PtM 16 - Chapter 18: Painting Rivers and Lakes

3/4 this week! Woooo!

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Immortal White’s research and training facility occupied an unusually large plot of land on the training floor of the Heartforge Realm’s jade mountain. It was four times bigger than any other facility and had several more layers of defence than any other building, hands down.

The place was filled with every room that could be imagined and was veritable maze of marble corridors, marble flooring, and marble ceiling. There was no orienting yourself, even with Immortal White guiding the way. Cha Ming lost all concept of up and down, left and right, and inside and outside. In fact, he could swear he’d seen a garden from the outside–

And suddenly, there was. There were rosebushes on either side of Cha Ming now, and grass that grew in curious tangles. Every type of tree imaginable was planted here, and all indoors. But was that statement accurate? Because now there was no ceiling, only a clear open sky.

“This place is what you make of it,” Immortal White said, picking up a flower and breathing in. The flower became a white mist that vanished upon fulfilling its purpose. “It is not an illusion, but a constructed reality that depends on the people inhabiting it. It is very useful for all kinds of training, and much cheaper than redecorating every other day.”

“What if two people want different things?” Cha Ming asked. He noticed a bookshelf that simply would not go away despite his best efforts. It stood out in this garden where no other furniture was present, not even a bench.

He tried to transform it into something else – anything else –but the best he could manage was a flower-patterned bookshelf that contained the same books.

“There are set objects in here alongside the variable. The pattern must accept them and work around them.” Immortal White picked up a book, leafed through it, and put it back. “As for conflicts?” He looked towards a rosebush, and suddenly, it was burning. The roses didn’t burn but grew alongside the flames, creating a pleasant duality of colors, smell, fire and beauty. “It really depends on how badly each person wants them, I suppose. As the master of this place, my will supersedes all.” He flicked his sleeve, and the garden became dust in an endless desert landscape. “But enough of that. Let’s talk about you. What do you intend?”

Cha Ming frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I’m asking what you’d like my help with,” Immortal White said. “I’m a trainer, not a babysitter. For example, you practice staff arts. Did you want to know how to materialize them into qi attacks? Do you want to create multiple overlapping staves that complement your battle arts? Or do you prefer using talismans? I heard you do that a lot, albeit poorly.”

A likeness of Cha Ming appeared not far away. It was summoning a flood dragon composed entirely of talismans chained together in perfect harmony. Most of them were mundane, but he saw that 1080 of the talismans were painted on solid slates of bone and could be reused continuously. “It’s not the best of paths if you want to save money, to be sure. But talisman artists are legitimately powerful entities when they know what they’re doing and put together reusable talisman frameworks.

“I’m not sure,” Cha Ming confessed. “I was hoping to get some advice. There are far too many choices.”

Immortal White froze, and so did Cha Ming’s double. His talisman dragon, which currently breathing living ice flames, shattered and collapsed. “No.” Immortal White said, and suddenly, he was in front of Cha Ming and pressing at his chest with a bony white finger. It was an immortal’s finger, so it wasn’t even as physically strong as Cha Ming’s muscle-empowering realm body, but the finger was filled with an intent that could shatter bones and send him to the underworld.

“No.” The finger shoved him into a spatial rift, and the next thing he knew, he was underground, in a tomb that would keep him sealed for all time. Aeons passed, and by the time he got his bearings, he was in a crystalline maze that filled his mind with an endless chain of illusions.

“No!” Cha Ming tumbled in a bizarre world that contained houses and people and greenery mixed with ancient treasures and alchemical ingredients. Some of these ingredients combined to create an unholy monster that pounced at him with vicious claws and massive jaws. Then everything shattered and faded away, revealing a dusty, desolate landscape that was blow away by an azure wind, leaving nothing but blank whiteness.

“If you want someone to tell you what to do and receive and follow instructions like a novice cook in a small-town restaurant, then go see Immortal King Shadefire,” Immortal White said. “He is a competent instructor for that sort of thing.” The white-robed, white-haired immortal bent over and picked up a handful of white sand, which trickled through his fingers and became golden flecks that formed runes as they blew off towards a sad sunset. The image caused Cha Ming’s heart to ache and threatened to tear is soul apart. At the last minute, it relented, and Cha Ming found himself back in original desert.

“A competent, said,” Immortal White continued. “Not excellent. He teaches people to do what’s been done. But that has never been and will never be the way of the truly powerful.” The immortal stomped his foot, and white lotuses appeared all across the desert and filled his entire vision. They were mesmerizing, whether it was their scent or their appearance, but they were also deadly and sharp as swords. They flew in a soft formation that suddenly grabbed Cha Ming and began to squeeze like a giant’s fist – only to crumble to silver dust that covered the land in a strange but deadly silver pattern.

