Chapter 69: Finery Must Not Go Unseen

The Celestial Stars Chart was not a single image. Any Grandmaster could in fact draw the corresponding visualization chart.

Upon entering the Dharma Realm, every martial practitioner could achieve the union of spirit, intent, and qi, and give them form through a brush—using intent to compose the image as well as embodying the corresponding method and the principle hidden within. This was the origin of the name Dharma Realm.

Visualization charts drawn by different Grandmasters for the same technique would differ slightly in spirit and intent, each carrying its author’s personal character. For example, the sword intent within Ding Songyan’s white jade token held no injurious force but carried Tao Wenshu’s unique spirit and intent. That made it usable as a means of identification.

Of course, minor differences in spirit and intent between charts did not affect the actual practice of aperture refinement. The method by which true qi circulated and was refined within the corresponding apertures was fixed. What different spirit-intent could produce were primarily variations in the speed of refinement and the amount of energy consumed.

The Celestial Stars Chart Wang Zhou gave Ding Songyan was drawn by Tao Wenshu herself. And after generations of Brightnight Sect practitioners passing the flame down, Tao Wenshu was the one who had walked furthest along the martial path since the sect’s re-establishment.

Thanking the Grand Elder, Ding Songyan picked a meditation chamber in the corner at random, shut the heavy iron door, lit the oil lamp, and sat cross-legged on the meditation cushion.

This dim and secluded environment was perfectly suited for visualizing the Celestial Stars Chart and the Candlelit Nocturne Chart.

This was also why the Brightnight Sect had placed the visualization chambers underground.

Ding Songyan unrolled the chart in his hands and beheld a vast and brilliant field of stars.

Tao Wenshu had applied pine smoke ink to render the night sky, then dipped her brush in silver powder to dot in one star after another.

The positions did not correspond to any actual constellation. It more closely resembled a miniature of the human body. The Purple Forbidden corresponded to the ancestral aperture, the Supreme Palace corresponded to the Crimson Palace, the Heavenly Market corresponded to the dantian, and the remaining lunar mansions were arrayed at their respective points—360 apertures in total.

Merely looking at the chart, Ding Songyan felt a mysterious tremor pass through multiple apertures in his body.

The Celestial Stars Scripture requires refining 360 apertures of the human body. No wonder it takes two to three years. The Ten Bodies, Hundred Hands, Blameless Profound Art only needs 49 apertures, and most other arts in the scripture repository are under a hundred... My Chaos constitution has more. Other than the ordinary human apertures, it includes extraperiphery and variable apertures, probably over a thousand in all... Ding Songyan had not yet counted exactly how many apertures his Chaos constitution encompassed.

He closed his eyes and attempted to sketch out in his mind the most essential star in the Celestial Stars Chart—the Purple Forbidden Star.

As that silver-bright star gradually took form, the dark true qi flowing through his ancestral aperture at the brow was stimulated. It trembled lightly, and began to circulate through the aperture following some distinctive principle along an arcane path.

In only a dozen or so breaths, the ancestral aperture at the brow was suffused with brilliant radiance.

One aperture refined.

Under normal circumstances, it would take a beginning practitioner two to three days, sometimes longer, to refine a single aperture. But Ding Songyan’s apertures had already been refined by the Chaos force and long since stabilized. What he was doing now was using Manifesting the Way and its Virtue to encompass the refinement method of the Celestial Stars Scripture. That naturally made it far faster.

But this also presented a problem. Once Ding Songyan stopped visualizing the Purple Forbidden star, the brilliant radiance in his ancestral aperture would disperse on its own, reverting to darkness.

For this kind of refinement to become an instinctive capacity of the aperture—one that appears the moment I will it—would take at least two days. That’s roughly the same as a normal Brightnight Sect disciple refining an aperture. With the entire Celestial Stars Chart, that would probably take two to three years... Encompassing and deriving in this way holds no real meaning for me. I should be putting more effort into aperture forging, meridian condensation, viscera installation, and void aperture lodgment...

It’s not like I can pull out the visualization chart for a look before every battle engagement in order to activate the sect’s true qi. And I just rely on the Brightnight Sect’s martial techniques? Ding Songyan sank into thought.

In the past month or so, he had already clarified that the critical step of entering the Dharma Realm was called void aperture lodgment. The Great Proliferation Realm was divided into three parts—aperture forging, meridian condensation, and viscera installation—though the sequence of these three was not strict. Some heterogeneous apertures could only be forged after viscera installation, while others required immediate meridian condensation and qi-circulation the moment they were forged to prevent them from gradually dispersing. Only then could other apertures be forged.

As his thoughts drifted, Ding Songyan was suddenly reminded of something.

Made instinctive... training while walking, training while lying down... Both involve instinct, a common thread...

Wait—could I use that secret method Yan Changqing taught me, the Celestial Heart Art, to deceive myself? To make the body treat the aperture refinement method as an instinct, so that when I want to use it, it simply manifests naturally...

That would consume some vital essence and lifespan, but certainly far less than ’training while walking, training while lying down.’ It’s essentially forced memorization. If I can stabilize my Grandmaster peak realm in three to five years’ time, I’ll have over 120 years of lifespan to spare. It’s a manageable cost...

Right, I can’t do this repeatedly—only for methods that are exceptionally useful. For now, limit it to the Celestial Stars Scripture and the Candlelit Nocturne Sutra. I’ll cultivate everything else the normal way...

