Translator: Strivon

  Luo Nan sat on some stone steps with a loose-leaf notebook resting on his knee, placed in a comfortable angle. Behind him was a classical-style auditorium that blocked half of the sun. The warm rays of the sun and the chilly shadow of the building were placed side by side.

  He sat right at the border where light and shadow crossed, and he faced a complicated ambient lighting. His half-squinting eyes were focused on the tip of his pen. They moved together in strokes along the paper’s surface to create neat characters one after another.

  "The breathing of life of heaven and earth is the format of heaven and earth. The breathing of life of the human body is the format of the self. To display effects of the infinitesimal Self-Format with the vast and hazy Heaven and Earth Format requires not only a great match in strength, but a look into the details. Before, I did things too crudely, too stupidly……"

  He lifted his head upon writing to this point. His gaze cut across the flow of people outside the large auditorium. It was now time for school society activities. The number one area with the greatest congregation of students was near the large auditorium, near the Nanan River Bank. The ages of the people spanned several years. From tall to short, from big to small, from beautiful to ugly, from male to female, all sorts of people came and went, forming a motion picture.

  Ten days ago, Luo Nan would have sketched out a drawing with his observations. He would capture a few interesting people of the here and the now in drawings with typical characteristics.

  Three days ago, Luo Nan would have striven to commit everybody who fell in his vision to memory. He would have memorized their facial features, their movements, their clothes, their relationships with each other, and so on. He would have classified them with great detail and precision.

  Luo Nan was currently sitting on the steps of the large auditorium. He swept his gaze around and selected ten people out of the several hundred people below him. These ten were at different locations. Some were male. Some were female. They were not necessarily in the same grades or societies. However, in the following half-minute, these same ten people brushed past Luo Nan’s side as they climbed up the steps of the auditorium.

  These ten people passed the closest to Luo Nan compared to other people. They came in the order he predicted, and he made not a single mistake until the last two. He made an error for the first time because one of them answered a call.

  "Not bad…… Eighty percent."

  No one else could see it, but Luo Nan was absolutely clear. Every time a person approached him starting from a distance of two meters away, the muscles of his body would tense and relax, and his pores would open and close. He was instantly alert to ensure that he could jump up and react in a single breath every time a person came near him. Although his vigilance and preparation to react at a moment’s notice was covert, it used up quite a deal of energy. A thin layer of sweat appeared upon his body by the time these ten people passed him, and his breathing became a bit uneven.

  It consumed a lot of physical energy, but it consumed even more mental energy. This 80% success rate wasn’t due to luck; it was from observing several hundred people’s body language, direction of pace, and location and distance. Luo Nan began from the largest to the smallest, from the outside to the inside, to make his judgments.

  This was none other than what Gym Master Xiu meant when he said, "With the self as the master, observe one’s self and observe others through illumination." Luo Nan wasn’t a video recorder. He wasn’t an inanimate object. He was a living person. Every sight captured by his eyes had to correspond to his own body. He had to clarify the key information, and discern this information into different levels of priority. This included prediction, preparation, and reaction.

  Therefore, cultivating the eyes orifice was never just about cultivating the eyes. It was using the eye cavity as a guide to meld mental and physical energy, vital energy, and the body into a single furnace. This was a systematic undertaking. This was a marvelous cultivation method involving a single point levering and moving the entire body.

  Luo Nan spent nearly a week’s worth of time before he could understand it. Then, he used three more days to consolidate his foundation. It could be said that he finally started after the tenth day.

  Luo Nan thought about his cultivation progress and couldn’t bear to go back in time. Luo Nan was required to maintain high levels of sharpness. It was totally impermissible for him to get distracted or be lost in thought.

  In the beginning, he couldn’t determine the priority levels of information in an accurate manner. Aside from that, he felt that he wasn’t using his eyes meticulously enough. He hated that he couldn’t engrave everything within his vision into his mind. It seemed that he wouldn’t be able to reach Gym Master Xiu’s standard of a ’bitter cultivation’ if he didn’t do this. At all times, he had to completely concentrate and torment his mind until both his strength of vision and mental capacity were squeezed clean.

  Luo Nan’s eyeballs felt achy and swollen just recollecting. His reflex was about to make him shed tears, but perhaps he should simply close his eyes, lie down, and take a nap. Napping was one of the greatest pleasures in the world, after all.

