The road of cultivation was intricate and endless—countless paths, boundless arts, with no fixed certainty. Yet in the end, there were only two roads: seeking inward, or seeking outward.
The path of inner refinement was to behold the myriad phenomena of heaven and earth, grasp their essence, condense one's inner landscape, stack the Great Dao piece by piece, and continually ponder and polish it until a single Dao pierced the heavens, eternal through immeasurable kalpas.
Seeking outward, meanwhile, meant either searching for or seizing all manner of extraordinary treasures and powers between heaven and earth. Heaven and earth were boundless, and so were their treasures. Many such treasures were condensations of the Great Dao itself. Once cultivators acquired them, they had little need for comprehension. They merely transformed themselves into furnaces, refining the spiritual light of the Dao and using it to forge themselves.
After all, no matter what sort of treasure it was—yin and yang, the five elements, wind, fire, thunder, and lightning—it all lay within the Dao. What was ultimately smelted forth was the Dao.
Yet cultivation in this manner caused immense harm to heaven and earth. More precisely, however, it did not harm heaven and earth itself. No matter how cultivators plundered, so long as they did not transcend beyond it, those things would always remain there. On the contrary, after being refined by cultivators, the various lights of the Dao gained even more transformations.
What this path truly harmed were those who came after.
The farther one went into the future, the more barren heaven, earth, time, and space became, because the Dao within heaven and earth had all been seized by others. The road of seeking outward thus grew ever more difficult. Only by seeking inward—pondering, refining, and stacking—could one have a chance to reach