The Dao is originally mysterious beyond mystery, and the world changes unpredictably; how could the Dao be any different? The secular world undergoes countless transformations, and so does the Dao!
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This time, during my cultivation, I realized that if I recklessly tried to draw the celestial energy into my body after leaving the Xuan Huang Flag, I'd probably end up in disaster. The thought alone made my skin crawl. I had once believed that after entering the Dao, everything would be smooth sailing—how naive I was!
I've been cultivating for half a month now, and looking back, I realized that I don't even fully understand what the Dao is. Being able to enter the Dao shows that my luck is good, but the road ahead will undoubtedly be full of obstacles. The worst part is that I don't even know who to seek advice from.
The next day at school, I flipped through a few Daoist books, but without clear guidance on how to continue my cultivation, I didn't dare to proceed on my own. The Xuan Huang Flag constantly absorbs the celestial energy around me, refines it, and channels it into my dantian. Even if I don’t intentionally cultivate, I still make progress. I thought to myself, maybe I should first understand what the Dao really is.
The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth; the named is the mother of all things.
Sigh! I never properly studied classical Chinese, and after reading the first chapter of the Dao De Jing countless times, I still couldn’t quite grasp what the Dao really is. It’s truly embarrassing. I wonder if the Chinese teacher would understand? I almost had the impulse to ask her, but in the end, I decided against it.
I spent the whole day reading, and vaguely came to understand that the Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to all things. After the Dao gives rise to all things, it continues to exist within the very things it created, as the foundation and essence of all existence. The Dao is omnipresent, it fills the universe and is within everything. While the Dao is present in everything, it is not something tangible; it cannot be seen, heard, or touched. It is the essential nature of all things in Heaven and Earth.
I thought to myself: if all things are born from the Dao, and everything bears the mark of the Dao, then the Dao itself must also change, as everything in the world is in constant flux. But no matter how the Dao changes, it remains the Dao.
So, as a Cultivator, if I’m to sense the changes in the Dao, shouldn’t I follow the ways of the ancients?
If we were to compare the Dao to a road, imagine you have an ancient city map from a century ago—would it still be useful to you today? Some cities update their maps yearly, so you can imagine how much things change! Change is inevitable!
The Dao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things...
I began to wonder: if one were to cultivate when the Dao gives birth to One, would that be easier than cultivating in the process where One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to all things? If this is the case, then it’s clear why there were many successful Cultivators in ancient times, but there are so few today. Without a map, if you have one road, two roads, or three roads to reach your destination, it’s far easier than having a thousand paths leading to the same place. The difficulty is obvious.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Suddenly, I had an intuition: some Daoist books should only be referenced, not copied verbatim. If I focus too much on the cultivation methods of the ancients, my progress might be slower than expected.
It seems that cultivating the Dao also requires keeping up with the times! Infinite longevity!
Once I understood this, I felt much more at ease. The Dao is vast, with countless paths, but I’ve already entered the gate of the Dao through the Xuan Huang Flag, so why worry about other cultivation methods?
I’ve figured out many things, but today my cousin, Zhang Fuhong, seemed to have a puzzled look on his face. He kept sneaking glances at me, which made me very curious.
On the way to school that morning, he asked me, "Aren’t you going on the trip? Who signed you up?"
I lazily replied, "Who knows?"
On the way home that evening, he asked again, "Are you sure you don’t know who signed you up and paid the fee?"
What’s going on with this kid? When did he start caring about me so much? I answered, "I don’t know, I just don’t know. Heh."
"Then why did Zhang Yu sign you up?" My cousin suddenly asked.
What? Zhang Yu signed me up? How could she possibly have done that? No way… she shouldn’t even know I wrote that love letter. I deliberately wrote it in a style that would obscure my handwriting. Could she have figured it out?
"Uh… well… hehe, maybe Zhang Yu felt sorry for me or thought it’d be a shame if I didn’t go… or maybe she just thought I was handsome, haha!" I laughed it off and casually responded to him.
Before I knew it, the National Day holiday was just around the corner, and my classmates had discussed the trip several times. I decided to join them. My deskmate, Wu Xiaoman, seemed to have recovered from the shock of the corpse incident, and her complexion had improved. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off about her. She seemed even colder than before. She used to give me disdainful looks, but now she barely acknowledged my existence, and it seemed she was the same with everyone else.
During this time, I’d been so busy with my cultivation and studying that I had made quite a few blunders in class. Now, the teachers had mostly stopped paying attention to me. As long as I didn’t disrupt the class, they didn’t bother with my performance anymore. It seemed I had thoroughly disappointed them. But not the English teacher.
Our English teacher, a young and pretty woman who had just graduated from university, was always fashionable and lively. She was full of passion for teaching, and she was one of the more energetic and attractive teachers in our school.
Her name was Lv Yanling, and she had called me to her office several times. She told me that, as a teacher, she couldn’t give up on any student. Her responsibility was to educate and nurture, not just to teach the curriculum.
I felt a headache coming on.
When I was younger, I had learned the "Yin-Yang" talismans incredibly fast, but these 26 English letters? I just couldn’t get them right. I personally thought that talismans were harder to learn than English, but I just couldn’t figure it out.
Every time I faced the English teacher, I nodded my head like a little bird pecking at rice. As I nodded, I would take in every detail of her from head to toe. For the first time, I realized that women could actually be quite attractive. I found myself interested in women. I began to observe my classmates more closely, looking at this one and that one, and I realized that only my deskmate, Wu Xiaoman, and Zhang Yu were really worth looking at.
I began to observe Wu Xiaoman and Zhang Yu carefully, and from then on, aside from cultivating the Dao, I also had a new pastime: observing them during morning exercises.
To make up for my previous mistakes, I had already gone through all the textbooks from my first and second year. Once I was confident that I understood everything, I slipped back into my usual carefree study routine, never once thinking about self-studying for the third year or university-level courses...