098 Brainstorm

This sensation?

Could it be the primordial vital force mentioned in the classic texts of inner alchemy?

A trace of doubt rose in Chen Jue’s mind.

This was also the first time, since awakening the panel, that he had encountered a pregnant woman with a belly as large as Sister Biao’s, and he had unexpectedly sensed that extremely faint feeling of beneficial radiation.

As for the phrase that came to Chen Jue’s mind, “primordial vital force,” it was the only abstract concept he could think of that came close to this phenomenon. It had emerged after his cultivation had reached a modest degree of success, as he immersed himself in the group’s shared files, reading widely through Daoist culture and inner-alchemy classics, his thoughts branching outward in every direction.

What, then, is primordial vital force?

In Daoist scriptures, it is described as the fundamental element from which heaven, earth, and all living things are formed.

Zhang Boduan of the Northern Song dynasty, also known as the Purple Yang Perfected One and revered by Complete Perfection as the founder of the Southern Lineage, wrote in his alchemical classic Awakening to Perfection: “When the five numbers arise of their own accord, the three powers meet and form the infant. The infant is but a chamber holding true vital force; when the ten months are complete, the embryo is round and enters the holy foundation.”

Here, too, appears the term “true vital force,” which is identical in meaning to primordial vital force.

As for the rest, Chen Jue had always believed that the descriptions of “forming the infant,” “the embryo becoming complete,” and “the holy foundation” were akin to the principles found in martial classics: “Cradle the elixir while seated in the horse stance, and after a hundred days of foundation building, cross the blood-changing gate.”

All of these spoke of gathering the blood and energy of the entire body inward into the Shangqu acupoint, allowing the body to undergo a slow metamorphosis, until one’s essence, energy, and spirit reached the wondrous state known as “forming the elixir.”

This was the realm of the Golden Elixir, attained only when martial arts or inner alchemy had reached an extraordinarily profound level.

It was also similar to the spontaneous embryonic breathing he had once entered during sleep.

After the elixir is formed, one must then endure a long process of rebirth and transformation, of changing marrow and blood, of one hundred days of foundation building, until the body sheds its acquired impurities and returns to what is innate, like a newborn infant.

That line from the Daoist Classic of the Way and Virtue—“Concentrate the vital breath and attain softness; can you become as an infant?”—describes a similar quality in those who have returned to what is innate.

As for the hundred days of foundation building, the duration varies with one’s constitution. The strong may need a full hundred days; the weak may need even longer. Throughout the entire process, one must remain exceedingly careful, lest the foundation fail to form and the elixir burst.

Throughout history, many renowned martial masters, or true adepts and eminent Daoists who cultivated inner alchemy, were said in old age to have died of diarrhea. What this meant was that their elixir-forming had failed, and the elixir had “burst,” killing them outright.

The long process of cradling the elixir and laying the foundation was like a woman carrying a child for ten months. One had to proceed with utmost care, which is why Daoist classics describe it as a tortuous journey of “nurturing the embryo,” with danger at every turn and constant vigilance needed to avoid a “miscarriage.”

In ancient times, when medicine was undeveloped, a woman giving birth was like walking the threshold of the underworld. In palace dramas and costume dramas, one often saw the melodramatic disputes: miscarriage, difficult labor, whether to save the mother or the child.

The elixir is inwardly condensed, round in every part.

When the embryo is complete after ten months, it enters the holy foundation.

From Chen Jue’s perspective, these two lines did not mean that a tangible pellet of cinnabar had literally formed inside the body.

Rather, once the blood and energy had been gathered inward into the Shangqu acupoint, a person entered an invisible, formless, wondrous state, one in which the so-called divine martial force of Daoist classics could erupt at any moment.

The founder of Complete Perfection, Wang Chongyang, once called this peculiar state the “living dead.”

Master Wang Chongyang practiced in the Living Dead Tomb at Nanshi Village, and only after two years, when his elixir way had reached great completion, did he emerge to spread his teachings. In truth, he must also have undergone the process of cradling the elixir and nurturing the embryo during those two years.