“And what is the way of the truly powerful?” Cha Ming asked.

“Creation,” Immortal White said simply. “Originalcreation. Every technique starts from somewhere, obviously, but that’s the beginning, not the end. A Daoist finds something unique or something powerful, like a blazing morning sun, and decides to capture in a jar. Or a swordsman, obsessed with the Jade Moon, channels the laws of moonlight into his blade and makes a personal style with seven swords that takes him to the pinnacle of the Immortal King Realm.

“Those that follow are merely copycats, Clear Sky. They will never know what it is to be powerful. They think they have mastered the many arts they practice, but they will never truly belong to them.

“I have seen many things, Clear Sky. There are Immortal Emperors out there that can shatter a world with a single palm. There are Immortal Kings that can send you to the underworld with a single finger. There are immortals – not even immortal kings or emperors – that can sing entire gardens into existence that immortal kings, which should be supreme existences in comparison, cannot enter without their permission.

“Personalized things have power. That is why your cultivation technique, while crude, defies common sense. I’d give it a law- stitching rank evaluation, and it’s not even finished.” He snapped his fingers, and thousands of flying swords appeared. They were arranged in five separate wheels that came crashing down over a terrible fiend. The shards of the swords became dust, and the dust formed an incomparably sharp wind that gathered into a six-fingered black palm print and came crashing down and obliterated everything.

“There are countless techniques in existence, and the universe has existed for aeons. During our little walk, I’ve shown you about a hundred of them.”

Cha Ming frowned. He’d only spotted a dozen or so different techniques, and each of them was extremely overbearing. “Now that I think about it, Godking Heavenbind never asked me to learn anything new. He taught me techniques to strengthen and temper my body and channel strength, but the most he ever did was give me pointers on how to resolve a problem with my Clear Rune Arts.”

“Godking Heavenbind is a powerful god, so he knows what he’s talking about,” Immortal White said. “He’s just a sliver away from the immortal emperor level but keeps accumulating because he strives for perfection. When he teaches students, he focuses on fundamentals, because everything else will fall into places given enough time. Fundamentals are also something compatible with all paths. You cannot go wrong by teaching them.

“To some, that comes across as lazy – but it is actually those who say this who are lazy! They do not understand that we are instructors, not minders or babysitters. We cannot help someone clarify their Dao, but we cannot choose it for them!”

Cha Ming had a thought then. “If you were to give me one of these unoriginal solutions, what would you recommend?”

“Oh? You want free advice?” Immortal White said. “No skin off my back if you take it, I suppose. Let’s see… you have the Savage Deity War Staff and have assembly-type arts. The most logical thing for you to do would be to teach you Ten-Thousand-Staff Maze to constrain your enemy, God Suppression Staff Seal as an ultimate technique, and the Five Staves Law Breaker technique, which can be used to quickly shatter defences, seals, and obstacles. I’d wager that if I gave it my all, I could create a pretty nice copy of Sun Wukong minus the Buddhist arts. You’d do decently in the final Heartforge Realm Rankings.”

“But I wouldn’t get the top rank, would I?” Cha Ming asked.

The corners of Immortal White’s mouth pulled up into a smile. “No. No you wouldn’t.”

Cha Ming took a bit of time to compose his thoughts. He looked around at the familiar whiteness. He thought of a scene, and it appeared before him. His likeness was fighting with a staff with all his divine abilities summoned, facing off against a nine-headed serpent.

Ten thousand staves appeared in the air and pummelled the hydra continuously, pinning it down and constraining its movements. Cha Ming pummeled it with one vicious staff strike after another, but it was unable to defend due to the ten thousand staves constraining and distracting it.

It was also extremely boring, to the point that Cha Ming tapped his finger, and the illusion shattered “I don’t know,” he finally answered.

“Then that is my first lesson as your instructor,” Immortal White said. “This place will let you play around with ideas as you please. Take a day. Take a year. It matters not. His body faded away until Cha Ming could no longer feel his presence. In fact, he could feel that the immortal was intentionally looking away, wanting nothing to do with the process, and actively ensuring his privacy.

All that remained was a world of whiteness and silence, and Cha Ming’s own thoughts, memories, and beliefs.

***

Strictly speaking, cultivation could be split up into three parts: cultivating body, cultivating energy, and cultivating spirit.

Body cultivation was much like Cha Ming had been doing for the past 4 years by constantly restressing and restricting his body to accommodate more energy.

