764.
When it started to feel stifling, he headed out to the wasteland near Dadu.
He chose ground where no one's footsteps reached and walked slowly with no purpose.
He walked without counting his steps until the dry, pale-yellow earth turned red under the slanting light of late afternoon, then came back.
For him, it was a kind of picnic.
It was different from the stillness inside the army camp.
Here, even without trying to empty himself, silence made room for itself.
It was time when no thoughts rose, and no greed stirred.
He was walking through a span of no-desire, 無欲.
He had crossed into a higher realm while living at a relentless pace.
Yet he had rarely been granted time to simply enjoy quiet.
A few months at home, briefly staying in one place, had been all he had.
He crossed the threshold in that short gap, but he lacked time to turn the study fully into his own.
After reaching a realm, the work does not continue only through forms practice or sword-walking.
Most of it is made of thought and sinking inward.
The utmost martial skill is closer to refining the mind.
He did not completely abandon the sword-practice.
But now it could become an obstacle rather than a help.
Thought needed to flow, yet old habits, old postures, and a hardened worldview could catch his ankle.
The complex units of bodywork that read an opponent's motion and answer it.
He asked himself whether he still needed them.
The powerful movement of limbs meant to bring an opponent down was a beginning on the road to mastery.
Now was the time to set things down.
Everything was relative, and within that relativity even the use of force changed.
A method that twists a grabbed arm and drives a head into a post remains effective in cramped space at short distance.
But at that level, what mattered was not the fineness of technique.
The problem was the moment when technique no longer became necessary.
That was why he needed thought.
Time that permitted that thought mattered more than anything.
He stayed among people and sank inward, then walked in nature and settled down.
Through time of doing nothing, he was preparing to move on.
To shave away movement, to empty out force, to reach a place where even thought disappeared.
Outside Beijing.
There was an inn on land that lay on the northbound road and yet saw few footsteps.
It sat a little off the official highway.
The road split there, and the wind always arrived first.
Horses and carts passed only now and then, and the surroundings were close to wasteland.
Yet places like this were where inns endured.
Between relay stations, it was where information and supplies stopped to catch their breath.
On the relay system laid densely to govern a vast empire, inn culture grew naturally.
Travelers slept here, drank tea, and set their next route in order.
Park Seong-jin was one of them.
That day he stopped in after a long walk.
He had come out as far as the outskirts of Beijing because it felt stifling, and he entered the inn as the sun slanted down.
He carried little, and his appearance was plain.
Yet there was a presence that did not quite belong.
He looked like neither soldier, merchant, nor scholar.
He ordered a cup of tea.
That was when a Daoist sat down across from him.
His beard was not long, and his robe was worn but neat.
His gaze was clear, and his seated posture was still.
He introduced himself as a Quanzhen Daoist.
He said he practiced Quanzhen Living Methods, 全眞活法.
It was a discipline that governed body, qi, and thought together.
Sharing the table was chance.
But the Daoist took interest first in Park Seong-jin's strange, mismatched air.
"You look like someone who has walked a long road."
It was a double-edged line.
It meant a long journey, and it also weighed the depth of cultivation.
Park Seong-jin nodded.
He answered the first meaning.
"I have to walk for my thoughts to settle."
At that, the Daoist's eyes flashed briefly.
The conversation continued without effort.
The Daoist spoke of orthodox practice.
How to steady the breath.
How to circulate qi.
How to use the body without damaging it.
Park Seong-jin listened.
His posture was that of someone receiving instruction.
He measured the other man's realm through his words and through the responses those words drew.
Then the Daoist suddenly asked,
"You've already gone… quite far, haven't you?"
Park Seong-jin nodded without hiding it.
Explanation was not easy.
His study was difficult to unpack in words.
It was neither technique nor theory.
It was closer to a sensation left behind after discarding and discarding again.
Only then did the Daoist look startled as he watched the silence.
"Your level… is high."
At those words, Park Seong-jin looked at the Daoist for the first time.
After that, the talk grew long.
The Daoist laid out Quanzhen study again in language.
What Park Seong-jin listened for was not the language itself.
It was the structure beneath it, the way of thinking, the criteria for what one clings to and what one sets down.
Only then did he understand.
What had made his own study hard to explain was not the absence of words, but the lack of organized language.
The Daoist's words were orthodox.
Yet that orthodoxy made reconstruction possible.
Borrowing the Daoist's language, Park Seong-jin rearranged his own study inside himself.
Thoughts that had been scattered acquired a frame.
He was becoming steadier.
It looked like chance, yet this meeting carried a reason that felt inevitable.
Quanzhen Daoists had long been entangled with Yuan politics.
Since Qiu Chuji, their shadow had always lain along the official roads between Shangdu and Beijing.
This encounter at an inn was one more inevitability scattered across the road.
They spent much time together.
They drank tea, walked the roads, talked, and returned to Beijing together.
Park Seong-jin still spoke little.
But now he felt he might be able to translate his study into words.
Through the Daoist's language, he saw that their strength lay in recording through writing.
He learned he could translate his own silence.
This fortunate encounter was not splendid.
There was no fight and no miracle.
Two people recognizing each other across one cup of tea in an inn.
That was enough.
And Park Seong-jin understood.
This meeting too was another lesson placed on the road he walked.
---*
What was Quanzhen, 全眞.
As he listened, Park Seong-jin rolled the single term around for a long time.
Quan, 全, wholeness.
Zhen, 眞, truth.
The Daoist said it meant making one's original truth whole.
Only when jing 精 is whole, qi 氣 is whole, and shen 神 is whole does one become Quanzhen.
If there is even a little flaw, it is not whole.
If there is even a little stain, it is not true.
The words were simple.
