766.
"Alone I stride through Heaven and Earth—who will walk with me?"
獨步乾坤 誰伴我.
Zhang Zhiqian, his sideburns threaded with gray, slowly bowed his head before Park Seong-jin, who looked barely twenty.
There was no hesitation in the movement.
He set aside face, seniority, and the dignity of a sect head in a single gesture.
"I ask to learn."
At those words, the air of the inn trembled faintly.
Zhang Zhiqian laid out his own path of practice.
From refining essence into qi,
from refining qi into spirit,
from refining spirit back into emptiness,
and at last, joining emptiness with the Dao.
The orthodox line Quanzhen had systematized—
鍊精化氣, 鍊氣化神, 鍊神還虛, 鍊虛合道—
he explained it steadily, as one reciting a road he had truly walked.
"I have walked this road.
But… I did not reach its end."
Practice was like that.
If you did everything and it still would not open, you stopped where you were.
And there were only two reasons to stop.
Either you were wrong, or the study itself was wrong.
"Many people say it's because I lack something.
They say it must be my fault, because there exists even one person who succeeded."
Zhang Zhiqian smiled bitterly.
"But I no longer think so."
A study, in principle, should work when you learn it, understand it, and train the method.
If you learn triangulation, you should be able to survey.
Yet this study—almost no one makes it through.
Only a rare few, with extraordinary conditions, passed the gate.
Most books were written by those who never arrived,
depending on hearsay and interpretation,
writing down what they had not lived.
So Zhang Zhiqian bowed his head to someone far younger than himself.
"This is how I have practiced.
Please look at what is real and what is false."
---*
Park Seong-jin's summary of Daoist cultivation of nature and life
Park Seong-jin did not speak for a long time.
Then he opened his mouth slowly.
His arrangement was simple, and yet strangely clear.
He compressed what he had been saying into a few pillars.
1) What cultivation actually means.
To refine nature (性) and life (命), for a person living today, has one meaning.
Brighten your mind, see what is true, and gain the strength to live as the subject of your own life.
Whether you become an immortal, or live long, is secondary.
The core is becoming the owner of your own life.
2) The inner medicine and the outer medicine.
There are two branches of practice.
Outer medicine (外藥) is the study that uses the body.
Breath, qi and blood, physiological effects.
It can treat illness.
It can also keep life going longer.
Inner medicine (內藥) is the study of doing nothing.
Non-action, 無爲.
Not a method, but a state.
Keeping the mind clear.
Inner medicine has no visible shape and no graspable "base."
Yet in truth it exists unmistakably.
3) Water rising, fire descending—change that happens by itself.
In outer medicine, yin and yang circulate outwardly.
In inner medicine, the work happens inside.
The "water" of the kidneys rises.
The "fire" of the head descends.
That is 水昇火降.
At that time, essence does not leak.
Qi becomes fine.
Spirit grows quiet.
You do not force it shut.
It becomes that way on its own.
4) The change of essence, qi, and spirit.
When essence is refined, the root yang-qi draws up.
When that yang-qi settles firmly, it does not scatter.
That root becomes qi and is refined further.
When original qi stays, breathing naturally slows.
Inhalation and exhalation almost vanish.
5) Refining spirit—return.
To refine spirit means to refine the original spirit, the pre-heaven mind.
Body and mind's root merge and return to the source of Heaven.
When the original spirit gathers, stray thoughts rest on their own.
The mind fixes, vast and steady.
You do not "stop" it.
There is no need to hold.
Conclusion.
When inner and outer medicine are cultivated together,
regardless of whether one becomes an immortal or not,
a person stops being shaken.
That is the end of this study.
Park Seong-jin finished.
"This is what I have seen.
Through your words, I have arranged what I think into this form."
Zhang Zhiqian could not lift his head for a long time.
He understood.
The answer he had sought was not complete inside scriptures—
it was already complete inside one person's lived life.
So he said again,
"Help me."
This was no longer the sect head addressing someone below him.
It was one practitioner speaking to another.
--*
Park Seong-jin did not speak at length.
If anything, he arranged it too easily—so the listener was the one who grew flustered.
"Even if you call them inner and outer medicine, it isn't much."
Zhang Zhiqian raised his head.
"The words sound fine.
Essence, qi, spirit.
Water rising, fire descending.
Non-action, naturalness.
But in the end it's one meaning: look carefully with a clear mind.
Then you must explain how it becomes 'working.'
There's no bridge.
That means few actually knew."
Park Seong-jin paused, then added calmly.
"And if it was that important, they should have written first how to practice mind-work properly.
'The mind must be clean and empty and clear'—fine.
How, then?
How do we become that way?
It's missing.
If the mind is clear like a mirror, will everything be reflected and seen?"
His tone carried a faint edge, almost mocking.
Then he broke into a broad smile.
"Instead they pile up nonsense and say, 'You didn't work hard enough.'