When the blood and energy of the entire body are gathered into one place, the flow of blood throughout the rest of the body drops to an extremely low level. Add to that the inward turning of consciousness, and the brain enters a marvelously strange state: as if thought has stopped, yet one can still sense the outside world. Is this not close to Wang Chongyang’s “living dead”?

In more modern, straightforward, and plain language, the “living dead” may be understood as a special kind of person in a vegetative state who can awaken at will.

For a person in such a state also suffers a decline in whole-body blood circulation and requires external assistance to move, lest the limbs lie motionless for too long and wither away.

Meanwhile, the brain of such a patient falls into a peculiar disorder of consciousness, losing the intelligence, thought, will, emotion, and all the other faculties that a human being should possess. In that sense, it bears a striking resemblance to the “living dead” Wang Chongyang described.

That said, cradling the elixir and returning to what is innate is not without risk from start to finish.

Among the ancient sages and even among eminent monks, one often hears tales such as “their body remained lifelike after sitting in meditation and passing into nirvana.”

This may not be an exaggeration, nor does it necessarily mean they died of old age exactly where they sat.

From the perspective of Chen Jue, whose inner-alchemy practice had already reached a modest level of success, such stories were very likely cases of inner-alchemy cultivation that ran out of control, of consciousness that could not return, of blood gathered in the Shangqu acupoint that could not flow back through the body. What had once been the “living dead” had accidentally become what modern people would call a vegetative state, and only then, finally, a true corpse.

This peculiar state also comes very close to the meaning of “formless and without appearance” mentioned in the Diamond Sutra translated by the ancient monk Kumarajiva, and to the line in the scripture where Shakyamuni tells Subhuti: “Whether there is form or no form; whether there is thought or no thought; whether there is neither thought nor no-thought.”

Even Laozi’s Classic of the Way and Virtue contains a description of such a condition: “The Way spoken of is bland and without flavor; looked at, it cannot be seen; listened to, it cannot be heard; used, it cannot be exhausted.”

Because the scriptures of the three teachings are filled with cryptic language, secret phrases, coded expressions, and specialized terms, and because they are mostly written in classical diction and verse, modern readers often find them dazzling, baffling, and difficult to comprehend.

For the time being, let us simply call this marvelous state the Golden Elixir. In Buddhism it is called a relic; in Confucianism, the Supreme Ultimate. Thus Patriarch Zhang Sanfeng said in his Song of Chan Practice: “The three teachings were originally one family.” The “three teachings” are Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. In the end, the names differ, but the substance is one; the words themselves are beside the point.

For ordinary people, this Golden Elixir state is far too profound to grasp, impossible to touch or fathom.

But for someone like Chen Jue, who had already achieved something in his cultivation, there was no great mystery left.

Of course, all of the above was only a literal understanding, and one could say it was an extremely shallow one.

But after accidentally drawing near the fetus in Sister Biao’s womb and sensing that thread of primordial vital force, all of those shallow notions were overturned at once in Chen Jue’s mind.

Since even the unimaginably strange state known as the Golden Elixir truly exists, and has been written into the classics of the three teachings, then the “primordial vital force” or “true vital force” said in Daoist literature to constitute all things in heaven and earth must also be something real rather than a figment of imagination.

Chen Jue, only just beginning the first steps of elixir practice, could personally sense that subtle “beneficial radiation.” This meant that the seemingly illusory Daoist terms, these pictographic words, were probably not casual errors made by ancient sages in their writings.

It may be that those ancient adepts who attained the Way—Laozi, Shakyamuni, the Purple Yang Perfected One, Patriarch Pure Yang Lu, Wang Chongyang of Complete Perfection, and others—had all personally sensed this invisible and beneficial “beneficial radiation” to the human body.

Yet constrained by the limitations of their age, they could only describe it as primordial vital force or true vital force. If they had possessed modern scientific theory, perhaps this term would have been replaced by another.

The phrase “beneficial radiation” was the closest modern wording Chen Jue could presently think of to describe primordial vital force, though it still could not be taken as the final answer.

He did not know whether this primordial vital force was truly a kind of radiation, or something like gravity with both wave and particle characteristics, or perhaps some rarer form of dark matter or dark energy.

