Packed with purpose, the days passed hurriedly, making the hours vanish in a blur of accomplishment.
Bao Zhi progressed with his work, deducing his killer moves at the now fully grown Brain Melon plantation.
Hao Meng wasn't slacking either. He practiced his fire path killer moves steadily.
He gained a burst of inspiration after participating in the defense of Tian Qucheng blessed land, witnessing how gu immortals fight.
"Master, look and critique my move!" He landed and asked respectfully.
Bao Zhi watched with satisfaction, a faint smile crept up on his face as he saw Hao Meng demonstrate his techniques one after another.
"This next move is my own creation. Watch me!"
The fiery wings from his immortal gu unfurled behind him with a great wingspan. Then the wings draped over Hao Meng, enveloping himself in a closed ball of fire.
A defensive move!
Bao Zhi nodded.
But Hao Meng wasn't done yet. The blazing orb of flame accelerated and crashed into a patch of empty ground.
Both a defensive and offensive move in one!
Hao Meng's happiness was hard to hide as he presented himself before Bao Zhi. He managed to execute his self created killer move just as he imagined!
"Do it again." Bao Zhi instructed.
Hao Meng flew up to repeat the whole process, wondering what his mistake could have been.
"Just your self created technique. I've seen the rest enough."
"Mm." The fiery wings unfurled again behind Hao Meng, just like before.
Pang!
"Ouch!" Hao Meng was startled.
A green dart hit him unexpectedly and the killer move was disrupted right away.
"Master?"
"You are full of confidence after just managing to activate it once, do you think you can use killer moves as you like?"
"..." Hao Meng was tongue tied.
He quickly understood Bao Zhi's meaning.
In a real fight, how could he afford to only focus on his technique?
"Practicing is not done when you succeed once, it is done when you do not fail once. Do you understand the difference?"
"Let me try again." Hao Meng began, but this time he started with his investigative killer move and multi-tasked to activate his new killer move.
Now he could detect the seventy-two green darts in the air, all around him. "So many. When did these appear?" He understood at once, Bao Zhi was going to test him even more. The previous stung was just a warning.
"No problem." Hao Meng concentrated on his control.
The darts came flying as expected they would, but now he reacted in time and dodged gracefully.
With his fire path movement type immortal gu, Hao Meng was like a fish in water.
But dodging took up time and mental effort.
The green projectiles were numerous, their paths soon became complex, sometimes curving in odd directions, sometimes missing on purpose.
A mistake occurred! Hao Meng was hit on the back of his neck.
"Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" He rubbed his sore spots with frustration, as he got hit by another two darts right before Bao Zhi stopped them.
"Again."
This time, specks of flames scattered from the wings. Hao Meng wasn't going to take these hits lying down and just dodging. He changed his killer move, improvising on the spot.
Fighting fire with fire, offense with offense!
The fiery specs shot out in all directions, chasing and incinerating the green darts upon contact.
A chaotic aerial battle unfolded, with Hao Meng in the focal point.
Like a swarm of fireflies, the little flames whizzed all around him.
"Difficulty is what wakes up the genius." Bao Zhi keenly observed Hao Meng's talent on display.
"Guh!" Hao Meng made a mistake again.
He couldn't even last as long as the previous time.
"Master! You won't let me succeed on purpose!"
"Who, I?" Bao Zhi asked in jest. "Then try again, the exact same as you just did. I won't interfere this time."
Hao Meng looked at him curiously, but activated his investigative killer move anyway. The army of little flames appeared next as well.
The killer move progressed as before, but just when Hao Meng was about to succeed, his eyes opened wide. He suffered a backlash.
"I almost had it!" He cursed under his breath.
"Try again." Bao Zhi told him.
At the same time, he activated the improved version of a human path killer move; Alive in Suffering, human in Perception, this time incorporating purpose, conviction and defiance gu as well.
Immortal killer move — Alive in Aspiration, Human in Perception.
The effect was even more broad than before. Bao Zhi's and Hao Meng's human qi formed a mystical connection.
Hao Meng didn't notice at first, but as he started to activate his gu worms, he noticed a sharp awareness he didn't have before.
He felt himself, the fire path gu worms, his immortal essence and the killer move in its entirety. As if he became the center of heaven and earth, yet only a speck of dust in front of its grandness.
Then; he abruptly paused, stopping his killer move.
