21. Deep Meditation

The kind of concentration that makes me feel like time has stopped without distraction.

I had never felt like this before, just unrolling the rolls of parchment on the wooden table one by one, and my eyes were like a DSLR camera, saving all the symbols on the parchment into a picture, a picture so clear in my mind. I could even feel myself naked. Naked. I was standing quietly on the rocks by the sea, watching the pictures soak into the water, and as my mind thought, the picture I wanted would come to the surface, and the visible characters would turn into a complete golden thorny plant, and I could even see the roots at the very end of its rhizome, and see a strong orcish sorcerer's hand caressing the tiny barbs on its pale golden stem, and feel the slight tingling between them. It was no longer a photograph, those rolls of parchment were closer to cinematography, sending vivid images into my mind's eye.

I stood somewhat bewildered in my own little world, knowing full well that I could actually enter my own spiritual world as a traveller would, I remembered that when I was learning to meditate, Sister Gogo had told me that during meditation, someone had been able to enter deep meditation, which was a very subtle realm that could only happen with a pure mind in the most concentrated situation, and that magicians spent their whole lives longing for their ability to enter deep meditation This means that the wizard will break through the bottleneck and go straight to the next level.

(There have been countless attempts by magical scholars to unravel this wonderfully irregular realm of meditation, and it has been found that the younger the wizard, the better the chance of reaching it. I only learned of this later.)

I stood at the edge of the golden sea and opened at random one of the pictures immersed in the golden sea, each one a faint memory for me, some of them so clear that it seemed like yesterday. Some of the pictures are so blurred that they are not even visible, and only a rough outline can be made out. It was like two separate minds, and while I was wandering in my own mental sea, my body was still lounging at my desk reading, and a picture was falling like a snowflake from the starry sky above my head, sinking into the sea before me.

It was a bizarre experience, from the time I discovered I had the power of magical perception, to the time I could gather magic and draw magical formations, to the time I learned to meditate until I managed to cast my first spell, the constant process of growth revealed that the six senses of the body had become sharper than ever before. I poured over the parchment scrolls tirelessly, like a small sailing ship in a storm, riding the waves of the sea of knowledge.

Until the irresistible exhaustion came over me and the black clouds fell into darkness and coma wherever they went.

In my dream I was a little bird, flying above the golden-rimmed clouds and moving forward into the warmth of the sun.

When I woke up again, in the moonlight from the roof of the tent, I found a large, furry head pressed against my forehead and I tugged hard on his pointy ears. I left you a bowl of sourdough pancakes on the cooker."

I shook my head slightly, still feeling dizzy, all those confusing memories popping up in my head, making it a bit impossible to distinguish reality from memory, feeling like my head was about to explode. Maybe I've been reading too much and my head has aches."

Seeing that I looked tired but was able to speak normally, Kurtz seemed to put his heart down then and turned to walk out of the tent.

Probably because it was at night, the tent was still dark despite the moonlight coming in, and I squinted around, my vision a little blurred by the familiar cowhide tent with an air-dried smoked leg of lamb still hanging on the right-hand side wall and a harpoon tied between two poles with my leather jacket and trousers on top. I lay on a mattress that smelled of Kurtz's stinking sweat, covered with a thick wool blanket that was very roughly woven and a little tangled.

I had spent two winters and two summers in this tent, far more days than normal since old Clu saved my life. The moonlight shone through a hole in the roof of the tent the size of a basin, shining on the cowhide covered floor beside me, two mud-caked boots lying to one side, one of them heavily stomped on, the large muddy footprints of Kuzi.

Kuzi had taken to looking after me and always had a pot of cold grass juice simmering on the stove when I had an attack.

Old Kulu lifted the leather curtain and bent in, sitting down cross-legged next to me, reaching out to feel my heart under the covers, his large, cool, rough hands always scratching my tender skin a little. He took the wooden cup from Kurtz and leaned forward, holding my head in one hand while he put the cup to my mouth with his other hand and poured the contents into my mouth.

It was a bitter liquid like some kind of bile, unlike the sourness of the herb juice, and the taste was so bitter that I almost threw up in my mouth with its pungent taste.

I could feel my stomach getting extremely upset, perhaps because there was still residual juice in my throat, I gagged twice, took the half cup of honey water Kuzi handed me and swallowed it straight into my mouth before I dared to gasp, "It's bitter!"

