion was an illusion level; boundless was boundless. How could the two possibly be confused? An illusion of the boundless level—was that not a contradiction in terms?

"Hua Sheng, you know this: illusion-level spells can deceive the senses. Everything you see, hear, and touch is false. Many fox-spirit legends describe this very scene: a person spends the night in a grand house, only to wake at dawn lying in open wilderness. Once the illusion fades, all of it vanishes. It’s all fake."

Hua Sheng said nothing.

"But an illusion of the boundless level is different, like the Penfield experiment—it is not meant to deceive your outward senses." Supreme Little Lord went on.

"Then what does it deceive?"

"Your central nervous system!"

"What central nervous system?"

"In a boundless-level illusion, everything you feel is exactly like reality! Even your sense of time. Time has no taste, no color, nothing you can touch or see, and yet why can people feel it? To sense time, you rely on intuition." Supreme Little Lord said. "Hua Sheng, where you are now is not normal time. You are trapped in a world you imagined, and trapped only within a single instant. A single instant is a single thought. You may feel as though months have passed here, but all of it happened within one thought. If you do not break free, your entire life will amount to no more than one thought, and your brain will age and die within that one thought!"

A spell cast directly upon the human brain's central nervous system. It severs every neural connection, isolating the mind. It cannot tell truth from falsehood, cannot even perceive time.

Hua Sheng had never heard of such a thing, and could hardly believe it.

"You say you are Supreme Little Lord?"

"Yes."

"If time has almost stopped, how could you come here?"

"Don’t you remember? In the Panxian Cave, if I traveled to the past, my past self would vanish. Immortals are beings not bound by the flow of time, because immortals are not made of flesh and matter."

"Then show me immortal arts! Make this hospital disappear, or make these grasslands burst into flowers! Prove that you can use immortal arts!"

"Hua Sheng, I told you: this is a world you imagined. I can only enter your mind, but everything here is something you have imagined. The you of now does not believe immortal arts exist, so here I can only be an ordinary person. All my immortal spells are useless in a world of imagination, because you believe this is a so-called real world with no immortals in it."

Hua Sheng's mind was in utter chaos.

Then came Cat Nurse's voice from behind him. "Are you all right? Who are you talking to?"

Hua Sheng turned and saw Cat Nurse walking toward them. He immediately pointed at Supreme Little Lord and said, "Nurse, it's him!"

"Where is anyone?" The nurse looked up outside in confusion, then her face went white. "Hua Sheng! Are you having another episode? There are only the two of us here!"

"He says his name is Supreme Little Lord." Hua Sheng said, looking at Supreme Little Lord.

"Supreme Little Lord is someone you imagined, don't you remember? You mustn't give up. You've been recovering very well these past days. Don't throw it all away at the last moment!" With that, the nurse picked up the cane lying nearby. "I'll prove it to you right now! Where did you say Supreme Little Lord is?"

Hua Sheng pointed toward Supreme Little Lord.

The nurse gripped the cane and swung with all her strength at the spot Hua Sheng indicated.

Hua Sheng saw the cane pass straight through Supreme Little Lord's body and touch nothing at all. She swung it back and forth several more times.

"See? There's nothing here!" the nurse said. "Come on, let's go!"

She helped Hua Sheng up from the ground, set his cane properly beneath him, and supported him back toward the hospital.

Hua Sheng walked back with difficulty.

He told himself not to believe, not to believe, not to believe! There were no immortals in this world at all, and no such person as Supreme Little Lord!

"Hua Sheng, remember this! This is your world, and you decide what to believe! Perhaps you want to grow into an ordinary office worker someday. But do not forget: all you see and all you meet in your life is only a world that has already been arranged. They call it fate. You will always, always be trapped in this one instant! Will you die here after decades on a hospital bed, or will you become the hero who treads upon auspicious clouds, leads thirty thousand immortals into battle in the stratosphere, wins the Heaven-and-Earth Guard War, and saves the world? What you see is not important. What matters is what you choose to believe! Remember, your conviction will shape you, and carry you down this road until you reach the world you truly want!"

From behind him, he heard Supreme Little Lord shout:

"The Dao gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to all things. Do not trust what you saw before! Do not be deceived by others! I tell you now, two is yin and yang, three is opposition. Tell me, what is one? Answer me! What, in the end, is one?"

That night, Hua Sheng lay awake until dawn.