"This is all wrong." He landed on the ground. "This killer move..."
Bao Zhi nodded silently.
Hao Meng was very adept at improvising and using fire path, but even talent couldn't overcome moving in a flawed direction.
Gu immortal inheritances were precious. They were the results of the accumulation of trial and error, often originating from dozens or even hundreds of previous inheritors. One fixed and improved upon the previous, taking the inheritance closer and closer to its ideal version.
Hao Meng's inheritance didn't have a long history like that. He was only its second possessor.
New creations were wrong more often than not. The new is always untested, while the old has survived challenges, adapted, and endured, if it earned its place in the present.
Just from this simple observation, one could surmise to not be swayed by new things solely because they were recent. Of course, all things were new once, and only the new could bring progress.
But novelty alone does not guarantee an advancement. In fact, the allure of the new can often mask the flaws that become clear only after careful observation and repeated failure. It is through this process of trial and error, of evolution and adaptation, that the truly worthwhile innovations rise above the merely transient.
"I think, I get it now. The harder I tried to fix a flaw, the more flaws I introduced." Hao Meng realized.
"When I encountered a problem, I only thought to solve it by adding more gu worms and activating other methods, using even more gu. But adding more gu did not end up yielding a better result in the end."
"I started with a defensive killer move, but then I added offensive variations, by then, the killer move couldn't even fulfill its original purpose!" He shook his head.
"What I should do is not add; but remove! Yes. Less is more... Removing the source of the flaws!" Hao Meng delved into the intricacies of his killer move.
Bao Zhi was pleased with Hao Meng's conclusion. "Indeed. Quality is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."
Gu worms floated around Hao Meng, he could not explain this phenomena he was a part of, he could only embody it.
An unspeakable understanding!
Even the blind could see it, and even the deaf could hear it, yet a thousand words could not describe it. This was how the great dao was understood.
A kind of knowledge, beyond the limit of the theoretical, that one could not formalize and reason about.
People often called it 'common sense' or 'intuition' when they knew something was right, but didn't know how they knew it.
This profundity was related to attainments and true meaning. One could not teach attainment, only the person themselves could grasp it.
In his deep insight, Hao Meng had reduced the number of gu in his killer move to a mere third of the original!
He activated it again.
Whoosh!
The two fiery wings appeared around him almost instantly! Both the activation time and complexity were a stark contrast compared to before.
"Very good!" Bao Zhi applauded.
He didn't expect Hao Meng to resolve his killer move so swiftly.
"This is the terrifying result from a ten extreme physique's talent and a human path killer move!?" He noted to himself in shock.
"Hmm, would this work?" Bao Zhi suddenly had a thought.
He explained the mechanism of the formation of the Brain Melon plantation to Hao Meng and let him try it.
Hao Meng sat cross-legged in the center of the formation and closed his eyes.
Bao Zhi left him there, and went to visit Qinyang.
"I've brought something you might want." Bao Zhi opened. "Soul Mirror Wine, to strengthen your soul."
"Is that so? But I don't cultivate soul path."
"This is the era of soul path, who does not need it?" Bao Zhi produced a vat of said wine and set it down. "This is the last in existence. Its supply in Tian Qucheng was destroyed, the rest I drank with Hao Meng and Mo Xuan."
Qinyang eyed the large vat of wine suspiciously. "What is you play here?"
"I already refined some of this immortal wine so a gu master, like you or Mo Xuan could safely consume it. This last portion is for you." Bao Zhi began.
"If I'm going to use your strength, I need you to become stronger." He spread his arms. "This is all."
"What do you want in return?"
"Since this is the last of a wine that's on the same level as the Bewitching soup and considering my own effort; five immortal essence stones."
"No deal."
Bao Zhi sat atop the wine vat as if he didn't hear her, silently studying the various gu and their mechanisms that Qinyang created.
"A strange formation." He murmured.
"My information path killer move? Well, I guess it works by itself, so it is really a formation. Formations are also killer moves." She thought.
Bao Zhi had grandmaster formation path attainment, yet this formation in front of him was nothing like he saw before. He understood what this formation was doing at a glance, yet its core principles of operation, the whys, eluded him.
It was similar to when Great Formation Wen Bo tried to assess Bao Zhi's Flying Leaf Coiling Vine formation, even though Wen Bo's formation path attainment surpassed Bao Zhi's, the formation contained great grandmaster level wood path profundities, surpassing Wen Bo's knowledge in that area.