Energy cultivation was split into two parts: cultivating energy and cultivating law. Both could be used separately, but in the end, law and energy belonged together and were strongest together.

Spiritual cultivation was also split into two parts: directly cultivating the soul and spiritual strength and cultivating the heart. Many things were involved in cultivating the heart, including auras, personality, and inclinations. The slightest slipup could lead to the birth of a heart demon that forever obstructed one’s path to advancement. In the worst of cases, even the purest angel could become a devil.

Cha Ming was currently cultivating his heart, and the room he was in was perfect for this purpose. In it were no natural objects, smells, sights, or sounds. Simultaneously, all of these things could exist as he willed them.

He sat there, observing as thoughts rose up from his sea of consciousness, manifesting themselves in the brief emptiness before fading back into oblivion. Some were useful, and some were useless, but he acknowledged both of them whenever they appeared before immediately releasing them. Detachment was key, and so was observation.

Most of the thoughts that showed themselves were recent memories. Some were insights on techniques, which he set aside for another time, while others were everyday thoughts and occurrences. Sometimes, however, older memories were brought to light. Some were mundane, but many were painful.

Each of the thoughts that came up were relevant in some way or another. It was difficult to say how or when they’d come up, only that they contributed to the ceaseless chatter inside Cha Ming’s mind and spirit.

He watched them as they surfaced, until one day, none came.

It was in that emptiness that he began to dream an unstained dream from the core of his being. He spread out his mind and soul like tiny seeds that sprouted in the barren plane.

This was not focused meditation. The goal was to maximize options and see what might develop absent his usual worries and his soul’s terrible condition. Only in this way could he spy upon the many possibilities for his future cultivation.

Most seeds sprouted and faded. They did not have the potential to grow into anything useful or real. The nourishment each seed received was proportional to his interests and the strength of his emotional attachment to them.

Dreams came into and out of existence until eventually, there were dozens of different paths laid out before him. All of them were legitimate and had their advantages and disadvantages.

My qi arts are pretty much non-existent, Cha Ming concluded when he compared the imagined possibilities and his current self, who wasn’t doing so well in the law trials. I have Descent of the Five Sovereigns, and nothing else.

My talisman creation arts are mundane and useless at this level. I have no way to apply laws or techniques, and I have no preferred tools. Immortal White said to focus on what I like to do, but do I even have any hobbies? Huxian has his cooking and a passing interest in interior design. I, on the other hand, have nothing. I’ve been doing nothing but training over the past few time-accelerated decades.

Fortunately, the immortal had left a few hints that Cha Ming could use to piece together his own path. Every technique Immortal White had shown him had a focus with which to serve as his basis. Staff arts were a possibility, and so were sword formations and talismans.

Every cultivator had a theme. For Wei Longshen, it was sound and music and souls. For Xing Tianlong, it was his spear and shield, lightning and fire, yin and yang. For Huxian, it was spatial constructs and the eight directions.

Cha Ming needed a theme. His staff could be one. A soul bound treasure seemed like a good choice. Demons, for example, based their entire fighting style and profession on their bloodline and demon weapons.

Then again, he didn’t only have a staff. The staff was just a part of his greater treasure, the Clear Sky Brush, which could manifest in many forms.

He could pick talismans. Immortal White had been very clear about that, and the Clear Sky Brush was a good way to make that happen. His assembly-type runes were also very compatible with this path.

Talismans, staves, and swords. Perfectly legitimate fighting styles. He should be excited just thinking about them, and yet…

“They’re all boring,” Cha Ming said with a sigh. He flicked at each of these three paths in turn reducing them to pure white mist.

These options were not original, he decided. They were only copying.

All of them would also require him to make templates over and over again. And after all the training he’d been doing, it seemed like a lot of busywork he’d rather not do.

By considering what one didn’t want, it was possible to see what one truly wanted. Cha Ming realized he didn’t want rigidity; he wanted flexibility. He didn’t want to be locked in; he wanted to be able to create and expand his technique endlessly.

Structure was fine. Everything in the world needed structure. But if the occasion called from him to crush a witch with a house or to summon a wondrous garden for a dinner party, he wanted to be able to do either one on demand without need for preparation. That was the level of flexibility and potential he desired.

This could not be done with talismans. It couldn’t be done with staves or swords either. Flexible creation demanded a focus on the basics with endless combinations and configurations.

Now I only need to figure out how I’ll be creating, Cha Ming thought. Weapons are useless, so a staff is a no go. A sword… well, technically a sword is useful. Can’t I just do like Huxian and carve reality to make what I want to happen?

