841 A Sage in Town Part Two (1/2)

Darkness thickened in the shabby house. Ye Su looked at him, smiling and saying, ”I've learned some from your Senior Brother before, so I should teach you. But you'll have to pay for it. What do you want to learn?”

Ning Que looked at the bowl in his hand, in which the water looked like wine. After a moment of silence, he started to tell the stories that had happened since last autumn.

The snow fell like a light curtain hanging over the city wall. The Abbey Dean met thousands of cutlasses in the city. The snow burnt in the air, burning out a hole, revealing a piece of blue sky. And Ning Que wrote a character in the blue sky.

Ye Su was now an ordinary person, an outsider of to the cultivation world. He might have missed lots of things, but he had been informed of the Abbey Dean's breaking into Chang'an by the Sword Garret long ago.

”You are invincible in the city as long as you can write that character, so even my teacher could be beaten by you. But if you step outside the city, it would take no more than a glance for teacher to kill you.”

Ning Que admitted it and said, ”I want to know how to become equally powerful, even if I am outside of Chang'an.”

Ye Su said, ”I am not qualified to teach you, neither are Yan Se and your many predecessors. In fact, nobody is qualified because you're the first one who has been able to write that character.”

Ning Que asked, ”How can I gather more of the people's will?”

Ye Su said, ”In the most common way, it's presented as faith.”

Ning Que said, ”I've got the same idea, but I don't want to follow the old way of Haotian Taoism.”

Ye Su said, ”But you've taken great risks to go out of Chang'an and into the mortal world, traveling land and seas. That is still the old way I went, when I was trying to see through life and death.”

Ning Que couldn't quite understand what that meant.

”Back in the old days, when your Senior Brother was reading by the pool, he didn't even notice my sword; that was when I realized I still had to seek even if I had seen it through, but I've lost it when I insisted it was something to be 'seen'. Later when I was in secluded cultivation in the small Taoist Temple, I watched the temple breaking and collapsing, then I realized that a wall has to be broken first if it needs to be restored. And finally I knew nature was all about the circle between life and death.”

Recalling the strike at the mountain in the Wilderness, and the scholar by the pool, Ye Su looked at him, then he smiled and said, ”That was why I was able to take Jun Mo's sword before the Verdant Canyon.”

Ning Que asked, ”What does it have to do with my current question?”

Ye Su said, ”You wrote the character no one had written out before; you're on a way without any pioneers ahead. I've made it clear that nobody is qualified to teach you. I am sharing the process of my enlightenment. I am exhibiting it to you; I'm bringing it out for you to touch. It's not up to me if you can catch anything from it.”

After a brief silence, Ning Que replied, ”Go on.”

Ye Su said, ”During the trial when I saw through life and death, I had been watching the mortal world as an outsider. Then, I became an insider when I was paralyzed, and came back to the mortal world, in this shabby alley in Linkang City.”

Ning Que remembered when he stood on the city wall in Chang'an, watching the crossing lines of streets and alleys, on which walkers were like ants. He remembered those dull faces of the travelers in the ship on the Great Lake. Then he realized he had never quit being an outsider.

Ye Su looked at him and continued, ”You hate to follow the old way of Haotian Taoism because you hate the religion in your nature. While religion is indeed a kind of faith, faith is not all about religion; at least not all about religions like Haotian Taoism.”

After thinking for a while, Ning Que said, ”I agree on that.”

”You know that for those powerhouses in Haotian Taoism, the higher their realms are, the harder it is to keep their hearts pure, which in simpler terms is: 'it's hard for powerhouses to have faith'. Faith exists not in Heaven but in the dust and the lower places. It is the unshakable will and desire of the ordinary. If you want to gather their will, you have to figure out what they really want.”

Ye Su said, ”My Snow Moutain and Ocean of Qi are all broken, which made me a true ordinary person. I lost the qualification to consider those complicated questions, but I've been given the opportunity to live like the ordinary, and know about their thoughts. For example, the children in my neighborhood, eating was their only faith.”

Ning Que nodded as he thought of those pictures he had seen.

Ye Su looked at him and asked, ”Have you eaten anything?”

Ning Que saw the large bowl of green vegetables and rice, saying, ”It doesn't matter.”

Ye Su said, ”See? That is what differentiates you from the ordinary.”