Chapter 252: Solving the Vision
The Dao of Space was slippery and abstract. It was obtuse, mystical, and complex. Far more difficult to comprehend than the simpler Daos of the Fist, of Indomitable Will, of Power, or of Weakness.
Those were concepts based on emotions. They had equivalents in everyday life, making them easy to relate to.
But how could one understand space?
Jack dove into the concept with zeal. He relived the Dao Vision time and time again, until the vampire womans face became familiar and her moves predictable. He could replay everything with his eyes closed, if he wanted to. Thanks to his enhanced mind, he could remember every fluctuation of space, every glimmer of light coming from odd directions. Or, at least, he could try.
Jack was, first and foremost, a scientist. A researcher.
He went at the Dao Vision with a sledgehammer. He divided it into several parts, focusing on each of them separately before proceeding to the whole. First, he looked carefully at the womans hand gestures, memorizing the precise movement of her every slender finger. When he tried out those movements himselfnothing happened.
But he wasnt discouraged. This was just the start.
He then attempted to memorize the patterns of light and his own body warping. These were the only hints he could use to decipher the spatial manipulation enforced by the vampire woman.
Finally, he spent dozens, maybe even hundreds of iterations of the Dao Vision focused solely on his Dao perception. This was the most difficult part. The warping of space completely ruined his spatial awareness, meaning that his Dao perception became inaccurate. He attempted to sense how the woman manipulated the Dao around her, but the curvature of space distracted him, making him unable to understand what went where. It was like observing the movement of her Dao through a hundred small screens arranged in a ten-by-ten grid, except that each screen wasnt steady, but constantly flew around randomly.
Naturally, precisely observing her Dao like this was impossible.
But that wasnt enough to stop Jack. He was a fist. When a problem seemed unsolvable, he just brute-forced it.
If a dozen iterations werent enough, he would try a hundred. If a hundred werent enough, he would try a thousand!
Time lost its meaning as Jack entered a trance. He replayed the Dao Vision over and over until being lost in space was second nature, until the real world, with its smooth and orderly curvature of space, seemed jarring. Every time he opened his eyes, he half-expected the walls to start dancing.
Maybe its my imaginationbut how fragile does space seem. This stability could be broken at any minute. It is smoke and mirrorsmerely an illusion.
Closing his eyes, he dived into the vision again.
The System was unhelpful during this cultivation session. Space was not a part of his Dao Tree, so the System saw no reason to assist him. Jack was alone against a task of impossible complexity. All he had was his System-enhanced mind.
However, he also had the gift of hard work.
As impossible as this task was, he set to it with fierce resolve. Iteration after iteration, he beganbegun to memorize every small movement of space. The hundred angles through which he observed the woman slowly came to fit into his mind. He observed how each of them changed and swam throughout the Dao Vision, forming a tapestry of viewpoints that was completely random and extremely complex, but always the same.
Thousands of iterations later, his brain was so trained to these patterns that it began to adapt. It was similar to how, if you watched the world upside-down for a while, your eyes would adjust and you would be able to see normally. To enhance this process, Jack did not open his eyes when exiting the Dao Visionhe simply dived into it again, over and over until it became his entire world.
His brain gradually adapted. It no longer expected to see a stable world. It expected a world that was dancing and turning and warping in the precise way that the Dao Vision did. It learned to automatically slot in the right viewpoint in the right section of Jacks vision, forming a complete image yet again.
Or, at least, as complete as it could be. Even a System-enhanced human brain had limits. Jack now looked through the swimming space and saw an image of the woman that was blurry, fuzzy, hazy, but almost made sense.
It wasnt optimal, but it was enough.
Only now could he truly begin to comprehend the movements of her Dao.
His Dao perception had adapted in the same way his eyes did. Diving into the vision over and over, he now focused on the world around the womans hands, observing it as clearly as he could through his sliding kaleidoscope. Multicolored particles of the Dao floated everywhere, dominated by what felt empty but was actually not.
Jack realized that space itself was made of Dao.
The countless tiny particles that comprised existence were not everything. There were more of them; he just couldnt see them before, as they were colorless and formless, a part of the world so natural that it served as the background.
Only when the woman grabbed those particles and wielded them did Jack comprehend their existence. Immediately, it was like his eyes had been opened for the first timehe perceived something in emptiness, a force he always missed before. Now, it seemed so obvious. He felt like a deep sea fish that discovered the existence of water.
Finally, Jack realized the importance of this Dao Vision, and he felt eternally grateful. If he didnt see the woman manipulating space so clearly, it wouldnt matter if people sat him down and explained exactly how it worked. How many years, how many decades would it have taken him to comprehend this concept otherwise?
How valuable was the Dao Vision hed so casually received?
B-Grade factions really have resources he thought, still shocked at the weight of this insight, but he focused on the woman again. This was no time to daydream. It was time to learn.
He observed her movements as clearly as he could, iteration after iteration. At first, he understood nothing. He saw space bending oddly, saw it following the movements of her fingers and spreading like a wave, but he had no idea how shed achieved that.
Eventually, however, his vision sharpened further, and he began to see.
