A breath escaped Lican's lungs.
As he stared at the colossal statue, something deep within him stirred, as though its appearance had awakened a feeling he had carried for ages and eons without ever understanding it. It was a strange emptiness, a hollow sensation buried somewhere within his existence. Yet, when he tried to grasp it, he felt nothing at all, as if even that emptiness had never truly belonged to him.
Chants echoed from the distant void.
The statue moved again, and the entire expanse trembled beneath its presence. The sound rolled through the boundless darkness, ancient and solemn, carrying a weight that seemed to transcend time itself.
"Shatter the ego, cleanse the soul, or dissolve into the endless cosmos."
"Mortal flesh is but dust; only the eternal spirit shall cross the heavenly gates."
Lican stumbled as the chants reverberated through the space around him. Their voices seemed to come from every direction, yet he could not locate their source. They were distant, almost beyond his reach, but each word struck something deep within his consciousness.
Then another chant followed.
"A thousand eons pass like a breath; ten thousand worlds crumble like ash."
The colossal statue raised one of its enormous hands. Its movements were slow, almost effortless, yet the void shook as the gigantic palm rose beyond the horizon, spreading across the heavens like a celestial continent. Its fingers stretched over the cosmos, casting an immense shadow across the boundless space.
The statue's eyes remained closed.
Yet, despite its apparent stillness, Lican felt as though its attention had fallen upon him.
He tried to move away, but his body refused to respond. When he looked down, he discovered that a golden aura had enveloped him, pressing him into place. Above his head, a bell hung suspended in the void. Its translucent body seemed to exist somewhere between reality and illusion, yet the invisible force pouring from it weighed upon him like an entire world.
Lican struggled against the suppression, but his efforts accomplished nothing.
The enormous hand continued its descent.
A single finger slowly approached his head, growing larger with every passing moment. Lican felt like an ant standing before an approaching mountain, utterly insignificant beneath something whose size defied comprehension.
The fingertip began to shine.
He braced himself, expecting the impact to crush him out of existence. Yet, when the finger finally touched his head, no pain followed. There was no crushing force, no explosion, and no sensation of his body breaking apart.
Instead, a strange harmony flowed through him.
For a brief moment, the emptiness inside him seemed to settle. An indescribable peace spread through his consciousness, so profound that he almost forgot where he was.
Then the chant sounded again, louder than before.
"Shatter the ego, cleanse the soul, or dissolve into the endless cosmos."
This time, Lican heard every word clearly, even as he closed his eyes. The light surrounding him intensified, growing brighter until it swallowed the boundaries of the void.
He no longer struggled against the force holding him down.
Something within him seemed to understand what his mind could not explain. Fighting had brought him nowhere. Resistance had changed nothing. Whatever awaited him beyond this moment, he could no longer force his way through it.
So, he let go.
He relaxed his body and allowed himself to float, surrendering to the boundless nothingness surrounding him.
Dong!
Dong!
The sound of a bell reverberated across the heavens.
One ring followed another until Lican had heard ten in total. Each struck the void with enough force to make the surrounding space tremble, and each faded into the distance before the next arrived. When the final ring disappeared, a different chant emerged.
This time, the voices were beyond counting.
Thousands, perhaps millions, echoed across the expanse, their voices overlapping as though countless beings were chanting from different points in time. The sound entered Lican's consciousness, and his mind trembled beneath its weight.
All around him, spectral lotuses began to bloom. Some rose from the boundless ground beneath his feet, their translucent petals unfolding in silence, while others descended from the heavens like a shower of celestial flowers. With every pulse of the chant, invisible ripples spread across the void, and the lotuses swayed as though the entire cosmos were breathing with them.
Then the voices spoke as one.
"Gate Gate Pāragate Pārasaṃgate Bodhi Svāhā!"
"Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O awakening, hail!"
Lican opened his eyes.
He tried to look at his hands, but there were none.
He tried to breathe, but there was no air.
Panic flared within him, sharp and unmistakably human. He searched for his limbs, his chest, anything that could reassure him that he still possessed a body. Yet he found nothing. He existed without flesh, suspended in a place that seemed to have neither beginning nor end.
Where am I?
Then he looked up.
Rising from a boundless, mirror-smooth ocean of liquid gold stood a colossal figure.
At first, Lican mistook it for a mountain, for its immense body towered so high that its summit seemed to pierce the dark violet cosmos, reaching toward the stars. But as his awareness settled upon it, the truth became clear.
It was a Buddha.
A gigantic, multi-armed Golden Buddha sat cross-legged in deep meditation within the boundless expanse of what appeared to be his own soul space. Its body was carved from gold so pure that it seemed to burn without fire, radiating a solemn majesty that made the surrounding cosmos appear insignificant.
From its broad shoulders, dozens of massive arms unfolded like the wings of a divine bird, stretching across the horizon. Some hands held weapons that hummed with world-crushing power: a thunderbolt pestle wrapped in raging lightning, a wheel of spinning fire, and other instruments whose mere presence seemed capable of shaking the laws of existence. Other hands held nothing more than a single white lotus, its delicate petals perfectly still amid the overwhelming power surrounding them.
