Liu Wei pulled out of his soul, just in time before his emotions overcame their suppression, a wave of confusion washing over him. Had this hit him while he was still in there, it would have given him one hell of a headache.

He couldn’t help it though. Why in the world had his Dao reacted this way?

Now that he had tracked it down, Liu Wei could easily observe and analyze the spark. It was a tiny thing, insignificant at first glance, but contained within it were a plethora of things. There was a notion of pride, similar to what he had felt in the moment of its creation, a speck of curiosity and a plethora of other emotions, all related in one way or another to the experience of teaching. All of it was wrapped up in a miniscule layer of fire qi. The more Liu Wei studied the spark, the more confused he grew, because with all of his cultivation knowledge, he could only think of one thing this could possibly be: an epiphany.

Epiphanies were a phenomenon that cultivators in the Dao Contemplation Realm could experience in moments in which their emotions were highly aligned with core principles of their Dao. They were created without human intent, simply as a result of this alignment and they could help a cultivator advance their understanding of the Dao in a similar way to cultivation resources.

Liu Wei had never experienced an epiphany before and neither had most cultivators in the Dao Contemplation Realm. They were rare to occur by themselves and actively chasing after them was rarely seen as worth the effort, because the benefit they provided was truly not that large.

What was confusing about this was that Liu Wei was very certain that he hadn’t been emotionally aligned with his Dao at all. If fire was anything, after all, it was the purest expression of destruction, of volatile and unbound consumption of all it touched. And that wasn’t at all what he had felt.

Then it clicked.

To say that the realization struck him like a thunderbolt would be the understatement of the century. In one moment, it seemed like the question of what was wrong with Liu Wei’s cultivation would grow by yet another mystery. In the next, everything was clear. It couldn’t even be said that the mysteries were solved because there truly hadn’t been any to begin with. His troubles had all been entirely of his own making.

Fire was destruction. That much was true. But it wasn’t just destruction. People didn’t cook their food over a fire in order to destroy it. They didn’t heat their oven to kill themselves. They didn’t light candles to burn something down.

Fire was destruction, but it was also light. It was warmth. It was safety. It was transformation. An element couldn’t be fully described with a single of its traits. Just as any human needed to drink water to survive and yet could drown, when submerged in it, fire also was made up of many different traits, all of which were equally important to its existence as a whole.

Philosophically, this was evident and something that Liu Wei had naturally always been aware of. Yet he had somehow never thought to apply this very thing to his contemplations on its Dao, its essence.

To him, the Dao of Fire had always represented destruction. What he had been doing was akin to someone trying to map out a continent by exclusively staring at the map of a single kingdom. It was bound to fail.

Every cultivator starting to research the Daos would learn from the very beginning that every Dao consisted of a near infinite number of simultaneous truths, some of them working alongside one another, others standing in opposition. To contemplate a Dao was to strife for understanding of those truths and to use that to build what one might call a full picture of the Dao in one’s mind. This full picture, representing the tenth stage of Comprehension, would not be all-encompassing but rather one of an infinite number of possible interpretations of the Dao.

To this end, the way one went about understanding their chosen Dao and on which of its many truths they wanted to focus was mostly up to the individual. Two individuals who contemplated the same Dao could come to wildly different interpretations of their Dao without either of them being wrong. What one could not do however was taking a singular truth, a singular property of an element and declare it a full understanding of that Dao.

Liu Wei had run into a wall neither because he had lacked the ability to understand, not because there was nothing left to learn. His view had simply been too narrow to gain an understanding of the whole.

Why? He was currently struggling to understand that himself. He had broken through to the first stage of the Dao Contemplation Realm on the back of his understanding of this truth. From then on, he had continued in a way which felt natural to him. The only reason he had gotten as far as the eighth stage of Dao Contemplation with his fundamentally flawed approach was probably, as silly as that sounded, the fact that he was a genius.

An average cultivator below the realm of Dao Contemplation would probably not be able to even build up a deep enough understanding of a single truth to break through at all. In fact, it wasn’t at all unlikely that what Liu Wei had encountered was actually a common roadblock early on in a cultivator’s pursuit of the Dao.

A rookie mistake, only that he wasn’t a rookie but a four-and-a-half centuries old expert. If his theory was right, a normal cultivator would naturally be led to starting to contemplate other truths in order to progress. He on the other hand had been far too entrenched in his ways to consider something like that when it had started to become a problem.

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On top of that, he was the only powerful cultivator of the Dao of Fire far and wide. The peninsula that the sect was located on didn’t contain good environments for its practitioners and his choice to follow it had been largely based in the arrogance of a young genius. As such, he had never held any meaningful conversation with others who pursued the Dao of Fire, from whom he could have learned of his mistake.

It was a perfect mix coincidences and circumstances that had led to this embarrassing mess of a mistake. A mistake which had cost him two-and-a-half centuries of cultivation and that he would probably never have discovered, were it not for the incredible stroke of luck that that epiphany represented.

