Water and Fire

But now, Wen Xu's words had awakened him. Cultivation techniques were indeed important, but not important enough to be placed first. They should assist one's Spiritual Root, assist one's own cultivation. He could not wager all his "treasures" on a cultivation technique.

Cultivation techniques were profound and mysterious. Written like heavenly scripts, they were reminding novice cultivators that this should be a process of a cultivator merging with the technique itself!

It could not be copied word for word from a book. It should be adapted to local conditions; it should change to suit him, rather than him racking his brains to discern its shape and cater to that shape!

"I understand! So that's how it is! No wonder I could never find the door!"

He had thought too simply. He had believed cultivation was a procedural, step-by-step project. Cultivation was a problem, and the cultivation technique was his method for solving it. As long as he obtained the method, he would surely be able to solve the problem.

But that was not how it worked. Even a math problem could be solved in different ways. Functions, geometry, sequences, and conic figures all led to the same destination by different paths. He should not force himself to comprehend the one most correct way to use Water-Fire Harmonization.

Because there simply was no single most correct answer. There was only the optimal answer best suited to him!

Every cultivator's Spiritual Root was different. How could different Spiritual Roots be fitted to the same cultivation technique? No wonder cultivation techniques were not written in a way everyone could understand—because that would have no meaning at all.

It would only lead people astray. It truly should be written as it was now.

Bian Chunchou suddenly calmed down. Holding the jade slip of Water-Fire Harmonization, he slowly closed his eyes.

"He's entered enlightenment."

Chen Zui looked at Wen Xu in confusion. "Could you repeat what you just said?" He wanted to enter enlightenment too.

Wen Xu: I was playing the lute to a cow, and even the cow would have reacted more than you.

Chapter 23: Water and Fire

The writer of the world's first cultivation technique must have been a once-in-an-age genius.

That was what Bian Chunchou thought. And the first cultivator to write down a water-fire cultivation technique might not have been a genius, but he must have been a brave man. If someone dared to walk a road no one had ever walked before, and one fraught with peril at that, how could he not be called brave?

A Fire-Water Spiritual Root was a Dual Spiritual Root close to being a useless Spiritual Root. People used "water and fire at daggers drawn" to describe two sides locked in sharp opposition, their contradictions impossible to resolve. Thus, water and fire could not coexist.

If water overwhelmed fire, it would extinguish the fire. If fire flourished over water, it would evaporate and dry up the water.

The two were like a needle point against a wheat awn, impossible to reconcile.

But were they truly impossible to reconcile?

If it were truly impossible, why could a Fire-Water Spiritual Root exist within one person? Why could predecessors have written Water-Fire Harmonization?

Bian Chunchou believed they could certainly coexist, just like other Dual Spiritual Roots. Their way of coexistence was simply more hidden, requiring someone to blaze this path.

So, how could water and fire harmonize?

Water-Fire Harmonization did not provide a clear method, nor did it clearly state how one should control the growth of water-fire Spiritual Root spiritual energy. That was why he had never found the door.

He had thought the technique had written it down, and that he simply had not understood its deeper meaning because of the differences between ancient and modern educational cultures. But in truth, it had never been written, like the answer key to a mathematical fill-in-the-blank problem. It gave the answer, but glossed over how it had been derived.

Just as Wen Xu had said, a cultivation technique served as guidance. The true core should be himself.

Therefore, what he truly needed to comprehend was his own understanding of how water and fire could coexist.

And so he returned to the original point: how could water and fire coexist?

Though Bian Chunchou was a science student, he had not studied chemistry. Still, even without specializing in it, his basic high school chemistry knowledge told him that water was an inorganic compound composed of hydrogen and oxygen. At room temperature, it was a colorless, odorless, transparent liquid. Below zero, it froze into ice; when boiled, it became water vapor and lingered in the air.

Fire, meanwhile, was a light- and heat-producing chemical reaction, usually manifesting at very high temperatures. It was a process of energy release. Fire could not arise from nothing. For combustion, first there had to be fuel, and second, oxygen. In other words, fire could not ignite in a vacuum.

But what he wanted was water and fire coexisting, not one simply restraining the other.

So how could water and fire influence one another without consuming each other? Bian Chunchou thought, Had I known I was going to cultivate immortality, I should have studied chemistry.

But it was not as though he had no ideas at all. Water was an extremely special substance. Its composition of hydrogen and oxygen allowed it to serve both as a reactant in chemical reactions and as a product of them.

In fact, most combustion in nature was accompanied by the production of water. It was simply that this "water" was water vapor, invisible to the naked eye.

Thus, the ideal state was for water to become water vapor and coexist with fire.

But then, the offensive nature of a Fire-Water Spiritual Root would become too singular, far removed from Bian Chunchou's imagined harmony of water and fire. What he wanted was to control both water and fire with ease, not... to keep burning continuously.

Water and fire might be able to coexist this way, but his body probably could not withstand such "coexistence." Though cultivators possessed physiques far beyond ordinary people, their cultivation would gradually increase. Most Fire-Water Spiritual Roots could not advance to the Nascent Soul stage, likely because their bodies could not bear excessively intense water-fire reactions and thus fell into a deadlock.

But water vapor... hmm, it truly was a rather good form of attack. It could stack buffs together with fire, making it a decent approach for crafting talismans.

Yet when it came to cultivation techniques, excessively complicated water-fire coexistence would only make cultivation more cumbersome. It might be fine at the beginning, but it would surely grow ever more difficult later on. After all, advancing one's cultivation inherently required ever more spiritual energy.

So what was the simplest way for water and fire to coexist?

People generally believed water and fire were incompatible because under normal temperature and pressure, the ignition points of most common materials were higher than the boiling point of water. Thus, when substances burned, excessively high temperatures would be accompanied by the evaporation of large amounts of water.