Just yesterday, Ding Songyan had pulled from the shelves a book of jianghu records left by the Brightnight Sect’s Grandmasters two generations ago. It mentioned the Sage-Severing Way and the self-deceiving, heaven-deceiving Celestial Heart Art. Ding Songyan suspected the secret method Yan Changqing had taught him was the first half of the Celestial Heart Art.

He had not yet had a chance to read that book’s other contents, intending to save them for evening reading.

With his plan in place, Ding Songyan immediately set to work.

His first step was not to deceive himself, but to use the hazy "seed" in his sea of consciousness to split his mind in two—one half carefully examining the Celestial Stars Chart, the other half diligently performing the visualization.

In this way, Ding Songyan no longer needed to memorize and refine one aperture at a time.

Within his sea of consciousness that was plunged in vast darkness, one brilliant star after another took rapid shape in accordance with the visualization chart he simultaneously viewed, assembling into constellations.

In merely the time it took to drink two cups of tea, the dark expanse of his sea of consciousness transformed into a tranquil and dreamlike starry sky.

Amid the glittering starlight, dark true qi flowed through, circulated through, and refined every aperture in Ding Songyan’s body—gradually making them clear and luminous.

When all 360 apertures were thus transformed, the dark true qi itself rapidly changed, converting in an instant into radiant starlight.

Ding Songyan’s eyes snapped open. Their dark, fathomless depths reflected a sky full of stars.

He lightly pushed out a palm to one side, letting the brilliant and lucid Myriad Star True Qi pour outward.

The palm landed against the blue-gray stone wall of the meditation chamber in silence, sinking into it without a sound.

Ding Songyan withdrew his right hand and saw a clear, complete, deep handprint pressed into the stone.

I’ve mastered Myriad Star True Qi in the time to drink two cups of tea... Ding Songyan’s elation was immediately followed by a wave of exhaustion, as though he had gone a full day and night without sleep.

He assessed his condition and found that the split-consciousness memorization used to assist the aperture refinement had consumed mental energy, not vital essence or lifespan. What came next, the self-deception, would be what affected the latter two.

Taking advantage of the state in which every aperture in his body was aligned with the Celestial Stars Chart, Ding Songyan gathered his two-halved minds back into one, then with complete focus began reciting the specific-rhythm incantation within his sea of consciousness.

"To deceive others, first deceive yourself. The false can become true. Believe, and it exists..."

As his sea of consciousness shifted and transformed, Ding Songyan used the incantation and the art to continuously "inform" himself: the current state of his apertures was one of his body’s original states—one that could be manifested without recollection or reattempt—and the trigger for manifesting this state was visualizing the Purple Forbidden star within the Celestial Stars Chart.

Recitation after recitation, the image of Ding Songyan within each thought gradually became suffused with starlight, internalizing it all as instinct.

He did not know how long it took. When he finally finished, his head throbbed, his stomach turned with nausea, and his body felt so light he seemed to float, as though Ren Youyang had dragged him to drink at the pleasure house for seven days straight.

He composed himself, and after nearly an hour of sitting meditation did he recover.

He could not tell precisely exactly how much vital essence and lifespan had been consumed. Based on his physical state, his initial estimate was two to three years.

Next, Ding Songyan committed the Purple Forbidden star from the Celestial Stars Chart to memory by normal means, to serve as the catalyst for manifesting Myriad Star True Qi.

With his Grandmaster realm to draw on, a quarter-hour of focused memorization and a quarter-hour of repeated attempts were enough to fix that star completely in his memory. It was now ready to appear at will.

Ding Songyan snuffed the oil lamp, opened the iron door, and walked out of the meditation chamber rubbing his aching temples, yawning without any care for appearances.

After returning the Celestial Stars Chart to its place, he walked slowly back to the ground floor.

"How did it go?" Grand Elder Wang Zhou looked at him with eager, expectant eyes.

Ding Songyan smiled and said, "Done."

"Done with what?" Wang Zhou’s mind failed to catch up for a moment.

Did he use Manifesting the Way and its Virtue to refine one aperture from the Celestial Stars Chart?

That was under two hours; other people needed two to three days!

Ding Songyan gave a soft laugh.

"I’ve mastered Myriad Star True Qi."

"What?" The jianghu-seasoned Wang Zhou was completely at a loss.

Ding Songyan did not explain. Within his sea of consciousness, the Purple Forbidden star took swift shape, and the ancestral aperture at his brow trembled in response.

He slapped a palm at Wang Zhou.

Wang Zhou instinctively met it with his own.

The moment their palms made contact, the Grand Elder leaped up from his chair and blurted out, "You’ve refined every aperture in the Celestial Stars Chart?"

True qi this vast and sweeping, this star-bright and luminous, could not have come from refining only a handful of apertures. That would still be thin and mixed through with the body’s own ordinary qi!

"Mainly through Manifesting the Way and its Virtue," Ding Songyan replied with modest restraint.

"Under two hours... It took me two and a half years." Wang Zhou’s expression shifted through several registers as he let out a helpless sigh. "So this is the Chaos path... One of a kind in all the jianghu—no, there’s also Demoness Ji."

In this elder’s experience, there were indeed martial arts that could derive the techniques of others; for instance, the Yin-Yang Sect’s Boundless Forms Art. But to do it to the degree Ding Songyan had just demonstrated, Wang Zhou knew of no one besides Ji Hanyi, who shared the Chaos constitution.

Watching Wang Zhou’s expression and hearing his words of wonder, Ding Songyan felt a surge of deep satisfaction.

He had just done this deliberately to show off.

If finery goes out only at night, it’s no different from returning home rich and telling no one.

If I don’t show off in front of the people who know my secret—what is the point of cultivating at all?

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