'Your study is insufficient.'
'Your karmic conditions didn't reach.'
They don't even need to say it.
A learner will naturally think, 'It's my fault.'"
He shook his head.
"That's the fault of teachers and books that failed to teach the study properly.
Teachers didn't know, and books were translated and copied anyway."
Zhang Zhiqian's hand clenched his sleeve.
"Someone writes an experience that happened to them by accident as if it's a study anyone can reproduce,
then when it doesn't work, they speak as if the reader is lacking.
It happened by chance,
and they don't even know how it happened."
"I'm not trying to insult your predecessors.
I don't even know who they were, but I understand why they spoke that way.
They didn't reach that realm."
"It's like Jeoksa Tugwan.
People who never experienced it spoke of it.
'There is such a realm, I hear.'
'The book says this.'
'So you try hard.'
'If you fail, it's your fault, not mine.'"
A frightening statement.
And true.
Park Seong-jin's gaze pinned him directly.
"I'll ask you now.
Sect Head—did you succeed by that method?"
Silence stretched.
Zhang Zhiqian bowed his head slowly.
He was honest.
"…It did not happen.
I improved.
As years added, my power grew.
But it did not open."
Park Seong-jin nodded.
"That's the answer."
It is true that with a clear mind you see more clearly.
But the moment you speak as though having a clear mind alone makes one an immortal,
the explanation becomes a lie.
"To explain the Dao with such soft-headed words is the most contemptible thing."
He continued, steady and sharp.
"I also admit there are parts you must embody.
But if hundreds read a book and none succeed,
the fault is not in the readers.
The book is wrong."
He said it plainly.
"So we must beware vague, sloppy books."
People who have never once arrived—practically—at what nature (性) is and what life (命) is,
still talk of 'dual cultivation.'
Park Seong-jin had not read that many books.
He had begun late, and he had not touched many Daoist texts of this kind.
"It's ridiculous.
Some fools wrote things they didn't know.
They say 'cultivate both,' and yet they never write the concrete process of how.
If you sit and stand a hundred times, what changes?
A thousand times, what changes?
They didn't do it."
He read the difference cleanly.
The difference between words and lived experience.
Between hearsay and arrival.
Between pretending to explain what cannot be explained,
and knowing without needing to speak.
So Park Seong-jin separated studies,
sifted books,
and chose teachers.
And his criterion was one thing.
Is this something that works by reading,
or something you only know by going there yourself.
Any study that could not tell the difference—
no matter how grand it sounded—
was not a study to him from the start.
---*
Beijing was already boiling.
From the city gate onward, a tide of people stretched unbroken.
Horses and carts, banners and instruments, envoys and retinues from the empire's four corners tangled into a single heaving crush.
Whenever a kurultai was held, Beijing was always like this.
It was the day the empire's heart briefly turned itself outward.
The walls were high.
The gate towers were grand to the point of excess.
Yet that grandeur felt less like order than like gathered force—
weight before refinement.
Pressure that seemed ready to scatter unless someone kept gripping it.
Zhang Zhiqian entered by formal procedure as a Quanzhen Daoist.
The markings of the Daoist establishment led.
Officials opened the way.
The murmuring among the crowd subsided.
Some knew his name.
Some bowed only from his face.
The authority of an old Daoist worked without speaking.
The reason the Great Khan had summoned him was simple.
Many did not trust the Great Khan's words.
But an old Daoist's words were received differently.
Politics spoke in the language of interest, and that language always bred suspicion.
A Daoist's words sounded as if they stood outside interests.
So they were believed more easily.
The Great Khan knew it.
What would cause backlash from his own mouth could, through the Daoist's mouth, become the people's grievance, and Heaven's intent.
He summoned a Quanzhen Daoist to hear resentments from every region—
to let them pour out, to soothe them, and if needed, to absorb them.
When they reached the forecourt, the welcoming crowd surged.
Musicians began to play.
Soldiers raised spears to form a corridor.
Red silk snapped.
Gold ornaments flared in the sun.
In that gap, Park Seong-jin stood a step back.
He did not stand behind Zhang Zhiqian.
He did not step forward, either.
His uniform was neat but not ornate.
Adornments were minimal.
His position as escort was clear, yet he made himself hard to notice.
There was no reason to enter the Great Khan's gaze.
No wish to.
When the welcome swelled to its loudest, Park Seong-jin turned his head.
He offered Zhang Zhiqian a brief salute.
A greeting for the bond made on horseback.
That was enough.
Then he vanished into the crowd.
Under banners, behind carts, into the seams between people.
No one seized him.
No one searched for him.
Beijing stayed loud.
Soon the Great Khan would sit facing the Daoist, and countless words would pass.
But Park Seong-jin did not remain.
His role was already done.
He walked again toward where people's voices could not reach.
A place one step aside from the empire's center—
the place he found most comfortable.