Avery continued skimming the cultivators past, but there was nothing that really attracted his attention. He did read all the cultivation manuals he came across, but not only were they too low level, they also focused on the gathering of Qi, something that was useless to him.

  He had lost his human body, and no longer had a dantian. He had no way to store Qi, and nothing to use it on. A human would generally slowly accumulate Qi, cycling it through their meridians. Each time Qi passed through their body, it would purify and elevate their flesh, slowly but surely reaching for perfection.

  However, for Avery, cycling Qi through his body would only disrupt the delicate balance of mana he had established. If he wanted to improve himself, he only needed to rewrite his runes.

  If he wanted to, he could adapt his runic body and create a new cultivation technique to start cultivating through Qi, using storage runes to replace his dantian. However, that would only dilute his path, and he was better off just continuing on cultivating mana.

  The reason Qi was the standard cultivation resource was that it was a very basic form of Hongmeng Qi, compatible with everything in the world, and with limitless uses. One could use Qi to forge their body or strengthen their soul, engrave runes or power formations, to create fire or water.

  Mana was a much more specialized energy, one for which he knew no other uses than fueling runes, but it was perfectly suited for Avery’s needs. He only knew runes, so what was the use of additional versatility?

  Even if being a jack-of-all-trades was often preferable to being a master of one, he did not care. He was already powerful enough, having successfully escaped the abyss and fulfilled his worldly ambitions. Now, his only remaining goal was the Tao, and why should he take some valuable time out of his cultivation just to get a few more meaningless abilities?

  Instead of the advanced martial art cheats, it was the less impressive poems and ballads of mortal sages that brought him the greatest joy. He lost himself in these musing on the profundities of the universes, that had no apparent purpose or goal.

  “The Path cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be known.

  The Path does not appear in the eyes of the plain man, or in the head of the sage; But realize your unselfish nature, and all will be clear.

  Cultivate a pure heart, and through non-existence, become One.”

  These simple words inspired countless insights that would greatly help Avery’s cultivation, and were by far the most valuable things he gained from his divination. He knew not who had penned these words, but he felt a similar inquisitive reverence towards the Great Way to the one he felt.

  Perhaps their philosophy differed slightly, but they were fellow travelers on the meeting on the Avenue, and they had a kinship that transcended time and space, as they were connected by their desire to stand tall before the Tao.

  Unfortunately, the man he was spying on had read very little of this kind of poetry, deeming them useless rambling of mortals who had no clue what cultivation really was. The only other thing that piqued his interest was to learn how long he had spent cultivating while pretending to sleep.

  It turned out that the crowd surrounding him had not rushed to see him at all. They had been extremely methodical, gathering slowly and taking great care not to appear suspicious. They wanted nobody to realize what they were doing so that they could monopolize this opportunity.

  They had had plenty of time to organize themselves, for his light meditative trance had not been a nightlong affair as Avery had assumed. It had lasted four long months.

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  He knew he often lost track of time, but wasn’t a few months a little bit much? If all of his cultivation trances were this long, how long had he spent in the mountains exactly?

  He found the idea that years could have flown by undetected amusing, but in the end, it did not matter too much. He was immortal, and had all the time in the world to spend. Perhaps he should make himself an alarm to wake him up in case a time-sensitive issue comes up, but frankly, he could hardly imagine anything more important than contemplating the Tao.

  He also learned why he had attracted so much attention. Apparently, he unconsciously drew runes as he cultivated, probably as a way to "store" the insights he gained, leaving his mind uncluttered and free to delve deeper into the mysteries of the Tao.

  So that as time went on, the air in front of him was filled with hundreds of illusory runes, symbolizing all the progress he had made while cultivating. These runes were incomplete, and had no effect, but they still contained the fruit of his cultivation, and were a great help to any mortal who had the opportunity to study them.

  Soon after, his divination soon caught up to the present, showing him the scene of nearly a hundred men and women looking at him, waiting with anticipation to see what the runes he had drawn would do. They did not realize it had already taken effect, and that he was about to take a glance at the future.

  Predicting the future was no harder than surveying the past, but it was much more vague, and less accurate. This was because he was not really seeing the future, he was only simulating the machinations of fate.

  Fate was one of the laws of the world, it was simply a result of the natural order. In the right conditions, water would turn to ice, and no matter how many times you tried the exact same experiment, it would always return the same result. There were many forces at work to make this happen, but the inevitability of the result is what we call fate.

  As far as Avery knew, this definition of fate could not be applied to his old world, as on earth there was something called the uncertainty principle. This principle apparently challenged determinism by showing that in quantum physics it was impossible to measure the movement of a particle and its position at the same time.

  As he understood it, this meant there was a fundamental randomness inherent to the universe. As such, it was logically impossible to claim that everything was determined and could be accurately predicted.

  There was most likely a lot of nuance and details that Avery and his waning memory were missing, but what was important was that the world he was in now did not contain the same principle.

  The prehistoric followed an absolute order, forming a world devoid of randomness, where perfect predictions were possible. If Avery wanted, he could predict how many blades of grass would grow on a mountain in the next thousand years, and provided he took everything into account, he would always be correct.

  The only exception to this was with free will. Sapients were given the mission to change and improve the natural order, so they could not as tightly be bound to it. Of course, it was not total freedom.

  If fate was like a river, flowing downstream and dragging all things along with it, then to have free will was to be given the ability to swim, to orient oneself and alter one's course.

  It did not mean you no longer felt the current, it simply meant you had agency, and could choose to resist fate. You could be content in your lot, and either through choice or laziness, go along with fate's grand design. This was common, as it was both inadvisable, unnecessary and impossible to resist fate on all things.

  However, it was still possible to swim against the current, and depending on the amount of effort you made, you could do anything from slightly changing your trajectory to completely subverting fate. It was difficult and perilous, but it was the only true freedom this deterministic world offered.

  This was why it was said that the general trends of Heaven were set in stone, while the minor trends were susceptible to change. It was possible for an individual or a small group to defy fate, but to change the trajectory of the world required concerted efforts from too many people for it to be viable.

  It was also why becoming a saint was so difficult, since it implied single-handedly defying a major trend, imposing a new order on the world, changing fate forever.

  All this meant that while Avery could easily foretell the fate of anybody he came across, he would only know the path they were set on, and could not predict if and when they would decide to walk outside of it.