My Heart Aches Watching

At 7:30 p.m. on August 18, seven suns appeared over Chengdu.

Some said it was a phenomenon of light refraction. Some said it might be a parallel spacetime. Others went even further and said Hou Yi was coming back.

Ahem, ahem, ahem. I was one of those "others," hahaha.

Personally, though, I felt parallel spacetime was more likely.

Just like the Mirage Ship, which we also considered a refraction phenomenon.

But when people actually searched the world for places identical to the scenes in the sky, some could be found, while others simply could not.

Where were those unfindable ones being refracted from?

Could they have come from other spacetimes?

Just as many scholars believed this world had only space and no time at all—that time was merely something humans invented for keeping records.

How could you be sure that the you from ten years ago was not still in that time ten years ago?

And how could you be sure that the you from ten years later was not already in that time ten years later?

Let us suppose that the you from ten years ago, the you from ten years later, and the current you all existed simultaneously.

Then if certain past or future scenes appeared in the sky because they had been projected here through warped spacetime, did that not seem perfectly reasonable?

Could those seven suns have been projected from seven different spacetimes?

Back when spacetime warped and nine suns appeared together, a young man discovered the problem and found a way to restore the warped spacetime. That was why the other eight suns vanished again, leaving only the one from this spacetime.

Someone recorded that process and called it Hou Yi shooting the suns, hahaha.

Sometimes, people really needed to dare to imagine. Before airplanes were made, people dreamed of having a pair of wings.

Many things once thought impossible began with daring to think and daring to act.

Sometimes, when I meditated, I would enter a realm. It was similar to a dream, yet just as real.

Who could say that realm did not truly exist in another spacetime?

Just as cultivation allowed people to break free of the shackles of the flesh and let their consciousness roam the great void—ascending to the nine heavens to seize the moon, descending to the five oceans to catch turtles—they could learn many things in that realm that could not be learned in reality.

Could it be that they were learning by crossing spacetime planes?

I had even tried calculating math problems in dreams, along with other tests, and I had dreamed of myself writing.

I could remember the things I actively tested, but after passively waking from dreams, much of it was forgotten.

Perhaps I should cultivate properly. If I could bring things from the realm into reality, that would make me a god.

Many people throughout history had done similar things. Some solved scientific problems in their dreams and recorded the answers after waking.

Some learned from people within a realm while meditating, then applied it to real life.

I had not pursued that ability, so in life, I could constantly notice every thought that arose in my heart.

To be honest, I did not have many thoughts in a day now. If I said I had already united my true self with that outward-thinking self, I would not dare boast so shamelessly. By my own perception, I had probably reached around eighty percent.

In my view, if they were completely united, there should be no need for deliberate thought. Everything should be done through instincts accumulated over the years or through first intuition.

Today, my friend who worked as a spirit medium told me that distracting thoughts were always flying wildly through his mind, leaving him agitated and confused.

I taught him the method and application of turning thoughts into swords.

This was actually a way for one thought to withstand ten thousand thoughts: focus every thought on a single point, then use that point to break the surface.

I did not take disciples. I only taught according to fate. As long as I could help someone when they needed me, that was enough.

Let me clarify this once again: no matter what you believed in, if you could not even control your own thoughts, then you absolutely had to learn how. Only when people subdued their own thoughts could they become their true selves in the real sense.

Otherwise, whenever distracting thoughts flew wildly through your head, or whenever you habitually thought of something, that was not truly you.

Or rather, that was only the you controlled by thoughts, the you blinded by thoughts.

When people heard or saw something, they sometimes had to quiet down and look and listen with their hearts before they could truly understand.

Relying on old assumptions, on what you thought you understood, or on what you had heard someone say—that was completely idiotic.

If you believed your own thinking instead of having your own unique understanding, then you were someone being manipulated by others.

Changing your fate was actually so simple that you would not believe it. Just remember this: everyone dies, so do not live in other people's eyes or other people's mouths.

Let go of all your troubles, pressure, and tangled hesitation. Go do the one thing that you would deeply regret never doing before you died.

Keep at it for several years, or even more than a decade—it was up to you. As long as you believed that, on the day you died, you would regret not having done it.

Do not wait. Do not keep telling yourself you would find time later. When your realm was not high enough, you had no idea how much time you had left.

Start first and talk later. Everything was figured out while doing it; thinking alone was useless.

You looked at how this person or that person succeeded, but while you were daydreaming and fantasizing, they had already lowered their heads and begun working.

You only saw their success, but you never saw them suffering and persevering.

Take Mr. Guo's success, for example. You only heard how bitter and difficult his days had been, but you had never experienced them yourself.

Yet when you looked at him now, all you could see was the splendor after his success.

Without those years of persistence when even putting food on the table was difficult, how could there be today's peaceful and prosperous age?

No matter whether a person's success came from hard work or talent, persistence was indispensable.

For someone who relied on talent to paint, if they did not paint, that talent was just a lump of shit—it vanished the moment they stuck out their ass.

For someone who relied on hard work to dance, if they slacked off from time to time, then the hard work they talked about was no different from farting.

Though every success required the right time, place, and other conditions, if you had never even taken the first step—

Then all I could say was that dreams were fucking great things.

Do not look at how simple I made it sound. Was I not persevering too?

When I first started writing, I imagined that one day I could earn an income through writing and no longer work for others.

Later, I realized I had thought too simply. Writing had its own patterns. If you wrote blindly, you simply could not develop your own distinctive style, and it was hard to shine.

I had thought of giving up too, but then I thought: if I did not write an insanely good book, I would not be willing to accept it even at death.

But then again, if you were not born with talent for writing, what could unwillingness do? Right?

Then fuck that—I refused to accept it. If I had no talent, Laozi would forcibly give myself more talent. Whenever I had time, I read; whenever I had time, I listened; I wrote every day. I simply did not believe it, and I refused to submit.

Of course, there were times in between when I truly had no idea what to do and stopped to think for a long time, but I had absolutely never considered giving up.

As my realm of cultivation grew higher and higher, I no longer thought about making a living through writing.

Instead, I thought that if I did not write a book that could help people after they finished reading it, then I had cultivated for fucking nothing. What fucking money? On the day I died, what the fuck would money still count for? If I did not write what I wanted to write before I died, no amount of money could make me willing to accept it.

Everyone died. Sooner or later, they died. Laozi was not afraid of death. What I feared was being the only one happy and free while everyone else remained trapped in suffering, unable to pull themselves out. It hurt my heart to watch.