When Wu Ling woke, he found himself in a place that was neither part of his Inner World nor the lakeside camp he'd built with his companions. Rather, he found himself lying on a soft bed on a covered patio, listening to sublime music and overlooking a lake that sat at the base of four towering waterfalls. Above the mighty cliffs, the waterfalls poured over, a star-filled sky with unfamiliar constellations and ribbons of colorful auras cast a surreal light over the entire scene.
"Any pain or discomfort?" Hua Jue asked, standing up from her zither to come examine Wu Ling where he lay. "Do you still feel like yourself?"
"I still feel like me," Wu Ling said after a moment of reflection. "But, I feel… stretched. As though I'm being pulled in two directions at once." It was a strange sensation that seemed to come from deep within him. When he tried to pinpoint the sensation, he couldn't.
It wasn't that he felt like his arms were pulled in separate directions or that someone had grabbed his cheeks to pull them in opposite directions. Rather, the whole of his being felt slightly… stretched in a way he couldn't quite comprehend.
"That's a consequence of cultivating 'Duality.' You'll grow accustomed to the feeling with time," Hua Jue explained. "When you find yourself leaning too far in one direction or another, that pull should help you correct yourself to restore balance. If you lose that sensation, take it as a warning sign and look for help from someone who understands injuries to the soul."
"Someone like Master then?"
"Not so exaggerated," Hua Jue said softly. "I'm afraid that we'll be parting again for even longer after we finish your lessons. I told you before, what I can do for you is limited. The energy I'm spending to give you this help now will stretch my limits, even with the help your friends are offering to aid in your reawakening."
"When we're finished," she continued, "I'll need to spend some time slowly recovering before I can help guide you again. With only the energy of a Mortal Realm to draw on, it may be more than a year or two before you can turn to me for help again. That's why I say 'someone who understands injuries to the soul' and not 'seek me out.' As much as I want to be there for you until you actually reach me, I can only offer you limited help."
"Master has already given me a level of support that is unmatched by anyone in Silver Sword City, if not the whole of my world," Wu Ling said sincerely. "Disciple won't be greedy for more."
"I'm relieved that you don't hold it against me," Hua Jue said with a soft smile. "Now, as time is limited, since you're awake, we should begin. Come with me," she said, leading the way out of the small house on the lakeshore and onto a pristine, sandy beach.
"Where is this place, Master?" Wu Ling asked. "You once mentioned a place where four rivers meet at the base of Divine Mountain, is that where we are?"
"It's my memory of that place, yes," Hua Jue said with a wistful smile. "It doesn't look like this anymore. The sect has grown so large that the whole of this lake is surrounded by dozens of palaces, pavilions, training grounds, and offices of the sect. When you arrive, I'll make sure you have an appropriate palace for yourself and any of your loved ones who follow you here," she promised. "But those concerns are for many years from now. At the moment, I want to address the root of one of your struggles."
"I've been frustrated by my lack of power," Wu Ling confessed. "In order to eliminate everyone in the gambling den, I spent an entire day's effort painting birds on my zither, preparing the Asp of Paralysis and it was barely sufficient. I can't always bring that level of preparation and even if I could, I would bleed my purse dry in paints and pigments. I keep feeling that my cultivation is lacking and the strength will come in time, but from Master's words, there's something I'm missing."
"There is something you're missing," she agreed. "Though not entirely. Rather, you're stumbling on it without realizing it. Given time, I'm sure you'd figure it out for yourself, but you're traveling through dangerous lands and I don't believe that you have the luxury of time to figure this out the hard way."
With a wave of her hand, she conjured a small writing desk, brush, inkstone, and several slips of parchment for talismans.
"Write for me. You've used the basic elements in your calligraphy before. Write 'Fire' for me, do it five times. When you're finished," she said, waving her hand and conjuring a set of straw dummies. "Attack each of those targets with your flames."
Slowly, and with great care, Wu Ling did exactly as Hua Jue instructed. When he wrote 'Fire', he attempted to imbue a sense of the motion of flame in each of his strokes, creating the impression that each character could burn the paper of the talisman with the slightest spark. When he hurled the talismans at the straw targets, each of them exploded in a ball of flame that lit the straw on fire, exactly as he'd envisioned when he wrote the talisman.
"That's about half of what you're capable of," Hua Jua said as she observed his work. "Even before your breakthrough, you could have done better. Watch carefully how I do this," she said, waving a hand and replacing his set of targets with a pair of her own.
When his master stepped up to the desk, however, she wrote two very different versions of the character 'Fire.' The first closely resembled what Wu Ling had created. The calligraphy was sublimely beautiful and seemed to almost dance off the paper like a flickering flame.
It was the second one, however, that captured Wu Ling's attention. The strokes were uneven, the pressure at the start of each stroke was much greater but the tail ends of each stroke were longer and fainter, as though her brush had slammed into the paper forcefully and dashed off the stroke as quickly as possible.
If Wu Ling had presented Hua Jue's second piece of calligraphy to his teachers at the Pure Virtue Musician's Hall, he'd have been scolded for his carelessness, and yet, of the two, it was the second that seemed to seethe with heat and barely contained menace.
When Hua Jue threw the talismans at their targets, the first one produced a result almost exactly like Wu Ling's, exploding in a ball of flame and lighting the target on fire. The second talisman, however, engulfed the target in a terrifying conflagration that quickly reduced the straw target to ash!
"You see the difference?"