When she waved her hands, that was only a symbolic movement. It probably just helped her focus. The real driving force was the Dao particles she controlled at an extremely fine level.
To Jack, the Dao was like water. It was formed of many tiny droplets, but when he wielded it, he moved those droplets in the millions. When this woman focused, she could control a single line of droplets, a force so thin Jack more imagined than perceived it. She drove that line between the folds of space, slicing it open as one would a curtain, then easily moving the piece of cut-off curtain as she pleased.
Of course, her application was more advanced than this. She wielded these ultra-thin lines of particles freely, slicing space open in various places and then dancing around with the loose fabric, twirling and twisting it to her will.
Jack now pictured space as a giant curtain, of which he could only see a tiny part in the middle. There was no end to pull it from, and the entire curtain was too heavy to move. If he had a razor, however, if he could slice it open, he could then manipulate a part of the curtain.
He could bend space to his will.
If he could achieve that, he could do whatever he liked. Teleportation? All he had to do was slice the curtain open and move through its folds. He would no longer be constrained by the distance. It was just a manifestation of space. He could simply ignore it and appear wherever he wanted.
This concept was hard to grasp, actually. Jack felt like he was squeezing his mind into a hole where it wasnt supposed to fit. It was jarring and disorienting. The only reason he could even touch upon this concept was that he saw the woman tearing the curtain open, and the implications registered in an area of his brain he wasnt sure he understood.
On one side of the curtain, the one everyone stood on, distance was a thing. But there was no floor under the curtain. It was draped over a sphere of zero radius and infinite surface. On the inside, all points in space coincided, effectively allowing him to reach anywhere he wanted instantlywith the added bonus that he didnt pass through all the space in-between.
Of course, that had to be extremely taxing. Jack didnt quite get why, but he knew that was obviously the case or everyone would teleport everywhere all the time.
However, he finally felt that he understood a bit of how space worked. Well, understood was an overstatementhe had an inkling of an inkling, the barest idea of how things worked and how he could alter them to his liking.
But, maybe, it would be enough.
He kept watching the woman manipulating space, letting several iterations of the vision flow by, gradually growing more and more familiar with the way her every movement affected the world. He watched her Dao razors sink into the tiny gaps between the infinitely clustered particles of space, slice them open, then use the flat part of the blade to push the fabric of space in a direction of her choosing.
Though Jack had focused on the concept of teleportation, which interested him most due to Space Walk, this woman was purely manipulating space, moving it from side to side and wrapping it around itself. She had no goal that Jack could discernmerely practicing.
He was so engrossed in understanding that he almost didnt notice when he hit a wall. Suddenly, delving any deeper into the womans secrets was impossible, like the Dao he perceived through the curtain was slightly blurredand not by lack of ability.
Tsk. That was it, huh?
Dao Visions, as hed come to understand, contained a single insight, either large or small. Everything else was somehow blurred out so he couldnt get it. This was the reason why he had never revisited the Dao Vision of the bald man from so long ago; besides the basic essence of the Dao of the Fist, he could gleangleam nothing of importance.
Fair, I guess. Cant look a gift horse in the mouth.
He glanced towards the woman, who was manipulating space in front of him for the umpteenth time. He let her; for the first time in who knows how long, he did not focus on perceiving, but simply enjoying what was happening. It was like the first time, except he understood a tiny bit more.
Still not enough, the woman said with a sigh, then noticed the System spying on her. This is my Dao, she declared. Begone.
Jack felt himself collapse and shatter, and he was back in the real world. He opened his eyes, finding the task more difficult than he remembered.
Instantly, he fell to the floor. His brain tried to perceive the real world through the space dance enforced by the woman. Everything swam and nothing made sense. Jack couldnt even stand.
Ohh, he groaned. He used his Dao to stop himself from puking, then simply waited, enduring the nausea until the world stabilized again. His brain finally realized they were back to normalthough the process felt like hours.
Oh, man. What a ride. Jack sat up, noticing that his entire body was stiff. How long did that take?
Surely, not too long. It was a single meditation session.
Come to think of it, hadnt he seen several thousand iterations of the Dao Vision? If each of them took a couple of minutes, then
Jack paled. Shit.
Then again, it wasnt like he had anything to do. So what if hed spent several days meditating? He was an immortal now. He could do whatever he wanted.
Somehow, his mind felt fresh, not at all exhausted like he expected.
He itched to go out and make sure everything was alright, but there was something he wanted to do even more: practice the Dao of Space.
Reaching inside himself, he retrieved an amount of the Dao of the Fist as small as he could make it. It still contained thousands of purple particles, clustered together like the stitches of a carpet. Tenderly, he reached inside it and tried to minimize the amount of Dao, removing the particles by batches.
Some time later, he was down to around a few hundred, and he discovered that going any lower was impossible. It was like trying to untie a knot with extra thick fingers.
He formed that Dao into a line as thin as he could make it and tried to wedge it between space itself.
He sensed it bump against something. The slit was there, just a bit thinner than what he could manage. He kept trying for a bit, not managing to slice space open even in the slightest.
But it was progress. Hed come somewhat close. That gave him hope. And, since he still felt fresh
He knew a place where the Dao was more accepting of him than in the real world: his soul world.
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