Sitting on the cushion he'd prepared, Wu Ling looked over the instructions in the manual one last time before taking out the ring and disk-shaped Awakening incense he'd secured at great expense. According to the alchemist he'd bought the incense from, the ring represented the "Impelling Force" and was intended to help him force open the door to his Inner World while the disk represented the "Guiding Force" that would help him set his cultivation path once he forced the door open. The disk was intended to be placed within the ring with the incense burning from the outside inward, starting with the Impelling Force and ending with the Guiding Force.
The manual Wu Ling had obtained however suggested a very different method of using Awakening Incense. Rather than starting with the Impelling Force, he'd be starting with the Guiding Force to set his path and then using the Impelling Force to bring it to life. This difference was the reason that he'd had to search so hard and pay so much for this particular incense.
Across the Severed Spirit Mortal Realm, most Awakening incense came in one of two forms. The cheapest of awakening incense that produced the lowest odds of success blended materials to form a Guiding Force that could awaken any of the four paths with the main Impelling Force components, resulting in a stick of incense that could be used by anyone to awaken as anything depending largely on their luck. This kind of low-quality incense resulted in not only very low success rates but it gave potential cultivators very little control over their futures. The other common type of Awakening Incense was precisely blended to awaken a specific cultivation path. By combining both forces into one mixture it could be created in large batches and made the best use of the ingredients used. There were higher grades available at increasingly exorbitant prices but they were still largely produced in bulk in large and small sects or for cultivation families that followed specific paths to ensure that their members could continue the appropriate traditions.
What Wu Ling was about to do didn't align with either of those methods and it didn't match the intended use of the incense he'd acquired either. If the manual was wrong, if he failed because the method wasn't valid, he wouldn't just fail and waste a small fortune. The failed attempt would make it at least three times as hard to try again later and he'd have to wait at least a year for the injuries sustained by a failure to recover enough to try again. Still, he hadn't come this far and worked so hard just to give up on the path he'd chosen at the last moment. Lighting a thin match he reached out delicately with the same grace he'd showed Su Xiang when preparing tea and touched an ember to the center of the disk, breathing in the rose-colored smoke deeply and descending into meditation.
In his mind's eye, Wu Ling began to envision a room within his heart. Classical Awakening called for approaching this room from the outside and forcing the door open but Wu Ling followed the steps described in the Myriad Petals Lotus Sutra, envisioning himself already within the room in his heart. Slowly, four bare walls and a simple reed floor came into clearer and clearer view until he felt that he'd truly arrived in a real place.
"Four walls," he murmured to himself. "No, four walls and a floor. Let's see how far I can go." Taking a deep breath of the rose-colored smoke, Wu Ling started with the part of the instructions he felt it was most important to complete. He imagined a painter's palette with a vast array of colors and a paintbrush to go along with it. On the east wall he painted a vast lotus with dozens of petals in a multitude of colors. No real lotus would have so many different colors but the lotus wasn't ever meant to represent a real plant. Rather, each petal represented a different form of art, a potential type of artistic expression. Sweat dripped from his brow as he worked to keep the increasing number of colors in harmonious balance, stretching the skills he'd spent so many years practicing for just this moment.
In the end, his lotus contained eighteen petals starting with rich purple and magenta at the center and flowing outward in two distinct directions. One side of the lotus shifted in color from magenta to deep crimson, then lightened to a brighter red before turning orange and yellow at the outermost edge, warming like the colors of a flame. In the opposite direction, the petals shifted from purple to deep blue before becoming lighter, working their way towards a pale sky blue that gave a feeling of a cool winter's day. He'd hoped to achieve thirty-six petals in a ring further out with tones of green and brown to provide grounding to the lotus but no matter how hard he tried to visualize it he failed to see a way to include them without disrupting the balance and harmony of the painting.
"Eighteen is already a lot of paths," he reminded himself, taking another deep breath of the rose-colored smoke and turning to the wall to the south. "I shouldn't be too greedy."
Focusing on his next task, Wu Ling dismissed the palette of paints and the delicate paintbrush and instead envisioned an inkstone and caligrapher's brush. With slow deliberate strokes, he began to cover the south wall in elegant characters nearly a meter tall. 'Artist' came first, followed by 'Musician' but those were the most obvious and easiest words to call the power he intended to use. 'Dreamer' followed the first words and 'Lover' followed that one. It might be aspirational, but Wu Ling intended to let his life follow his heart. Finally, as his strength began to fade he added one more aspiration to the words on the wall. 'Hero.' Arrogant as it might be, he had no intention of being an Artist who was only fit for entertaining the masses. He intended to live his own life, to be the protagonist of his own story, not just a storyteller who could only reflect the glories of others.