"This is a whole plant of seven-hearted snake bile herb boiled out of the juice, it is wondrous for restoring spiritual power." Old Kulu set my body down and casually lit a cigarette. This coarse rolled cigarette, which grew on the Pai plateau and was always treasured by Old Kulu, burned slowly when lit, and a pungent smell filled the tent.

"Teacher, what's happening to me?" I remembered that before I passed out I had entered a wonderful state that allowed me to read the descriptions of various herbs recorded in ancient animal texts on those parchment scrolls ten times faster than before. According to the book, this herb was an extremely valuable third-rank magic herb that had the ability to reassure the mind and help practitioners enter meditation quickly. In addition the first dose increases the mental power of the person taking it by a small amount.

"When you were found collapsed in the tent, you were already near depleted of mental energy. But it looks like you're in better shape than you thought, I thought you were having side effects from your frequent use of the 'Warmth' skill, but that doesn't seem to be the case." Old Kuru looked at me seriously and said with slight doubt, "Did something wonderful happen to you?"

I told Old Kulu what I had experienced before, wanting him to tell me what was going on, why I had entered my mental sea and was able to see my previous memories at will in an uncanny way, like a hacker breaking into a computer and looking through the information on it at will.

He opened his mouth so wide that he could have swallowed his whole fist, before exhaling for a long time, and then began to question me for three hours, asking me all sorts of questions, starting with my reading of the herbology book on the parchment, and even my every movement and what I was thinking.

In the end, the old kuru looked at the wooden cup with great sadness and said, "It is very likely that you have entered a state of deep meditation, but you did not know how to restrain your mental energy, so you fell into a coma when it was depleted, but you should be fine. If I had known that, I would have saved that snake bile fruit."

"Deep meditation?" I was a little curious and wished Old Kulu had made it clearer.

Old Kulu put out his cigarette, put it carefully into his pocket, filled the wooden cup with water, stirred it with his finger and drank it down. The bitterness of this snake bile herb is still poor, and as for what the deep meditation is all about, no one has been able to say for sure. But the rumours before were that some cultivators would stimulate deep meditation while meditating. To the extent that I haven't heard of anyone going into deep meditation while reading a book."

"According to my understanding, this wonderful state should be able to enhance certain attributes of the body, stimulate the body's potential, and even break through some bottlenecks during cultivation." Old Kuru looked at me seriously and asked, "Jia, what do you feel now?"

I thought and thought but didn't find anything special about me, so I said, "My head is a bit dizzy, it's like I've memorised all the words on those parchment scrolls, er, so strange, those words turn into a picture in my mind, I can clearly see the form of each herb and can clearly remember their characteristics."

Old Kulu patted my face, stood up and said to me, "Get a good night's sleep and you'll be fine when you wake up."

And again to Kuz, "It's windy at night, remember to block the door curtain."

Kurtz had been tossing and turning most of the night, and although he had fallen asleep on me, the strings of his heart were tense and he would have been relieved to see that I was safe and sound.

It was probably because I had had enough sleep that I couldn't sleep at all.

I was too tired from the day and now I was a bit dizzy, so I didn't bother to think about anything, my head was blank and I just opened my eyes and looked at the moonlit night sky through the hole in the roof of the tent. I could feel my body again, it was like my soul was out of my body, I felt my mind could drift at will, in this tent, even if I didn't use my eyes to see, but simply feel, I could clearly feel every object in the tent, including their shapes, I could sense even penetrate into the smoked leg of lamb and clearly feel the structure of the bones. Feeling another wave of dizziness, I hastily withdrew my senses and silently felt the magical Force slowly spinning in my body. I found that the sensation was surprisingly much clearer.

It was then that I suddenly realised that the deep meditation during the day had actually enhanced my perception.

There was a door, and once it was opened the view inside was no longer mysterious.

I felt that my control of the Force had become stronger, and it was very stable, spinning freely between my fingers, and I simply reached out and drew it in the air. I simply stretched out my hand and drew a magical formation in the air, followed by a crystalline magical glow that rushed into my body like a hexagonal star formation. At the same moment, the Force inside me was activated, and more and more faint magical energy was coming into my body, so this was the feeling of "warmth"!