Days turn to weeks. However in the world of cultivation, even years can pass in a blink of an eye and were considered fleeting moments on the quest for immortality.
Yet for the young Xia Yan who had once been a young man that lived a life full of modern conveniences and easily accessible entertainment, it was still a little difficult to bear. Other than Sa Man, there were rarely other visitors who came after the first few times, having better things to do than flatter a weak, useless child of the Xia family. As for his family... Xia Yan sighs softly. Well, they were still considered very close and caring compared to other families in this world, but it was still normal to not visit for long periods due to their own journeys, quests, trainings and cultivation.
Sa Man who had already stayed for so long, had also recently bid him goodbye temporarily- attracted by the news of a certain medicinal tree that could help with body strengthening, which had recently began to fruit. While the old cultivator was deeply reluctant to leave, he knew this fruit could help Xia Yan a lot, and so he couldn't bear to let such an opportunity slip.
Such a journey would take at least a month minimum, meaning that Xia Yan would really have nearly no visitors for the foreseeable future save for the servants who were too respectful and dull to chat with him.
Xia Yan knew cultivators were just like this. Often going on adventures, taking care of important tasks, and most importantly- cultivating. It's okay when you're still young and new, when the foundation hasn't been fully established and people still need to eat and sleep to live. But once you progress to a certain point, such things were just unnecessary hobbies to indulge in, and entering closed door cultivation was much more to the norm. Therefore it was relatively normal to meet one person today and then meet them twenty years later.
Sa Man whose had his fair share of closed door cultivation explained that sometimes the feeling of getting close to a breakthrough was like trying to catch a vague memory in your head. It's that irritating and frustrated feeling where you've misplaced your favourite robe, or finding a gift that you had promised to pass on the next day but put it down somewhere and now it's vanished from sight. In closed door cultivation you will focus on nothing but this, using all sorts of mental methods to try catch this metaphorical memory.
And if anyone has lost something they're desperate to find, they would know intimately that, generally, the more you focus on searching for it, the harder it is to find. Imagining having this feeling for years, even decades, and the thing your searching for isn't even a physical item but an intangible concept of an idea… to be honest, Xia Yan kind of empathises with the cultivators who end up trying to take shortcuts like demonic cultivation or using artefacts or potions.
The willpower it takes really wasn't for everyone.
In cultivation novels, there is actually very little description of closed door cultivation or even the understanding of techniques. Generally it's brushed off by a time skip or absorbing knowledge from a jade slip and so on. For breakthroughs usually it's produced by a deeper and more profound understanding of life or whatever technique and element you specialise in. However rarely there is detail on this aspect either. Especially nowadays when the trend for many stories is to get a cultivation system or a golden finger or to be reborn as a genius beautiful villain character, there is almost no need to show any proper in depth cultivation at all!
When reading, people generally won't care about this, but living in such a world, Xia Yan was also a little baffled. After all, while it isn't completely brushed over, many teachings are incredibly vague, and jade slips that automatically give you secret moves are also a fairly commonplace practice. Techniques and cultivation practices were all from tens of thousands of years ago, passed down from ancestor to ancestor, but experimenting and producing new concepts were unheard of now.
Not just in terms of cultivation, but in general.
Xia Yan, for lack of much else to do, hugs his fat sheep plushie Xiao Yangpai, and sighs emotionally, while greedily reaching for a green jade pig plushie sitting next to his other pink pig plush. It was really terrible when you think about it more and more. Tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, and yet everyone is still stuck in ancient times! It was seriously too unscientific!
To put it into perspective, the battery was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta. The Bronze age was roughly 3300 to 1200 B.C, and the Iron age was 1200 to 500 B.C. This meant from the start of using bronze tools to the invention of the first battery, there was 5,300 years in between.
5,300 years.
Then you look at this world.
This world has been living with essentially magic, and yet glass windows still are not a thing after 100,000 years. There are still many floods because no one has produced decent dam technology. No one has figured out the advanced technological machine known as a pencil, much less a ballpoint pen. And forget flushing toilets, squat toilets were still not a thing here. It's appalling.
The cultivators don't need to eat or drink or sleep at a certain point in their cultivation, but that usually takes many decades, even hundreds of years. Still, ignoring that, Xia Yan does understand their aim is this point and therefore not interested in improving the current technology which would eventually become redundant to them. But what about the mortals? How can there be no one out there for the past thousand years who didn't have a shred of ingenuity and genius?
Xia Yan who slowly sorted through his memories and processed his understanding of the world, wanted to collapse a little inside.
Unfortunately, even though Xia Yan had transmigrated, he also could not contribute much in terms of ingenuity and genius.
Does he know how to make glass? Vaguely. Something to do with sand, heat and pressure, he's fairly sure.
But make a battery? Sorry he handed basic electricity knowledge back to his chemistry teacher ages ago. Build a proper dam? Vaguely, but ultimately not really. Make a pencil? To be honest he's never really thought of how people got the graphite into there. A pen? He's broken and taken apart some before… but he can't really remember the pieces now.