What exact truth his emotions had aligned with in that moment, he wasn’t sure. It was probably either the light that fire could produce and that could guide the way for others or the nurturing warmth it could give off. Either way, it wasn’t something he would ever have had the chance to experience, had he marched on along the path of selfishness.

That led him to another thought: His entire new concept of life was based upon the assumption that he couldn’t cultivate anymore. But now, that assumption was probably no longer true. Something that, surprisingly, he had mixed feelings about.

Sure, it provided him with new and unexpected tools to realize his goals. A higher cultivation could go a long way to help him in his pursuit of a more just world. It also presented a potential pitfall though: Cultivation, the feeling of outrunning death, of understanding the core principles of the world, of increasing one’s grip on reality – it was addicting.

As much as it hurt to admit it, the previous version of Liu Wei had been little more than an addict, always searching for additional ways to fulfill his desire to grow ever stronger. The only reason he had been able to become who he was now was because of the forced withdrawal that his inability to further cultivate represented. Now that this withdrawal was no longer forced, who was to say that he wouldn’t fall back to his old ways?

Liu Wei knew the sweetness of the call and he dreaded the speed at which the thoughts had started crawling back into his head. What if he just focused on cultivation for now? Not forever, no, he didn’t need to abandon his cause. Just for one little century. Or two. He would become stronger, so strong that he wouldn’t have to worry about any opposition as he brought justice to the world. All those hindrances would be irrelevant, nobody in the sect would be able to stand up to him. All he had to do…

No! This couldn’t be allowed to happen. If he allowed himself to fall back into these patterns, he might never find a way out of them again. As it stood, he himself was at risk of becoming his own path’s greatest danger.

He wouldn’t be abandoning anyone. He wouldn’t be abandoning the disciples he had trained, the members he had employed, the allies he had made. The cause was nonnegotiable.

To this end, he would need to create for himself a set of unbreakable rules, a framework to contain his addiction, to prevent it from seizing control over his actions. Something like this couldn’t be easily done though. If he truly wanted these rules to carry weight, he could not touch them at all, once he had formulated them. Otherwise, they might as well not exist. This in mind, Liu Wei got to work.

…

Liu Wei slumped to the ground in exhaustion. Never in his life had he held a negotiation with someone as cutthroat and unyielding as himself just now. It had taken hours upon hours of fighting with his own desires to create a framework of rules in which he could be confident. In the end, the only way he was able to accept it was by continuously keeping in mind that there was no option in which he would cultivate more than this. It was either cultivating while constraining himself or not cultivating at all.

In the end, the set of rules that he had come up with was rather simple:

First, he would never, under any circumstances, prioritize cultivation above any other activity important to his cause and he would never prioritize a solution to any problem that required cultivating if there was any alternative at all.

Cultivation would be a last resort for when everything else he could try had failed and a filler activity for when he couldn’t find any other useful activity.

Second, he would never use any cultivation resources to further his cultivation.

Resources took little time to use and would as such be the perfect way for him to circumvent the first rule. If he allowed himself to use resources at all, he might start to use the time he couldn’t spend cultivating to procure resources for the cause only to then funnel them away to advance his own cultivation.

Ensuring resources were of no personal value because he couldn’t use them was also a good way to ensure he stayed as free of greed as he could. That was important because greed was a pathway to corruption, he needed to look no further than to the pillar families to understand that.

Finally, he needed someone in whom he could confide. Unbreakable rules bore the risk of becoming a burden and Liu Wei wasn’t stupid enough to believe that circumstances would always remain within the scope of his current calculations. Giving himself the right to define exceptions however, was naturally not an option.

As such, he needed a person he could trust to make those decisions for him. They would be allowed to make exceptions on a case-to-case basis or even make change to the rules to account for things Liu Wei had not foreseen. They could also monitor Liu Wei’s behavior and inform him if he exhibited troublesome patterns that escaped his own notice.

Currently, the only person Liu Wei trusted to have both enough integrity and expertise to fulfill this role was Ma Rong. He had proven himself to be a truly honorable and committed person long before Liu Wei had joined his cause and would neither try to take advantage of Liu Wei through this position, nor be intimidated into making any compromises. Liu Wei would have to speak with the old alchemist on this matter.

These rules would be effective immediately and with them in place, Liu Wei could finally relax his worries a little. Slowly, still cautious, he allowed them to be replaced by joy. He was a true cultivator once more.

Diving into his understanding of the Dao, he dissolved the layer of fire qi around the spark that was his epiphany. As the contents merged with his understanding, he could practically see the walls of his horizon widening with new questions to be answered and new truths to be uncovered. His understanding, which had seemed so complete and impossible to expand previously, was no more than a single branch on the massive tree of knowledge that made up the Dao of Fire and all that was beyond it was just waiting to be explored.

At this prospect, all remaining trepidations were shoved aside by enough excitement to make his soul roar with delight.