He had not suffered from insomnia in a very long time. Ever since he accepted reality, he had rarely lain awake at night. He had thought he could calmly accept reality and live an ordinary life step by step.

But Supreme Little Lord's appearance made him wonder whether his condition had worsened again. Or perhaps he did not dare think any further.

The wire bed was hard, and of course it would not be comfortable to lie on. If one remained awake too long without changing position, the body beneath would soon begin to ache.

He started thinking about the final question Supreme Little Lord had asked him.

It was a line he knew all too well. Not only in Saint Peace Ning, but even in the mortal world, many five-year-olds could recite it by heart:

"The Dao gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to all things."

At first glance, it seemed to mean that all things in the world are born from the Dao.

That is, all things in the cosmos are born from "three." This did not differ much from what Hua Sheng had understood before: three is opposition; all things in the universe are opposites unified, and conflict in union shapes everything.

So the existence of the world is a kind of opposition, and the interplay between opposites. All things depend on one another, from the outside in; without such support, anything would collapse and fall into the so-called void.

This might be called common sense. Nothing visible exists without something to uphold it. If it exists, there must surely be something that sustains it.

But why had Supreme Little Lord asked him this, and told him that three was opposition and two was yin and yang? Of course, two must refer to yin and yang.

That was one interpretation of the saying as well. Because there is yin and yang, the opposition called "three" is created. Daoist thought cannot be separated from yin and yang; or rather, there is nothing in the universe that can truly stand apart from them.

But the question was: if yin and yang are the supreme originating principle, why had Supreme Little Lord asked him, "What is one?"

Isn't "one" just the Dao?

No, no—"the Dao gives birth to one," so the Dao definitely is not one. "The Dao gives birth to yin and yang" is not right either. Between the Dao and yin and yang there must be something else, and that something is one.

If one were obvious, Supreme Little Lord would never have asked him such a thing.

Hua Sheng suddenly thought of it.

"One, two, and three" are not merely numbers; they must also refer to some kind of order.

In other words, there is something before which yin and yang, opposition, and even the cosmos itself all come second. That thing stands only beneath the Dao itself.

Hua Sheng had once been told that the cosmos indeed contains one, and also all things. One is the origin of the universe, hidden within all things.

This could be understood as saying that the cosmos indeed contains the Dao, and the Dao is the origin of the cosmos, hidden within all things.

That ought to be the Dao—but clearly it was not the answer, so "one" and the Dao are in fact different things.

Think again! Hua Sheng grew confused. He could not make sense of the answer. Or rather, he did not even know whether Supreme Little Lord truly existed; perhaps this was merely another symptom of his illness.

Illness is illness.

Like pain. What is pain? Why it takes this particular form does not matter. What matters is that it is unbearable. If it can be made to vanish, then that is surely far more important than endlessly debating and studying why pain feels like pain.

Instead of becoming obsessed with pain itself, if one can utterly and permanently remove the source that causes it, then there is no reason to linger in it and repeatedly experience the sensation.

So Hua Sheng fell into a deep sleep.

Yuan Doctor also took Hua Sheng's relapse seriously. Later, the three attending physicians held another consultation about his condition. They all agreed that Hua Sheng should remain in the hospital for observation. The best approach would be to increase the pressure of his studies and keep him from having time to let his mind wander.

In coordination with that, they further strengthened his presence in the real world. The nurse told Hua Sheng that his book had drawn the interest of a publisher and that the chances of publication were increasing. Her boyfriend asked her to tell him that if Hua Sheng had no demands regarding royalties, they could even print two thousand copies first and release them to the market to test the waters.

The nurse said the publishing industry was difficult these days as well, but she could help Hua Sheng put the material online. Jokingly, she told him that because the contents were somewhat mixed, she did not even know whether to classify the book as fantasy, mythology, or science fiction.

Yet the more the people around him cared for Hua Sheng, the greater the pressure he felt. Although Saint Peace Ning Hospital was only a small hospital and the facilities were old and shabby, he had indeed seen hope in life there. Facing the doctors and nurses who had never abandoned him through all his hardship, he felt the warmth of being here.

In this world, what is a human life if not like the mayfly, born in the morning and dead by evening?

If, as Supreme Little Lord said, this is only a single instant, then what difference is there between an instant that feels like a hundred years and a true instant?

Even if he left this place, even if he truly went to the Immortal Realm of Saint Peace Ning, that seemingly vast fairyland would be nothing more than a single tear in the East Sea.

What is true is not important. What matters is the truth you want.