After spending so long on his vision, Avery had made great progress, but he couldn't bear to continue this way.
While progress was smooth, it wasn’t fast, and more importantly, it was too mundane. After experiencing the Supreme Avenue descend in front of him, a mere celestial phenomenon like a black hole didn’t cut it anymore.
He had tried to be content with his lot, knowing that he would eventually move on to bigger and better things, but it had only worked for the first few weeks, after which he had grown increasingly restless.
Avery dreamt of the Tao every day, reliving that transcendent experience, and the thought that he might be losing time with an inefficient approach was driving him crazy.
This time however his disgruntlement did not hinder him, and he had instead managed to turn it into a motivating force, helping him to be more productive, to find a better way of doing things and search for every possible improvement, no matter how small.
He had made countless big and small adjustments to his mental picture, but during the last year and a half, he had had time to devise a new, crazy plan to drastically expedite his exploration of the Tao.
He had long deliberated, wanting to make sure he was not rashly meddling with things beyond his level once again. He was convinced that it wasn’t an inconsiderate risk, and that it was just a way of portraying runes that was closer and truer to the Tao.
He had learnt a lot during these two years, and had slowly transformed all of the random insight from the Great Way into useful and practical knowledge. He had then strived to include his new understanding into his vision, but was relatively unsuccessful.
He had already greatly amended his vision, changing it so much it was unrecognizable, but it still wasn't enough. While it was true he was improving, he was standing on a shoddy foundation, and he could not remedy all of the fundamental mistakes he had previously made.
He sensed he was fast approaching the limit of his current vision. Well, maybe not the true limit of the vision, but at least the limit of what he could do with it at his current skill level.
While his galaxy was imaginary, to be able to carry intent, it had to have an internal consistency. It could evolve and change, but he could not completely restructure it to fix the mistakes he had made. There was nothing really stopping him, but doing so would only result in his intent getting muddled and losing in purity.
To advance further, he would need to take a step back, abandon the unstable foundation he had built with insufficient skills, and start anew. He was now much more capable in every way, and he was convinced it was worth taking a small loss and resetting to be able to open a path further ahead.
Despite firmly holding this belief, he hesitated whether to take action immediately or if he should push his current visualization to its absolute limit before he discarded it.
He had no precise measurements on how his plans would affect his speed, not even enough for an educated guess, and was at a loss as to what to do.
He finally decided he needed to evaluate how far he had gone before he could come to a proper conclusion, even if it meant risking the physical integrity of his writing stylus more than absolutely necessary.
Avery eventually picked up his pen, this time carefully etching his vision on the wall. The damage on the stylus spread as expected, but Avery hardly noticed as he once again fell into enlightenment.
Ding, Congratulations, you have completed a Tao mirror rune. +20 Points
He'd sensed before that he was inches away from a significant breakthrough, in which he'd make contact with the rune. This was why he had so hurriedly decided to visualize the Tao. Now, after six months of hard work, he far surpassed that milestone, his craftsmanship had entered a new realm, and he finally made contact with the rune.
It wasn't so much calling and communication with something far away as he had first assumed, but rather it was shining a light on something that had always been there concealed in the darkness.
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Similarly to how a letter written in invisible ink must be exposed to the correct range of light to be seen, the rune can only become apparent when illuminated with his artistic conception.
His visualization was still too incomplete, so the rune he saw was still hazy and shrouded in darkness, but it was still invaluable. In the short term, it was arguably more valuable than his insights from the Tao.
This rune was not like the ones Avery had drawn, this was a perfect rune, no, it was the original rune, the right rune.
If before Avery was attempting to draw a lion using only verbal descriptions from books, now he suddenly had a real lion in front of him as a model. It was still night and he couldn't see the details clearly, but just this glimpse was enough to reshape and ground his idea of a lion.
He was no longer blindly groping in the dark for ideas on what he should do, confused about his destination. He now had a clear view on the objective, and he only had to understand and copy it. Besides, the rune not only revealed information about itself, it also revealed the connection between it and the Tao. Avery could use the rune to digest the insights from the Tao, and use the Tao to understand the rune, incorporating concepts like yin and yang, the three realms or luck and karma into it.
The rune he had drawn eventually shattered and dispersed, and the light cast by his conceptualization died out, shrouding the original rune in mystery once more. That brief moment was enough for Avery's comprehension to skyrocket once more, rewarding him for all of his hard work.
Seeing the incredible improvement he had just made, and knowing it was not a one off opportunity, but rather something he could repeat as long as he diligently crafted an adequate rune, he reigned in his ambitions and vowed to honestly push his current vision to its limit.
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It took seven more years to develop his imaginary galaxy to the extreme, carving a total 16 runes and subsequently gazing on its true form. He had gained an extraordinary amount of insights from those experiences, comprehending the surface of many fundamental principles.
He had consequently done his best to infuse over a dozen of those complex concepts into the fabric of the virtual universe, but he had finally arrived at a bottleneck.
He had originally designed the black hole world to nurture the intent of storage through the display of the alchemic principle of the four elements, and it was ill suited to hosting more than that, especially since his premise had changed into five connected elements.
He had been able to force other notions in, but with his insufficient ability, their inclusion had created numerous logical flaws. They still improved the quantity of intent, but they simultaneously harmed its quality.
Now that he had gained all he could from this mental world, it was time to say goodbye and recast his foundation. With his current expertise, he would be able to create something infinitely superior, something that could accompany him for a long time in his quest for the Truth.
There were two ways for him to improve his mental picture. One was to improve his idea of storage, and pour more intent into it. He could get better at this just by thinking about it constantly, but that was it. It was very slow, and couldn't be forced.
The second way to improve, which was the one he had chosen, was to develop the background scenery. To make it as accurate as possible, and as comprehensive as possible, in such a way that it became a perfect stage for the rune to appear.
This was because runes were a representation of the Tao, and the picture containing even a hint of the Tao was enough to make it more connected to reality and elevate the quality of the rune. While he was still unable to just picture the supreme Avenue directly, he could still show it through its various rules applied in a world. In short, he needed to create a realistic mental world.
Improving the background was harder and required a lot more effort, but it would serve to improve every single rune instead of just one. This would normally not be worth it, as it was infinitely more complicated to depict the ultimate truth of everything as compared to a singular concept, but Avery had the advantage of having already experienced the Tao. Besides, the reason Avery chose to focus on the background was precisely because it was harder.
His current goal was not to craft better or faster, it was to strengthen his mental strength to the point he no longer needed the assistance of the pen to engrave. For this, he needed to challenge himself and go beyond his limits, rather than taking things slow and steady.
Aside from that, he found he was straight up unable to properly focus on anything else. When he attempted to concentrate on the rune itself, he would unconsciously notice the hint of truth in it, and invariably get distracted and start reminiscing about his experience with Heaven.
In fact, if he was honest with himself, he cared more about scraping together the vague shadow of the Tao rather than gathering points to stay alive. Survival was not a goal for him anymore, it was just a way for him to have more time to rejoin the Avenue.