Predicament

"Hallucination" and "phantom limb" are not enough to describe Li Qi's feelings at this moment.

Similar to... another strange disease he had heard of before, the "Anton's Blindness" he had heard of in another world.

People with this disease generally have their visual field in their brains completely destroyed, essentially losing all their vision and becoming completely blind.

However, another area of their brain that processes visual information is not damaged; it still perceives everything as normal and processes visual information as usual.

He could no longer see, but his brain was unaware of it; he still felt that he could see, and in fact, he 'really' could see, it's just that what they saw didn't match reality.

These patients are actually blind, but they believe they are capable enough to see.

Li Qi did indeed see something, because what people usually see is a scene processed by the brain, not the real scene.

The brain helps people filter out and correct blind spots, retinal inversion, and many blurry areas that are not clearly visible or out of focus, which is how we get the 'normal field of vision', or the corrected field of vision.

Humans are inherently 'corrective vision'.

The difference is that in the past, the correction of vision involved the eye collecting information about the outside world, transmitting it to the correction area, making corrections, and finally transmitting it to the visual area to obtain what the person sees.

Patients with Anton's Blindness can no longer perceive the outside world through their eyes, but the brain's correction areas continue to function. These areas work without any external information input, producing a bunch of random visual images to maintain the illusion that 'you can still see'.

For the brain, there is no difference. The brain is only processing information from the correction area from beginning to end. The brain cannot realize whether this information is real external information or a bunch of random stuff.

This is how Anton's Blindness came about.

Li Qi felt that his current situation was somewhat like that, although he could survive without a brain.

However, he did not suffer from Anton's Blindness, but from Anton all sensory disorders.

Just after his own five aggregates were pierced by that demonic blood—

He lost all perception of the outside world.

It turns out that his senses could only draw information from the five aggregates from beginning to end, just as the human brain can only read information from the correction area to form vision.

His senses are completely incapable of perceiving the outside world without the five aggregates; they were not created for that purpose. They are only responsible for reading the five aggregates.

After the Five Aggregates Demonic Blood suppressed the Five Aggregates, Li Qi completely lost all perception and sank into a series of illusions that were not illusions.

What is a hallucination that is not a hallucination?

It's like Anton's Blindness.

He couldn't see, but when he thought he could, the chaotic information from the outside world formed everything he saw, only that none of this information matched the real world.

He couldn't hear it, but he felt that he could hear it, and there really were sounds coming from his ears.

Even his senses, including touch and taste, were completely disabled, and they were still operating randomly and haphazardly.

Li Qi found it very difficult to stand up, because people need the tactile sensation of the soles of their feet to maintain balance and the cochlea in their ears to sense gravity in order to stand up and walk.

Now that his cochlea has failed, he feels dizzy and disoriented, as if he's in a randomly running washing machine, never finding a moment's peace.

He was constantly presented with recurring hallucinations that he couldn't distinguish, and he couldn't even close his eyes because he was already blind.

Countless voices rushed towards him, and he couldn't tell which words he actually heard and which he had imagined.

The skin all over the body is being touched, stroked, torn, or bitten almost every moment; these are all illusions created by chaotic information.

The complete loss of touch not only caused problems with his external skin, but also with his digestive system.

How does the digestive system work? First, the skin inside the digestive system also has sensitive touch. After sensing the arrival of food, the digestive system will start to function. But now, all the skin and all the epithelial tissues are disordered, which has caused Li Qi's whole body to be abnormal. His digestive system is sometimes full, sometimes hungry, and sometimes nauseous.

His sense of smell detected different smells every moment—stench, fragrance, strange smells that he couldn't describe—changing every second.

None of these sensations, including all five senses, were hallucinations, yet they plunged Li Qi into a state of confusion more terrifying than any hallucination.

He was out of control, unaware of his surroundings, unsure whether he was standing or lying down, unable to distinguish between light and darkness, and even unaware of where his hands were.

Normally, people need to use touch and sight to determine where their hands are, but now Li Qi has no idea what his posture is. He can't control his muscles anymore because any attempt to control them brings feedback that he doesn't know what it is.

He tried to raise his hand, but felt a resistance in his arm. The resistance disappeared the next second.

How can a person tell whether they have actually touched something? Is a sudden burning sensation on their hand a sign of touching fire, or a hallucination? Are they lying in bed or floating in the air?

I can't tell them apart, I can't tell them apart at all.

The whole world has become an illusion.

Li Qi was deeply mired in this quagmire of delusion, struggling in intense pain.

Of course, such a struggle actually requires a great deal of calm.

The maggots' writhing before they die is also a struggle, but it's futile. What Li Qi is doing is a struggle to survive, and for that he must remain calm.

First, he decisively cut off his control over his body to prevent all the hallucinations from causing him to do strange things.

After severing control of his body, he relied entirely on muscle memory to straighten all his muscles and maintain an upright posture without relying on any senses, so that at least he wouldn't end up in a dangerous position.

Even so, Li Qi still didn't know what his current situation was.

His 'heart,' or rather, the center of all his thoughts and activities, whether called the soul or the true spirit, in short, his spiritual entity has completely lost its perception of the outside world.

His spiritual entity and his physical entity are completely disconnected.

Originally, what connects these two is the Five Aggregates (skandhas). The Five Aggregates are the connection point between the mind and the body. The mind understands the body through the Five Aggregates, and the body is regulated through the Five Aggregates, thus forming a person.

Of course, only Buddhism holds this view. Other Dao Path do not recognize the Five Aggregates. Although they also acknowledge some kind of connection, they each have their own interpretations.

Different interpretations of phenomena, and the use of one's own theories to explain the world, are also characteristics of different Dao Path.

