Chương 66: Chapter 50 — What is a Hole?

Lin Che skimmed the first few pages of the Boundless Intake Sutra, as they were mostly filler fluff designed to give wider context to the reader. Wider context, which, as much as he didn't have and seemed important, consisted of names he didn't recognise — he would have to send this excerpt to someone much more knowledgeable than him in this regard. He made a mental note to go back to the first few pages and share them with Xu Fang.

The next few pages listed a couple of prerequisites, of which Lin Che, and, honestly any cultivator would have been able to tick off: the technique assumed a practitioner with established pathways, a functional foundation method for Qi circulation prior to this one, and, notably, a body with some degree of resistance to foreign Qi intrusion.

For Lin Che, the Hollow Bell Purification Art made his body inhospitable to foreign Qi by design, which, he supposed, was meant to act as a sort of filter for when his body accepted anything and everything around him into it. The Boundless Intake Sutra required its practitioner to open every pore simultaneously for outside absorption, whilst the Hollow Bell was meant to eradicate anything too foreign. If he had been blessed with a different purification art, things may have been easier.

The text addressed his thoughts in a section titled On the Question of Resistance and Invitation. The body that has learned to refuse will not easily learn to welcome. The cultivator who carries both must understand that resistance and absorption are not opposites, but instead neighbours two sides of the same coin. He kept reading off his phone. The first major concept the technique introduced was 'the hole'. A hole, as concerns this method, is not an absence.

The common error of early practitioners is to conceive of a hole as a void from which something has been removed. This understanding produces a cultivator who attempts to empty themselves in order to receive, which is both incorrect and dangerous. A hole is instead a structure of relation defined entirely by what surrounds it. The hole in a vessel is not the absence of clay, but rather the shape that the clay has chosen to describe.

The hole in a needle is not air, but instead that which makes the metal itself useful. To cultivate a hole, therefore, is not to remove anything from the self. It is to arrange what is already present into a shape that describes a space. Lin Che read to the end of this section and then looked at the wall for a while.

Outside, it was mid-afternoon, and Shen Yue, judging from the lack of shoes by the front door, was still at work. He knocked on her study door anyway, just in case, and was met with confirmation that she was out. Lin Che opened the door and found the incense on the second shelf of the study bookcase, right where it was when she first offered it to him. He took out his phone and sent a message: Would you mind if I borrowed some of your incense for cultivation? I can replace it. The reply came about a minute later.

Cabinet in the study, second shelf. There are spare sticks in a green tin. You can have three. He paused. Just three? Those three cost more than your rent. That's a month's supply. He found the green tin and counted out three sticks before returning to his room.

Lin Che placed a stick of incense in a pot and clicked his finger next to it to ignite it. Nothing happened. He sighed, thinking he really should have learnt how to ignite his own Qi into sparks by now just like how Shen Yue had done so. It seemed like a relatively simple application of his energy, but he couldn't wrap his head around exactly how to get it done.

He thought it would be like rubbing two sticks of drywood together, except replacing the drywood with Qi, but there was no friction between the two sections he was manipulating. The lighter would have to do. The incense was high-grade, immediately apparent from how quickly the Qi content of the room shifted. It was slightly stronger than the one he'd previously used, and he assumed she had offered him the stronger one simply because he would receive little benefit from the weaker incense.

Either that or she hadn't stocked it at all, as there were no weak cultivators in her house before he moved in. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Lin Che put on some headphones and listened to the audio of him reading. The cultivation of a hole begins with the surface… He had read this section aloud without much attention, but now with the incense active and his attention fully present, it landed a bit differently. The skin is not a boundary.

This is the foundational error of boundary-thinking cultivators, who conceive of the self as ending where the air begins. The skin is instead a conversation between inside and outside, where they meet to negotiate their terms. He who can feel this negotiation and can subtly interfere with it will improve drastically with Boundless Intake.

This sounded rather straightforward so far, as Lin Che's understanding of the self and non-self had improved by leaps and bounds ever since he started learning the Hollow Bell Technique — he had already redefined the 'self' to contain more than just his body and had moderate success with that. And then, with the recent developments in his Hollow Bell Resonance, he understood this division between the two concepts much more intimately.