Annoyed, Xia Yan bites down on the soft ear of the sheep, little teeth grinding into it producing a sense of comfort. He likes to sleep and daydream sure but it's impossible to continue without some sort of supplemental entertainment. And to be frank, even if he could cultivate, that objectively was not exactly a fun activity either.
Everything here was quiet and serene… and dull. And while he doesn't miss the exhausting pressures of the modern day world, he misses the array of options to help pass the time and delight the brain. Activities like watching television, short videos, reading stories, mindlessly scrolling on your phone, playing games… oh god, he's missed so many event banners for FU: Carnival by now and it's so hard to get repeat banners.
Ah, if only this was the sort of story where the transmigrator main character's golden finger was having his phone transported over with him into the new world. With unlimited charge and wifi available everywhere. Even if its only function was to connect to the internet, Xia Yan would be so happy! (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)
With such thoughts, he once again closed his eyes and slept.
When he opens his eyes he's in a familiar ocean again. However, it was a little different. The warm and cheerful waves were no longer as relaxed but they carried a sense of urgency. Xia Yan felt his body be pushed to and fro the water as the sky which was usually a bright blue, started to darken.
Xia Yan felt a sense of stuffiness in his chest, a sense of impatience and an urgency to go somewhere, to do something, though he didn't know where or what. It was the same growing feeling as he felt in reality, but this time it had directly manifested in his dreams.
The young transmigrator was a little surprised. It wasn't like he hasn't felt this sort of thing before, but his dreams had never reflected it so directly like this. Then again, he at least had Sa Man as a constant companion to ease and distract his emotions, and now that he was gone, the buildup of accumulated anxiety and boredom would naturally hit harder.
Helplessly, Xia Yan doesn't bother to try to dive into the water. If the surface of the waves were like this already, he was sure the currents below would not be any kinder, and at least the waves give more visual information than down below.
Instead he quickly adjusts himself, lying on his back and floating along the waves like a piece of driftwood. At first Xia Yan was a bit nervous at this huge change in scenery, but after the fourth time he coasted on a three metre tall wave before falling down, only to be caught by another growing wave, he had completely forgotten his fears in all the excitement.
With bright eyes Xia Yan laughs and shrieks as the waves become bigger and bigger, his brain filled with an adrenaline rush as rain also begins to pour down. If this was reality it would make a horrifying sight, but in the safety and absolute trust of it being a dream, it was more thrilling than a rollercoaster.
In the moment of free falling, the seconds between seem to slow down, or maybe, it's his heightened perception that has made the passing of time more vivid. Drops of water from the spray of the waves, the direction of the air- not just from the fall but from the movements of the rising waters, the winds in the sky- the change of temperature on his skin, his hair, the feel of his clothing fluttering yet stuck on him at the same time.
Somehow, Xia Yan felt like he had grasped something and his eyes gleam faintly.
As he fell this time he twisted his body so he faced the waters like he was diving into it, and held onto that rush, that vivid feeling of falling and just… kept holding it.
His slim body fell down, and kept falling, the ocean waters that was only a few centimetres away seemed to twist and bloom outwards, waves rising into the air like glass petals filled with fluid motion. Xia Yan continued to fall through the centre of this beautiful, unnatural vortex of water, and other than the initial fear that came instinctively there was a sense of inexplicable understanding and control that calmed him.
Emboldened he once again readjusts his position. It's awkward, without the buoyancy and density of water, and the continuous feeling of free-falling it was more difficult to move from falling head first to feet first. In the end Xia Yan ends up in a sort of sitting, almost fetal position, though it barely lasts long before his body tilts back again, unable to grasp that balance.
Fortunately for him, this was a dream. One he was slowly but surely grasping the rules for.
Before his body flips over from his perceived balance he reaches up and his fingers enter the wall of water around him. His body immediately stops falling, and instead, is dragged upwards by the water making Xia Yan's eyes shine as he inexplicably felt his hand grasp onto something solid despite there being nothing present but water.
With only a bit of imaginative thought, he no longer finds himself rising but once again falling, or more accurately, sinking downwards at a slower pace. Moving his hand out of the water he free falls with a shriek before reaching out for the water once more. There the same slowed effect was experienced.
Eyes full of bright interest he looks down below at the empty circular darkness and fails to see any golden sand at the bottom. Because right now the sea was bottomless.
But what if it wasn't?
Xia Yan was in a state of thinking but not thinking, daydreaming, fantasising yet without the concentration he had previously emphasised on before.
He had been too rigid. Thinking it was a new way to cultivate it must have similar rules.
But was dreaming such a rigid thing?
From the depths of the darkness pulsed faint glimmers of light before a stream of stars rushed up and past Xia Yan like a school of excited fish. Such a wondrous sight, made Xia Yan laugh with wonder and joy.
Of course not.
It was bringing the unreal into reality, forming monsters from your mind and strangeness into normalcy. How could it compare with traditional cultivating techniques?
Maybe it was important to have some concentration, to add some logic to strengthen this illogical world.
But the most important thing wasn't this.
The most important thing?
Was to dream big.