He slept soundly through the night.
The next morning, Nameless rose from bed and stretched luxuriously.
He opened the inn window. Plenty of pedestrians were already out and about, while vendors' cries, hammer blows from the smithy, and voices haggling over prices sounded without pause.
Then many passersby stepped to the roadside and lowered their heads. A man with knives stuck all over his body and an iron mountain on his back trudged down the street, each heavy step leaving a footprint.
The man was not strong; he was remarkably thin. His hair had gone ungroomed, and his tangled locks and beard hid his face. He seemed oblivious to everything around him and simply walked on in silence, gradually vanishing at the end of the street.
"Cai Bing still hasn't given up."
"You have to admire him. It's a shame this method was proven useless long ago. Tormenting the body is itself a search outside oneself. How could that ever let him begin the Inner-Seeking Method?"
"Unfortunately, since the world collapsed, the Great Wilderness has had no other path. The Inner-Seeking Method is our only hope."
"If the world hadn't collapsed, Cai Bing would surely have been a genius in some other system of cultivation."
After the man left, quiet discussion spread along the street. Many felt sorry for him.
Though Great Wilderness City helped people cultivate the Inner-Seeking Method, it was ultimately a method of Heart Refinement. What mattered was the heart. If one could not draw strength from within, the suffering one endured was nothing but suffering.
Nameless watched the pedestrians talking below, then raised his gaze toward the end of the street.
From their discussion, he learned that the man called Cai Bing had practiced austerities this way for a full ten years, yet had never managed