The ancient sages first discovered its existence from the standpoint of observers, and only then used the most straightforward language of their time to record it in alchemical texts and inform later generations that this primordial vital force is indeed real.

Only to sense this primordial vital force, the observer must first undergo “forming the elixir,” “nurturing the embryo,” and “entering the holy foundation”—in other words, the great accomplishment of elixir practice.

Or, to put it more directly from the line “the infant is but a chamber holding true vital force,” the observer may also sense and comprehend that faint primordial vital force through a real human fetus in the womb, just as Chen Jue was encountering now.

Chen Jue surmised that the primordial vital force emitted by the fetus, being too faint and too different from the scientific phenomena currently studied by humans, such as radiation, force, and energy, had still not been detected by scientific means.

After all, the universe conceals endless mysteries, human life is so brief, and technology so limited. There are many questions that may remain beyond the power of human civilization to analyze and explain, even to the very end.

If one looks back through the river of history, the scientific pioneers and great figures who once astonished their age all threw themselves, generation after generation and without regard for their own safety, into the study of these cosmic mysteries. Yet even a lifetime of effort could yield only a small achievement in some narrow field.

This is the limit of human life and intellect. And yet, through the passing of the torch from generation to generation, through the spreading of accumulated knowledge and culture into deep-rooted inheritance, countless human minds continue to investigate, driving civilization forward at great speed, until one day in the future humanity may leave Earth and truly look up into the stars. That, in essence, is the so-called community with a shared future for mankind.

Enough said. Let the view return to the matter at hand.

The reason Chen Jue could sense this primordial vital force was because his martial cultivation had reached an extraordinarily profound level, and because he had also just entered the threshold of inner alchemy.

Although he was not yet a true Golden Elixir master, the combination of his superhuman physical qualities and the aid of the attribute panel was already enough to compare with the Golden Elixir experts of old, and in some respects even surpass them by a great margin. Only then could he become such an observer, perceiving from the perspective of a real fetus the subtle fluctuations of that primordial vital force.

Returning again to what was said above: since this primordial vital force is acclaimed in Daoist culture as the basic element that constructs heaven, earth, and all things, and since Chen Jue had personally observed it, then the question becomes this: from the standpoint of modern science, what is the basic element that constructs the universe and all things?

Is it a unity made of time, space, matter, and energy?

Or is it some mysterious radiation or force like primordial vital force, something humanity has not yet measured, or perhaps a special kind of dark energy or dark matter?

Or perhaps, once this primordial vital force is detected by technological means and proven by mathematical formula, one could simply substitute it directly into the equation, form a theorem, and completely unravel the countless-year-old mystery of what the universe is made of?

At that thought, Chen Jue felt that his reserves of knowledge were a little insufficient.

He may have had an intelligence score as high as 1.61, or 1.11, but he still could not work it out.

For a brief moment, his whole being fell into a strange reverie, or perhaps into enlightenment that he could sense but not fully penetrate.

...

“Old Cat, what are you standing there for?”

“Sit down and eat!”

Seeing Chen Jue standing there in a daze for so long, Wang Biao reached out and patted him on the shoulder.

Only then did Chen Jue suddenly snap out of that marvelous state of insight!

Yet the things he had just been thinking about were so profound that, upon waking, he felt as though he had been practicing for a very long time, and hunger immediately surged through him.

This was because he had just gone through a mental storm, overusing his brain and causing it to burn through energy at an accelerated pace.

Some famous companies in society often hold such brainstorming meetings from time to time, and before the meeting each person is always placed with a can of high-calorie cola, or some energy drink like Red Bull, or a cup of coffee or tea to sharpen the mind, all in order to cope with this sort of mental exhaustion.

“Huh?”

“Right!”

“Let’s eat!”

“I’m hungry, and eating is the most important thing!”

Chen Jue came back to himself, put away his grave look of contemplation, and replaced it with the cheerful, easygoing expression one should wear when dining at another person’s home.

But when he glanced at the plate of bamboo worms fried to a fragrant, crisp golden brown, and then at the plate of sliced bamboo fungus with meat, which to his sharp eyes had a somewhat unsettling, trypophobia-inducing appearance, the already ravenous Chen Jue still could not help but shiver.