But Park Seong-jin immediately saw.
How harsh that simplicity was.
To be whole meant leaving nothing behind.
The Daoist's Quanzhen practice was severe.
"True skill," 眞功, was enduring humiliation and swallowing filth, 忍辱含垢.
It meant taking in wounded pride, insults, and everything the world called dirty, leaving no trace in the heart.
"True conduct," 眞行, was to suffer oneself and benefit others, 苦己利人.
To lower oneself, reduce desire, and cut life's demands down to the bare minimum.
The Daoist called that cultivation.
Park Seong-jin felt it as an extreme kind of sorting and clearing.
But what mattered more was what came next.
He said Quanzhen no longer sought the body's long continuance.
Once they pursued ascension in broad daylight, 白日飛昇, where form 形 and spirit 神 would not perish together, but now they accepted the body's end.
Only the single awakened root, called true nature 眞性, or one numinous spark 一靈, or original spirit 元神, or true heart 眞心, could endure.
The body was a shackle.
So some destroyed the body to hasten release of true nature and yang-spirit, 陽神.
At that passage, Park Seong-jin fell silent for a moment.
Am I that extreme.
Or have I already come by another road.
Last, the Daoist recited a line.
一念無生卽自由, 心頭無物卽仙佛.
When not a single thought arises, one becomes one's own master and is free, and when the mind holds no objects, one is divine and Buddha.
Park Seong-jin held the line for a long time.
Freedom.
Mastery.
Divinity.
It resembled what he had felt inside martial practice, inside silence, and while walking the wasteland.
The roots of inner alchemy, and Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin.
Cultivating nature and life together, 性命雙修.
Nature first, life after, 先性後命.
First gather the mind, lower thought, keep from being stained by circumstances, and see one's nature with a clear mind, 明心見性.
Only then steady the breath, refine jing 精 into qi 氣, refine qi into shen 神, and finally refine shen and return to emptiness, 虛.
The Daoist called it tradition.
But Park Seong-jin understood.
These names were attached after the experience had already been lived.
Quanzhen Daoists did not turn their backs on the world even in times of chaos.
They let people live in hermitages while enforcing plain life, and they stepped forward actively to save the world and relieve the people.
Immortal longevity did not lie in secret formulas, but in making slaughter stop with a single sentence.
They believed that was the strange merit that truly saved the world.
Those words sank deep into Park Seong-jin's heart.
He suddenly understood.
He had already been standing on Quanzhen's road, yet he had not had a language he could hold.
So he could not speak, so he could not explain, so he had been alone.
The Daoist's words were orthodox.
Yet that orthodoxy made reconstruction possible.
Borrowing Quanzhen language, Park Seong-jin rearranged his study again.
He turned sensations gained from martial skill into a structure of thought, and carried experience from silence into sentences that could become language.
In that moment, his study finally fixed itself as language, and as writing.
He understood.
This was not a study to keep alone.
It had to become speech, and it had to become sentences, and someday it had to be readable by someone else.
That was why a book was necessary.
Not a manual of techniques, and not a book of secret formulas, but writing that recorded how a person reaches truth.
Borrowing Quanzhen's language, yet not remaining within Quanzhen.
A language that had rarely been held in the hand until then, yet had to exist.
That day, setting down his tea cup, Park Seong-jin thought,
This study has to leave me now.
And that moment was the true beginning of the book that would be born from him.
He had endured a long stiflingness where he knew too well and had become too embodied to grasp where even an explanation should begin.
If he reached out, it was there, and if he closed his eyes, it unfolded, yet the moment he tried to place it on the tongue, it vanished.
That stiflingness eased only after meeting the Quanzhen Daoist.
What he gained was not a new awakening, and not a new realm.
It was a name.
More precisely, it was a sensation like permission to call it by a name.
He understood.
He did not need to force an explanation of his study.
Someone had already walked before him, and language had been left behind on that road.
So he felt he could call his study inner alchemy, 內丹.
A change that rose inside the body and acted beyond the body.
Not breath, not technique, but something like an alchemy of awareness.
And he thought he could call the vast mind like sky, boundaryless and impossible to contain, holding things while still empty, by the name emptiness, 虛.
The name was not perfect, yet it was almost accurate.
Empty, yet not hollow.
And one more thing.
That strange and precious something rising in his mind, unseen, ungraspable, slipping away no matter how one tried to say it.
He could give it the name one numinous spark, 一靈.
One wakefulness.
A center that did not disappear.
Me, and not me.
Of course, not everything was the same.
Park Seong-jin knew.
Some words came from places no one had actually reached.
Some sentences were copied down as they were after someone misunderstood another's words.
So he chose pointing over silence.
"This passage isn't spoken by someone who has truly been there."
"It's written by someone who hasn't reached that realm, who heard another person and wrote it down."
"It may be conjecture."
"In reality, it's a little different."
The Daoist did not look surprised.
He closed his eyes briefly and nodded.
"That's right."
"So it twisted as it was transmitted."
From then on, it was not teaching, but shared sorting.
Park Seong-jin pointed out errors, and the Daoist rebuilt the words and sentences that formed Quanzhen's subtle principles.
Where experience ended, and where metaphor began.
What had to be said, and what could never be carried into speech.
That was how the language was refined.
After that day, Park Seong-jin's stiflingness eased.
He could not explain everything perfectly.
But now he could distinguish the places where explanation was needed, and the places one could cross by naming.
That was enough.
He understood.
Study was not the act of gaining something new, but the act of becoming able to call forth what was already there.
And that calling could not be completed in a language meant for only one person.
That day, facing the Quanzhen Daoist and choosing one word, refining one sentence, was the decisive moment that made his study able to become a book.