Bao Zhi reached towards a gu.
"Hey! Don't touch that."
"Why? Do you know what will happen if it's removed?" Bao Zhi stopped halfway.
"It will create an error and the formation will enter an error state, it won't work anymore."
"What about that one?" Bao Zhi pointed at another gu.
"The same. All these gu are there for a reason. I constructed it carefully to get the optimal result." She said with confidence. If Bao Zhi pushed, she could prove her logical derivation correct.
"Allow me." Bao Zhi smiled and plucked a gu at random from the formation.
The formation's output became corrupted and its operation became chaotic.
"Oh no! That gu was part of the error handling, the net that would catch the error..." She watched with annoyance as her creation began to fall to pieces.
Bao Zhi shook his head. "As brittle as morning frost on an autumn leaf. A single touch is enough to spell its end."
So what if it was optimized and efficient? If it broke due to its brittleness, then its efficiency was zero.
The style of this formation was the polar opposite of the kind Bao Zhi would create. The Flying Leaf Coiling Vine formation was almost like a living being. It could react to external harm, mitigating the damage and even repair it to a certain extent by refining new gu. When pressured, it would resist harder. The internal parts were not fixed, they could move and adapt as necessary.
Bao Zhi activated Alive in Aspiration, Human in Perception once again.
His dense human qi engulfed Qinyang.
Bao Zhi cleared the remains of the formation, and got to work.
His hands moved quickly, placing gu worm after gu worm in their place.
Qinyang had a hard time to track it with her eyes.
But then!
"Woah!" She could 'see' it. "Is... is this like how Neo felt?"
Her hands moved on their own as she picked up on the rhythm and started to place gu worms in tandem with Bao Zhi.
She could tell the next move without effort, as if she could peer into a grand plan itself, the glimpse at the source code of the world was unfolding before her mind's eye.
She placed one gu, then Bao Zhi placed another, perfectly in sync with the rhythm, both of them responding naturally.
It felt as if she was singing along a song perfectly, even though she was hearing it for the first time.
The hour vanished like a fleeting dream, dissolving before awareness could catch hold of its wings.
Qinyang found herself staring at the marvel of this new formation, occasionally glancing at the spot where Bao Zhi stood, she wasn't sure if what happened was real or not.
Yet the proof was right before her.
"Amazing... The structure is inherently redundant, yet every part is used to its fullest. Simple at its core, modular, yet complex at its working." No matter how she looked at it, this formation surpassed all her previous creations in every aspect.
Using the formation, which, in this case meant configuring it to work in a specific way, was surprisingly intuitive.
In her past experience with programming, she was used to dealing with computers that felt cold and stubbornly literal. They would follow every instruction exactly, even if it led to unintended consequences.
If you weren't careful, a simple mistake could lead to a crash or worse. Those computers were precise, but unforgiving. If you gave them flawed instructions, they'd execute them anyway.
But this formation felt different.
"This… this formation feels like it wants me to succeed."
It didn't feel like she was battling a rigid, error-prone machine at all.
Almost as if it could anticipate her needs, as if she wasn't issuing commands to a computer but engaging with something more organic.
It was as though nature itself had evolved this thing to be her perfect tool, effortlessly aligning itself with her intentions.
"This should only be possible with black box systems, no? Is this what it feels like to understand the inner workings of a black box system?" She wondered.
In computer science, a black box referred to something whose internal processes were hidden or unknowable. You gave it inputs, got outputs, but couldn't really know what was happening inside.
But now, this didn't feel like a black box at all to Qinyang. It was as though the inner mechanisms had become transparent, like the system was showing her exactly how it worked without needing to explain.
"This wasn't something that deliberate design could achieve, could it?"
Qinyang's eyes sparked with fascination.
A little drunk on the Soul Mirror Wine, a long lost feeling of 'magic' from her childhood, thought to be purged by formal logic and education; it was reignited in her heart.
* * * * *
Hao Meng woke up from the formation.
"Master, this formation is incredible." He exclaimed.
However it wasn't Bao Zhi who stood beside the formation, but Mo Xuan.
"Greetings Senior Brother!" Mo Xuan cupped his fist, having picked up some manners in the meantime.
"Father isn't here, he left to find a solution for senior brother's time path problem." He straightened his back. "Please take good care of me."
"Huh?"
* * * * *