  Bai Xinyan saw Luo Nan like this and practically canceled all of the Frost River Waterway exercises. According to her, Xiu Shenyu’s torture was much more effective in exhausting Luo Nan’s soul strength than anything else. He was simply like a lantern burning through the last bit of oil. Luo Nan might not even make it by the time Doctor Clay, whose schedule was constantly delayed, gets over to Xia City. Luo Nan might even breathe his last.

  Luo Nan knew that he was walking a skewed path, but Gym Master Xiu spoke as softly as a feather, "Balance is what’s desired. First know the bounds and ends. Then increase or decrease the scale." It was fine for a beginner to be fearless of excessiveness for a time.

  All right. Luo Nan will remember to increase or decrease the scale for a lifetime.

  Luo Nan flipped through his notebook until he reached the page with the flexible e-ink screen. He opened up a spreadsheet and entered the training results from this instance. Then, he went to his diary page and wrote,

  "October 25th. Thousand people training has been completed. Total success rate is 72.2%. Dividing the training into sections, the middle section has a success rate of 55.6% and the end section has a success rate of 19%……"

  Luo Nan finished doing some basic data analysis and closed his notebook. The surrounding pedestrians gave him strange looks, but Luo Nan ignored them. He took out a medicine bottle and applied some eye drops to his eyes. After that, he massaged his face.

  A slight chill soaked into his eye sockets, and instantly some steam rose through the air. The medicine, which had a moistening function, had permeated inside to fuse with Luo Nan’s vital energy.

  The liquid medicine was the product of a secret recipe given to him by Gym Master Xiu. Octopus Bro concocted it for him, and it could alleviate the fatigue of the eyes. In any case, it was quite stupid of him to overexert his eyes.

  A person’s eyes were complicated and refined structures, but in the anatomical sense, one would not be able to find the existence of the eyes orifice no matter where one looked in the eyes.

  The so-called eyes orifice were the eyes and their corresponding functions. This orifice interferes mutually with the mental plane to form a special structure. It was between what is real and what is imaginary. Only through this orifice could one attain the result of linking the inside with the outside and shine with spiritual radiance.

  It was nearly impossible for a normal person to possess the eyes orifice. Only those who possessed a certain cultivation path, and those who could interfere with the mental and the material planes, could slowly build it. It lay on the same vein as the Shield of Truth.

  Luo Nan had experienced the Shield of Truth, but it existed only as a temporary construction. The eyes orifice he was building today was like a permanent facility in comparison.

  Luo Nan could somewhat feel it already.

  Luo Nan closed his eyes. He could feel a deep pressure acting upon them. The pressure came from the Format Pyramid. It was his power on the mental plane. It was a side-effect against his fleshly body, which was on the material plane.

  Other people started with nothing and grew from there when they cultivated. Only Luo Nan was substituting the fake for the real. He was taking the power imprisoned by the format, ‘My heart’s a prison’, and was shifting it to a plane where he could control it.

  These days of exploration and experimentation had passed, and Luo Nan felt that ’imprisonment’ wasn’t a completely accurate description of his situation. It could be said that his soul strength had entered a processing assembly line, because it had to finish a sequence of processes and be turned into a fixed and finished product before it could be taken off the line.

  This was why his range of application was so greatly limited…… Chains could be used to bind people, but it was hard to use them for embroidery.

  If Luo Nan wanted to take the ’raw materials’ that was his soul strength out of there, he would need to break through the barrier that was ’My heart’s a prison’. That was why not even an iota of efficiency remained when he tried to use his soul strength outside the range of ’My heart’s a prison’s’ applications. It was not efficient at all.

  It was because of this that he had such horrible results when he tried to do the soul strength activation exercises in the Simulator layer of the Psychic Wave Network.

  But now he was progressing in his cultivation of the eyes orifice. He could take out his soul strength, and it was manageable even if it was intermittent. This sort of technique was like grinding with water, and the material plane constantly conformed to him. It was like when dripping water would eventually cut through stone. Even if everyday he could only siphon out a drop, it will still leave a mark when it smashed down. After days and days of this, a sunken pit could be formed and water could be accumulated to develop further step by step.