Turning away from the calligraphy, he approached the west wall and envisioned a large wooden shelf with dozens of small squares to represent a chess board. Inhaling his third deep breath of rose-colored smoke, Wu Ling began to place both white and black stones the size of his palm on each of the shelves. Slowly, a game began to emerge, played by two very different players. The white stones suggested an aggressive, determined, and focused player, perhaps even a ruthless one who made sacrifices to capture territory. The black stones on the other hand, suggested a player who looked at the game with more patience, keeping several options open and yielding in some places in order to advance in others. "I really am both of them aren't I?" Wu Ling mused as he examined the game he'd set.
It was impossible to truly Awaken without being honest with yourself about who you really were. Mortals could hide behind their ideals of the person they wanted the world to think of them as and that they wanted to appear to be, but cultivators had to know themselves deeply if they wanted to draw on their inner strengths. Yesterday, Su Xiang had asked him if he intended to keep dressing as a woman and he'd told her that he didn't but he couldn't deny that over the years, the time he'd spent living as a woman had shaped him in ways most men would never understand. It had given him a duality of perspective that he was coming to realize held more significance than he'd ever expected. It was possible for him to advance as a cultivator by discarding the 'feminine self' that he'd carefully constructed for all these years but doing so would require him to discard large parts of his true self. Instead, he felt that he needed to embrace both halves of his existence and find the right balance for the two.
Looking at the last wall in the north, Wu Ling drew his fourth breath of rose-colored smoke but this time did nothing with the energy it provided other than to ponder. He had planned to write out a familiar piece of music here. He thought that 'Heaven Chasing' could guide his way forward to the limits that cultivation could reach. Now that he looked back on the lotus and the chess game however, and even the words he'd chosen for his calligraphy, he realized that 'Heaven Chasing' was too pure and too lacking in complexity to reflect the path he wanted to walk.
Taking an extra breath of rose-colored smoke, Wu Ling began writing on the final wall, the soft resonant notes of 'Upward to Moon' filling his mind as his hand wrote line after line. Halfway through the piece, however, he stopped, leaving a gap before continuing with an entirely different piece of music. This time, he chose 'Sun on the Water.' Where 'Upward to Moon' was slow and mysterious 'Sun on the Water' was intense and captivating. One drew the listener in with faint rests and subtle shifts while the other demanded attention even as it hinted at the fading glory of the setting sun.
Taking a sixth breath of rose-colored smoke, Wu Ling's vision began to swim, the smoke stinging his eyes as he caught his first whiff of the golden smoke that would soon spill from the outer disk. He wasn't ready! The music wasn't complete! In a moment of panic, his mind flickered over a dozen pieces of music that could connect the two pieces before him and provide some kind of transition but in the end, he discarded them all. Envisioning his well-worn zither he set down the brush and ink, closing his eyes and allowing his fingers to slide over its familiar strings, letting the music itself guide him. To his right, the lotus on the wall glowed briefly at his heart-stirring playing, lending a wisp of multicolored energy to the power of the incense he'd already inhaled.
No sooner had the multicolored energy merged with him than Wu Ling's fingers danced from 'Upward to Moon' into a playful and teasing melody, as though saying 'look, there's more beauty over here' to the listener, pulling them away from quite contemplation of the rising moon to stare in awe at the majesty of the setting sun. Gentle, and playful, the bridge Wu Ling built between the two pieces felt intimately familiar and wonderfully fresh. It acknowledged that both songs were beautiful but it didn't try to blend one into the other, rather, it said that both were beautiful and deserving of attention.
Holding desperately to the last bit of rose-colored smoke in his lungs, Wu Ling added one last thing to the center of the room. A small table ringed by cushions and holding a delicate jade tea set. Tea might not have a place among the Four Arts but all the joys and sorrows of the world, the bitter and the sweet could be gathered in a cup of tea and shared with the ones who mattered most. Sitting before the container that should normally hold tea leaves, Wu Ling felt the power of the golden smoke of the Impelling Force swirling within. Once he opened the container, he'd need to channel that energy into everything he'd created here in this Inner World. Eighteen petals of a painting, five words of calligraphy, seventy-two stones of a chess game, and countless notes of two distinct songs. All of it would take energy to bring to life. The question was, would there be enough energy to fuel everything he'd made? Had he been too ambitious in all of this?
Whether he had over-reached or not, he recognized that he'd been true to himself in every movement and brush stroke. Even if it was too much, it was him and it was honest. If it was too much, he'd just have to find a way to realize all of it because there wasn't a single bit of it he would choose to remove now that it was here.
Slowly, reaching out with the same practiced motion he'd used to serve tea yesterday and countless times before, Wu Ling lifted the lid on the container and took a deep breath of rich golden smoke.