There is no right or wrong. Before the ultimate path is revealed, everything is unknown. Each Dao Path simply encompasses the world in its own way.

However, in any case, Li Qi is indeed currently being suppressed by the Five Aggregates Demonic Blood, which is enough to prove that the theory of the Five Elements is not just empty talk, but has a real foundation.

However, although this caused Li Qi immense pain and endless torment, he had not yet failed.

Yes, he didn't give up.

In the endless illusion, he completely lost his sense of time, and this lack of time perception made him completely confused about everything.

Under such torment and despair, Li Qi sighed.

To be honest, he didn't know if his body had sighed or not, but his heart had truly sighed.

He struggled for a long time, and in this desperate situation, he came up with many ways to find a way to survive.

Initially, he tried to use his heartbeat or pulse to keep track of time, to maintain a basic sense of time. A sense of time is the rule for people to do things. It is with a sense of time that we can perceive speed, and then extend to other criteria for judging movement.

Losing one's sense of time will further impair one's ability to move.

But Li Qi failed. Needless to say, his pulse was completely erratic, and Li Qi also discovered that the heartbeat he felt was completely chaotic.

With his five aggregates blocked, he couldn't even sense his own heartbeat.

His heart was like that of a king imprisoned on his throne, frantically writing documents and issuing orders to every corner of the kingdom.

But no one replied or responded. The king didn't even know if the order had taken effect, nor did he know what had happened in those places or whether those kingdoms still truly belonged to him.

In fact, it certainly is true. You can tell from Li Qi's occasional twitching that the command is in effect, but the body is no longer responding to the mind. The two are detached from each other, which is why Li Qi is suffering this torment.

Li Qi had to resort to the most clumsy method of keeping track of time: he had to devote some of his attention to counting.

But this was almost useless, only better than nothing, because he soon discovered that his counting also had to be based on a sense of time. Without the guidance of a sense of time, he counted sometimes fast and sometimes slow, completely deviating from the goal of keeping track of time.

However, he continued counting, even if it was futile, at least it helped him keep his mind clear.

This behavior was still effective, but Li Qi himself was unaware of it.

It was his attempt to remain conscious that allowed his body to retain its instincts.

This instinct and muscle memory allowed Li Qi's body to still react to external stimuli. Although he was like a fool, at least when someone helped him walk, he would move his feet, and when he was placed on a chair, his body would sit down on its own.

When questioned, although I can't say anything logical or coherent, I can always come up with a few words, albeit random and difficult to understand.

Like I said before, he acted like a fool.

After failing to gain a sense of time, Li Qi was forced to endure another kind of torment.

He didn't know how long he had been lost in thought.

It could have been just a momentary lapse of attention, but it felt like a long time had passed; or it could have felt like a long time, but it was actually just a fleeting instant.

This is a deeper level of mental torment, greatly interfering with whatever he wants to do.

If he were an ordinary person, he would be dead by now.

Fortunately, Li Qi was already at the seventh rank, so his physical body wasn't that fragile. Even if he didn't eat, drink, or sleep, he could still be lively and energetic even if he remained a corpse for about a hundred years.

This prompted him to take a second action.

He attempted to reconstruct his senses using methods beyond the five aggregates.

Seriously, this is extremely difficult.

Li Qi had no understanding of anything beyond the Five Aggregates, and he only realized this after he tried to do it himself.

It turns out that the entire world is projected onto the five aggregates, and his mind knows nothing beyond the five aggregates.

Just like the king mentioned before, this king never went to the land he ruled; he simply read reports and issued orders.

The king never left his throne. His loyal minister, Wu Yun, would continuously deliver reliable reports to him, allowing him to know the state of the entire kingdom without leaving his throne.

From beginning to end, his mind has only been in contact with the five aggregates. Now that he has broken away from the five aggregates, it will be too difficult for him to rebuild his senses.

But Li Qi still found a breakthrough.

Besides the court minister Wu Yun, this king also had another secret agent who helped him learn about the outside world.

That means True Knowledge Dao Charm.

True Knowledge Dao Charm is Li Qi's sixth sense. This has been mentioned many times before. Every time he uses True Knowledge Dao Charm, it feels like a blind person suddenly grows eyes, or a deaf person suddenly grows ears. He examines the world from a completely new, strange, and indescribable perspective, thereby gaining extraordinary observational abilities. Furthermore, the things observed through this organ are firmly imprinted in his mind and are hard to forget.

This is an advantage, as it allows Li Qi to remember many things.

It's also a downside; this level of information overload has almost killed Li Qi several times. Fortunately, he's quick-witted and has managed to hold on, and now he's gotten used to it.

In other words, Li Qi wanted to know whether the True Knowledge Dao Charm had passed through the five aggregates.

After an unknown amount of time spent trying, he was frustrated to discover that True Knowledge Dao Charm had to be analyzed and deconstructed through the five aggregates before it could be perceived by the mind.

However, it's not all bad news.

There is good news: True Knowledge Dao Charm is not his senses. True Knowledge Dao Charm is still effective, and the massive flow of information is still pouring into his head. It's just that without the analysis of the Five Aggregates, he can't understand it.

This signifies one thing.

Unlike the other five senses which are fixed to the five aggregates, the True Knowledge Dao Charm can be manipulated. He can manipulate the True Knowledge Dao Charm and then directly connect True Knowledge Dao Charm to his mind.

Without going through the five aggregates, one can directly experience the world through True Knowledge Dao Charm.

Li Qi was unaware of the consequences, nor whether his own heart could bear it.

But this might be his only way out, since he can't suppress the Five Aggregates Demonic Blood.

If he can't do that, he'll try another plan.

Completely export your mind and spirit, abandon this body, and activate the Demonic Energy Clone to carry your mind and spirit.