Of body, mind, and soul, a person can start with any of them or all of them. The only important point is if you can survive long enough to progress. And the order they are listed in isn’t just because it sounds better when said. It also represents the speed you can advance each part.
The body is the easiest. Even without the advanced medical knowledge Jason has access to, the concepts behind improving the body aren’t hard to grasp. You put repetitive stress on certain parts of the body and it might get stronger after a while. Obviously this isn’t true for everything, though it is much more the case once you introduce some kind of mystical energy to help heal any bad outcomes.
The mind always lagged behind in his last life. People just didn’t have as much knowledge available to learn. The only people who ended up practicing this aspect with any regularity were the tacticians and those interested in board games similar to chess and go. Of course, Jason doesn’t have to worry too much about this side of it right now. Just the mathematics he has available to learn would outstrip anything from before.
Finally the soul, both easiest and hardest to train. While all three can bottleneck your progress, the soul is the one that shackles people. You need a combination of taking in novel experiences and mediation. Not cultivation, mind you, but pure meditation. The act of sinking below the distractions of the body and mind is like watering the soul, while experiencing the novelties that the universe has to offer is like fertilizer.
Oddly enough, his current life could almost be seen as the complete opposite of his last one. Most people ignore the body while the mind and soul grow. Just the required learning puts even the most recalcitrant of learners above even relatively powerful cultivators. And the soul? The fact that science allows anyone who desires it the ability to gaze into the mysteries of the cosmos is like a booster shot for the soul. About the only problem, of course, is finding time to meditate, though everyone has some experience with mindfulness because at some point it got added to the school curriculum.
Now, though, he has to decide how to proceed. With his foundation in place, Jason needs to take stock of where he is and plan what comes next. Of course there isn’t some nice scale to judge his progress against. It isn’t like in NeoRealm where he can just look at a number that tells him how strong he is. Rather, he needs to stretch his body, mind, and soul to feel for the limits. And this process is one way in which his previous life had a better handle on things.
The idea of standardized tests and what not had been dropped from schools for a while. Not that they would have helped, anyway. Those types of things don’t test knowledge, but rather memory and the ability to guess. And anyway, they can only test specific pieces of knowledge and not whether you are knowledgeable. While the method from his previous life is vague, someone with a high attainment in cultivating the mind had passed down a simple test.
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Not that the test itself was simple, rather maybe elegant would be a better term for it. The test involves a chant that guides a person into an introspective state of mind while also reaching out to the truths of the Dao. If one isn’t too self-delusional, this will allow a person to feel how small they are compared to what can be known.
The only problem with the test is that it can take a while the first time you use it. As luck would have it though, Jason has already experienced it in the past. Though he admits to himself that it might take a while because of his circumstances that doesn’t stop him from trying it. He sinks into a meditative state of mind and chants in a language unknown to the world. Not that he doesn’t want to use his current language. There just isn’t the correct vocabulary for the chant to work.
Though he doesn’t have long to consider those things as he falls into the enormity of what is and can be known. At first everything feels like a new experience. As if everything he had known was now defunct. As if the very underpinnings of the universe have changed on him. But the deeper he sinks, the more things line up. Math is still math and from there his horizons expand.
As if he was one of the blind men feeling the elephant only to gain sight! While he can’t see the entirety of everything, his new view allows him to notice the paths leading to his previous life and the knowledge that bridges it. Besides that, he can feel the connections to other realms beyond his reach and yet connected through the energies he has cultivated.
Because of his condition in his last life, Jason had learned many things to make up for it and had felt quite knowledgeable. In this life he has gone through a systematic learning experience, putting him a few magnitudes above where he was. Despite that though, with his expanded vision it feels as if he has gone in the opposite direction. Worse yet, those connections hint at other realms of knowledge or equal or greater size to what he has right now.
Jason falls deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole before his alarm forces him to snap out of it. Shocked, he lays out on the floor. He hadn’t been prepared for that, and it almost cost him. While the normal process of judging himself was quick enough, that last bit could have caught him in an unending spiral. Sure, hunger and thirst would have awoken him if the house didn’t alert someone before that. Even so, that would take too much time. Though now that he knows, he can ignore those deeper levels for now. It will take more than his current resources but those areas will open up for him at a later time. He isn’t going to tempt fate though and so pulls himself up and heads back to his capsule to return to NeoRealm.