Could imagination become reality? Xu Xiaoshou did not fully understand, but it sounded undeniably insane—and faintly familiar.
From the Dean's words alone, he felt that Elder Qiao's path was somewhat like his own "Painting Mastery."
Yet there was an essential difference between them.
The essence of Painting Mastery was giving tangible form to one's "imagination," then adding a trace of spirituality to grant it a measure of "independent consciousness."
But in the end, that "independent consciousness" was still the consciousness of the original body.
Like Ba Zunan's portrait clone—if Xu Xiaoshou did not control it from afar, it was merely a lifelike painting that had broken free of the paper's confinement. It was still a dead thing.
The path the Dean described for Elder Qiao leaned more toward spiritual arrays—or rather, Heavenly Secrets Art!
No matter what, hearing this made Xu Xiaoshou feel as if he had returned to his previous life, to the early days when he could still barely move around from his hospital bed and stubbornly gnaw through obscure physics and philosophy texts.
His fixed impression of Elder Qiao as a carefree old man was overturned in an instant.
Ye Xiaotian did not stop explaining.
Seeing Xu Xiaoshou's expression—pretending to be deep in thought while actually looking somewhat lost—he seemed to see his former self when he had first heard these concepts. He smiled and continued, "According to your Elder Qiao, the 'diagram' of all things can specifically manifest as the traceable web of Heavenly Dao rules, even the Sacred Dao.
"'Patterns,' meanwhile, are each individual rule within it—for example, the Great Dao of Fire.
"Beyond that, the veins in leaves and the rings in trees, the sinews, bones, and meridians of the human body—all are diagrams and patterns. Change them, and you can change their essence."