All he had to do now was listen to the conversation, and perhaps he would be able to make this technique his own, too. The first incense stick burnt down over forty minutes, during which Lin Che got approximately two minutes of what he thought might be the right quality of attention before losing it again. The room still held some residual Qi density when the stick finished, so he continued working in the afterglow until it dissipated. He opened his eyes and looked at the two remaining sticks. He lit the second.

A vessel described a hole only when it was capable of being filled. A needle's eye was a hole because thread existed. A hole in the ground was a hole because something could fall into it, or be placed there, or climb out of it. The hole was not a property of the structure alone — it was a property of the structure in relation to the world it existed within.

Since this technique wanted philosophy, Lin Che cast his mind back to his old high school classes, where he much preferred to discuss the western schools of thought over the eastern ones, purely because he wanted to sound more internationally and culturally knowledgeable when compared with his classmates. Plato would have said the hole in the clay vessel was a shadow of the ideal hole, which was an imperfect form of holeness, which existed without reference to any particular matter.

The problem with this, Lin Che thought, was that it made the hole prior to the existence of anything else, which made the concept useless for cultivation purposes, at least with his current understanding of it all. He sighed and moved onto the next philosopher he could think of. Had he known he would be doing this, he would have paid a lot more attention in class and not relied on spotty memory from over a decade prior. Aristotle had argued that form and matter were inseparable, in a concept known as hylomorphism.

You couldn't have the shape of a cup without the clay, nor the function of a knife without the metal. The hole, by this logic, was not an absence of form, but a form in itself, defined by the matter that surrounded it and the function it was most capable of serving. This was much closer to what the text wanted out of him. Lin Che remained seated and contemplated some more. He wasn't sure when, exactly, the thinking stopped and the doing began.

The second incense stick had perhaps twenty minutes left when he became aware that the attention he had been chasing for the past hour had naturally come to him, and he could vaguely feel the pores in his skin open up and allow more things to enter. He was slightly worried about acne and bacteria, but assumed a strong cultivator's constitution and Hollow Bell Technique was much stronger than any pathogen that dared enter via his skin. Lin Che held his breath, and the Qi still entered via the skin.

In fact, the only reason he kept on breathing now was out of biological habit, as he was more than confident that he was now breathing out of his skin. He felt a bit like a leaf. He let the stick finish. The Qi from the incense was completely gone, the room back to its ordinary ambient state of a modern apartment in a city. That is to say, rather Qi-sparse when compared with the feeling he had within the Shen Clan compound.

He wasn't sure if it was due to spirit veins or formation arrays or some other things he'd read about in novels, but he didn't dare practice at the Shen Clan, not only because he was not yet a member, but also because there were far too many variables at play over there. The difference between attempting the Boundless Intake Sutra here versus what it would feel like in the holy land was something he was eager to attempt.

The technique was like a wide pipe, and he had spent the past hour and a half finding the pipe, but his current environment was more just a tap that could barely fill a glass. For proper practice, he would need the right location. But the pipe was at least now there. Lin Che lit the third stick. This time, he decided to ramp things up a bit more and channel the entire Hollow Bell Resonance of his in combination with the Boundless Intake Sutra.

He expelled Qi out of his body at a great rate, but emitted it in a more gaseous form so as to not damage his surroundings, causing the Qi density of the room to increase further than with the impact from just the incense. This, in turn, caused an artificial state which more accurately represented what it would feel like in the holy land, only still weaker given Lin Che's cultivation level. The expulsion and intake was tiring, to say the least.

It wasn't draining in the physical sense, as he was recycling the same bits of his energy again and again between an external and internal form with very little loss, if any. He ran through it until the third stick was gone, by which point his cultivation base had increased by an amount he estimated was equivalent to roughly a month of steady Liuhe practice as estimated by Shen Yue. Lin Che looked at the empty incense pot and opened his phone. I think I'll need more incense, he texted his wife.

Her reply arrived almost instantly: what.