A cauldron is also useful, but concocting takes a lot of time. I could use a hammer to create a lot of different shapes though.

He found flames especially attractive, especially given the nature of his Iridescent Grandmist Flames. He willed a likeness of himself to appear and summoning curtains of living fire that formed giant phoenixes and dragons and entire forests in every burning element.

Entire worlds came into being, and rivers and lakes and mountains, all made of flame. It was like a master painter had decided that fire was his ink and the skies were his canvas, and that his works would exceed all in creation.

It was like… it was like…

“A painting.” The Clear Sky Brush rushed out from his spiritual sea and smacked him upside the head. “Right. Paint is most flexible.” He scratched his chin and began to wonder about the possibilities. “Paint is muchmore flexible than fire. Different flames can be combined and arranged, sure, but isn’t it just easier to gather hundreds or even thousands of inks and blend them as needed to create whatever picture comes to mind?”

He thought Descent of the Five Sovereigns, which he could now paint in a hurry if he expended enough ink, Grandmist especially. He’d taken an original technique, then channeled its essence into a quick painting. If he could do that with other things…

Cha Ming held out his hand, and the Clear Sky Brush hopped into it like an obedient pet. He channeled his qi into it and pulled talisman ink from the Clear Sky World and began to paint. Cultivators were quick, so it only took two seconds to create a small turtle and two more to paint a companion sparrow.

Each of the two paintings was a complete entity. Cha Ming discovered that he didn’t need to control every individual piece but could control the painting as a whole.

The turtle and the sparrow began to do battle. The turtle snapped at the sparrow and slapped waves of inky water at the sparrow, while the sparrow fought back with sharp claws and lightning-filled wing sweeps. It was all very entertaining and comical.

Since he had more than enough attention to spare, Cha Ming painted grasslands that reached up and coiled around the two creatures, immobilizing them. He then painted a storm of swords that plunged down into the earth, shattering the turtle’s protective shell.

He painted an azure wind that threatened to blow them away and entrained the fragments of shattered sword.

The sparrow was helpless against the wind, but the turtle wouldn’t give in. It spat out a glob of ink and formed chains that strapped the sparrow to its shell so they could weather the storm together. That was true companionship! That was true friendship!

“Retrieving the ink is easy.” Cha Ming said, tapping the Clear Sky brush to the grass. The ink was pulled back into the Clear Sky World, ready to be used again, and only a bit of ink was lost in the exchange. “That’s my answer then. I don’t need talismans. I can directly paint anything I want. I can use the Clear Sky Brush as a focus, and my qi as a medium. Paint will be an amplifier.

“If I want swords, I’ll paint swords. If I want turtles, I’ll paint an army of turtles. If I want a river…” He swept his brush and painted a long stream that extended hundreds of meters out. “I’ll paint a river. And if I want lakes…” He painted several more rivers, then had them flow together until they filled up a large area. “I’ll combine rivers into lakes.

I’ll call it the River Lake Brush Art, and the more I practice, the better I’ll get, and the larger rivers I’ll be able to paint. It won’t be long until I can paint rivers just as large as the original lakes, which I’ll then combine to create seas and oceans.

“With a single brush stroke, I’ll be able to create not only the lake water, but also the soil beneath it, and the sky above it, and the moon reflecting on its surface. I’ll be able to paint every living thing inside it, and they won’t have false life, but true life!

It was a dream. A concept. An idea. He had a brush, and it was the brush of creation. So why not use it? If you had such an amazing divine tool, why not use it?

Cha Ming was quite excited about the idea and began to paint many things. And the more he painted, the more excited he grew.

He knew from experience that it was possible to make powerful paintings or poems that could rival talismans – why not use them to complement his staff arts while he did battle physically? Could he not split the Clear Sky Brush and the Savage Deity War Staff? Doing so would only slightly weaken either one, so the answer was yes, of course he could.

Painting was everything he wanted. It was flexible, and with the Clear Sky Staff as a focus, he could paint anywhere within his domain, even ten kilometers away. He could paint with normal ink or alchemical ink, and he could paint normal strokes or integrate runes into their structure.

And in the future, if he saw something impressive and thought it would make for a good technique… he wouldn’t need to copy it or learn it, he could simply paint his impression of it and improve upon it.

This was his path to power, and the more he thought about it, the more he loved it.

In theory, it was a wonderful thought, but in practice, he saw a problem. The first of his paintings had begun to go drippy and unstable. Entire trees and packs of wolves were slowly transforming into puddles of blending ink that would be a pain to separate.