  What’s more was the fact that Luo Nan’s situation wasn’t as horrible as this.

  Luo Nan had just half-built the eyes orifice, and he was like a pond storing water. His soul strength trickled in. All Luo Nan had to do was carefully conserve it, prevent it from evaporating or leaking. After a while, it could turn into a deep pond, a lake, and then, an ocean.

  At this step, Luo Nan didn’t need Gym Master Xiu to remind him the importance of storing his soul strength. Every day he used seventy percent to temper his eyes orifice and build its structure. Thirty percent was set aside and stored.

  When he closed his eyes, his eyes were truly like ball bearings. They spun in his eye sockets, and they seemed cold yet not cold. Hot yet not hot. Warm and chilly. Their wonders were hard to describe.

  A mass of light appeared later on. It illuminated the interior of Luo Nan’s skull, and was hazy at first, akin to a candle flame on the verge of being extinguished. But Luo Nan was working hard every day, and with every day of training, some of the haziness faded away. There was progress.

  There was a name for this: "The sole heart lantern illuminates the nine netherworlds.” Gym Master Xiu said that the eyes orifice was considered a small success when the heart lantern probes down and lights the inner organs brightly.

  So far, Luo Nan had already built the platform for the eyes orifice. He had an outline. It was no longer a mirage. It was no longer the ravings of a lunatic.

  Because of this, Luo Nan was no longer fond of having his eyes open. Especially when he was alone, he would relax his eyelids and allow his eyeballs to become moist with both warmth and coolness. The glimmer that was the illuminating lantern of his heart felt excellent.

  He sat there with his eyes closed, yet not closed. He couldn’t see anyone, and he didn’t deliberately use his mental senses. Every time a pedestrian passed by him, faintly discernible traces were left upon his body. They were all revealed by the illumination of the heart lantern spreading ahead and extending behind.

  The light weaved and crossed, causing Luo Nan to feel like a spider at times. He had this wonderful method of knitting an incorporeal net. Every living being stirred his senses when they passed through his territory, and he responded accordingly.

  In comparison, the range of Luo Nan’s clairvoyance on the mental plane was larger and was on a more profound level, but it didn’t possess a mechanism that allowed him to purely and directly react.

  "……Huh?"

  Luo Nan suddenly shifted his shoulder, but he was a step too late. Xue Lei had walked up behind him and pressed down with a hand. The sensations of the spider web were instantly shattered…… The insect was too big.

  "Eh? Are you using your mental senses?"

  "Nope." Luo Nan failed to react in time to Xue Lei’s approach. He was a bit depressed, so he responded to Xue Lei in an unhappy tone.

  "Then you saw me coming up to you from behind? The heart lantern of the eyes orifice. Observe the self and observe others through its illumination. It’s only been a few days! A beginner needs to meld the mind and thaw the flesh and blood. They typically need a hundred days to build their foundation and tap through to this meridian point…… It took me two months back then!"

  Even Xue Lei was a bit envious as he saw Luo Nan’s rate of progress.

  "It’s not finished yet, plus I already have a foundation……"

  "Hehe. The gym master said early on that although you have a deep foundation, most of it is assimilated into your external technique, Formatting Theory. Your body is weak as well. Logically speaking, it is easy to say that you have it harder than normal people. Today’s the 25th. It’s just been ten days and there are signs already! You’re a genius!"

  "You’re exaggerating. At most I can borrow a bit of power."

  Luo Nan had a clear awareness of himself that others found hard to understand. It was quite a coincidence, occurring in this moment. A chain of lightning suddenly cut through the sea of his mind. It flashed and disappeared, but it stirred his thoughts. His heart lantern flickered and lost its stability and smoothness, but it blazed all the brighter.

  He frowned. It leaked again.

  The grounds of the lake-sea had overflowed a bit. His tiny little pond couldn’t store it all.

  Before he could finish his thoughts, a loud voice called out from the lower steps, "Nanster, Leister! I’m here!"

  Luo Nan didn’t need to look to know that it was Xie Junping. He had come to pick them up. Luo Nan dispelled his thoughts for now, stood up, walked down the flight of steps shoulder to shoulder with Xue Lei, and got into the cart.

  The electric cart went around the stream of people and sped away.