Cha Ming was not dejected or disappointed. He was just starting off with this idea, and it was inevitable that there would be setbacks. There had to be ways around this. After all, he could already paint talismans and formations that were permanent. Paintings, even. There must be a way to use paint to do battle!

Normal paintings have canvases, Cha Ming thought as he inspected the original turtle and sparrow, which were now a little soggy and limp. The problem with liquids is that they’re unstable. I could freeze them, but then they wouldn’t be mobile, and that would defeat the purpose of using paint to begin with.

“What I need… is a canvas,” Cha Ming decided. “A canvas that will stabilize the ink but not dry it.” He summoned a canvas from the Clear Sky World and forced the turtle painting onto it. The painting immediately stabilized. In fact, it was too stable. It was still runny, but it was no longer deteriorating.

How interesting, Cha Ming thought, poking and prodding the painting. He flicked it with the Clear Sky Brush, and the painting popped out. The turtle was fine. It was not decomposing. Its ink was also completely stable and locked into place. He could not retrieve any ink from it.

Curious, Cha Ming cut off his connection to another painting, one of a small mountain stream.  The stream fell to the floor in a blue, silver, and gray puddle with flecks of red and gold.

He sent the Clear Sky Brush over and retrieved the ink, which he used to paint another stream. This one, he threw onto a much larger canvas and felt its nature change. Once again, he tapped the brush to the canvas, and the stream came pouring out. It was a completely stable and realistic painting of water and rocks and reflected sunlight.

Binding a painting to a canvas finalizes the painting and locks in the ink. A similar thing happens when a talisman is finalized and its ink fuses with the paper. Storing paintings on a canvas is not a bad idea, but what I really need is a way to ensure that the ink doesn’t degrade and collapse and maintains its form. I wonder…

He focused on the small sparrow that remained and sent out his creation domain. He focused on the creation runes of Assembly, Mending, and Accumulation. Typically, he used these runes to facilitate assembly. He’d done so while painting because it made the process so much easier.

Now, he tried a different approach. He channeled the power of these runes to prevent their opposite. Why couldn’t his domain be used to heal and sustaining the things he created and grant them some degree of permanence?

His mind shook as he suddenly understood a deeper functioning of his runes, and something like a rule was set in place. The runny paintings in the range of his domain began self-repairing. Most of them, at least. His first paintings were unaffected.

The domain was vastly different form what he used to cultivate. It couldn’t gather much energy for him, as most of it was channeled directly into the paintings to enforce their stability and repair them. In other words, there was a limit to how many paintings he could manifest using only his domain. And set paintings, like the river and the turtle that moved around, required the attention of his soul and part of his domain’s influence.

In other words, he would not be able to mass produce paintings and dump them onto the battlefield. At most, he could create an army of countless weaker paintings that flooded the entire range of his domain.

Concept proven, Cha Ming retracted most of his ink and began to think of the many different possibilities. Painting pictures was not like painting talismans, but they were not completely unrelated. For example, he could still paint out temporary talismans, or even parts of them. But that was only a small part of what he could accomplish.

Runes were also useful. He painted out a second lightning sparrow, but this one he infused with runes of wind and lightning and various concepts he’d accumulated over the years. It took longer to paint the sparrow, but it was substantially stronger.

The talisman artist that Immortal White showed me used a solid base for the dragon’s spine, Cha Ming thought. The rest was created. There must be a reason he didn’t assemble the entire dragon. The problems were many, but the solutions were probably also many. He would need to figure these things out as he went.

Cha Ming executed one last test. He performed another tiny version of Descent of the Five Sovereigns. The five sovereigns appeared and unleashed their attacks at his command. Normally, that’s where the technique ended, but under the influence of this strange new domain ability, the technique persisted. It wasn’t perfect, but the residual energy inside the technique was enough for them to execute another attack at half strength, or to fly out and self-detonate.

“This is the perfect solution,” Cha Ming concluded. “I don’t lack for close combat or swift techniques. I lack ranged attacks, large techniques, and persistent effects that I can use to complement my close combat fighting style.

“I lack flexibility. Smacking people with a stick is easy, but what if I need of a cage or a giant mug of hot chocolate?

“My painting style will be the River Lake Brush Art. I will create smaller paintings that combine into greater ones, with the eventual goal of painting oceans and even entire worlds with a single stroke. As for my canvas… my domain will be my canvas. The sky will be my canvas. I’ll call it the Sky Canvas Domain Technique.”

It was an idea, and one with great potential. Magical painting was probably not very strong when one first started, but as one accumulated ink and experiences.

The idea had limitless potential. It was not something he had to do, but something he wanted to do. And most importantly, the idea was his idea. His own direction. His own Dao.