The contrast left Lican speechless.
Destruction and serenity existed within the same entity, each appearing as natural as the other.
He tried to flee.
The moment he willed himself to turn away, however, the colossal Buddha moved with him.
Slowly, its massive heads shifted.
Lican froze as he realised that the entity possessed four faces, each gazing toward a different quadrant of eternity. Their expressions remained solemn and unreadable, as though they had witnessed the rise and fall of countless worlds without ever being moved by the passage of time.
Then the forward-facing head lowered its gaze.
Its eyelids parted.
Two suns of warm, suffocatingly compassionate light opened before him.
Lican felt those eyes settle upon him, and in that terrifying instant, a realisation struck his consciousness like a physical blow.
The Buddha wasn't looking at him.
The Buddha was him.
The boundless ocean beneath the colossal figure, the countless arms stretching across the heavens, the weapons that seemed to embody the laws of the cosmos—none of these belonged to some distant temple or an unfamiliar world.
They existed within him.
This was his soul space.
And the colossal Golden Buddha was a manifestation of his own soul.
Lican stared at the gigantic figure, struggling to comprehend what he was seeing. He was looking at himself from the outside, a tiny speck of awareness standing before the infinite majesty of his own existence.
Yet the sight did not bring him comfort.
Instead, it left him feeling more insignificant than ever.
He had thought himself a mortal struggling to survive in a world that had never intended to grant him strength. He had believed his suffering was simply the price of existing, something he had to endure because he possessed no power to change it.
But now, within the depths of his own soul, he stood before something that seemed capable of shaking heaven and earth.
Something that was both familiar and utterly beyond his understanding.
Then golden words began to appear across the sky.
They spread through the dark violet cosmos, each character forming as though an invisible hand were writing directly upon the fabric of existence. The inscriptions glowed with a solemn radiance, their ancient strokes extending across the heavens until they surrounded the colossal Buddha.
Chants echoed once more.
The Buddha's sun-like eyes remained fixed upon Lican as the ocean of liquid gold beneath it began to boil.
But it was not heat that stirred the sea.
It was conflict.
Strands of pitch-black demonic smoke erupted from the depths of Lican's subconscious, twisting through the golden waves. Blinding golden lightning followed, tearing across the heavens and colliding with the darkness. The two forces intertwined, neither yielding to the other, until massive, jagged runes emerged across the horizon.
Black and gold.
Demon and Buddha.
Their powers twisted together above the boiling ocean, transforming the once-serene soul space into a battlefield of conflicting forces.
This was not peaceful enlightenment.
It was a forced evolution.
And from the depths of that struggle, a forbidden scripture began to awaken.
The Forbidden Golden Heart Mantra.
A text meant to remain sealed away for eternity now echoed through the chambers of Lican's mind. Its voice was strange, carrying the gentleness of a meditating monk and the overwhelming authority of a conquering warlord.
"Vanquish the demon, or be the demon..."
The words struck his consciousness with the force of a thunderclap.
Lican stared at the colossal Buddha.
He had always believed that a Buddha represented pure mercy, a being who had transcended hatred and abandoned the desire to harm others. Yet the entity before him radiated something far more terrifying than serenity. Beneath its compassionate gaze lay a cold, overwhelming wrath, as though the power to grant salvation and the power to deliver destruction had always belonged to the same hand.
Another line appeared across the heavens.
"Merciful is He, yet ruthless are You..."
Lican's mind trembled.
He began to understand.
The ancient Buddha who had passed down this mantle represented mercy. But he, the successor, was meant to become something different.
The weapon.
The memories of his shattered bones surged through his mind. He remembered running, bleeding, and struggling to survive when the world had given him no reason to believe that he would ever escape his suffering. He remembered the pain that had followed him through every step of his existence, the helplessness of being too weak to protect himself, and the countless moments when he had been forced to endure what he could neither understand nor prevent.
For so long, he had viewed that suffering as a curse.
Now, another line appeared in the sky.
"As your suffering birthed peace, let your pain birth freedom."
The words settled into his consciousness.
And something changed.
His past remained the same. His wounds had not vanished, and the memories of his suffering had not been erased. Yet, for the first time, he no longer felt that his pain existed merely to break him.
Perhaps it could become something else.
Perhaps the very thing that had brought him to his knees could become the strength that allowed him to stand again.
The colossal Buddha suddenly threw back all four heads.
Its enormous body trembled as it unleashed a soundless, reality-rending scream. The boiling ocean surged, sending waves of liquid gold crashing toward the horizon, while golden lightning tore through the violet cosmos. Its countless arms tightened around their cosmic weapons, and the immense power radiating from its body seemed ready to tear down heaven and earth.
Lican watched, his consciousness shaking beneath the overwhelming sight.
His pain was no longer merely a curse.
It was the key to his liberation.
The forbidden scripture continued to echo within his mind, and this time, Lican did not merely listen.
He recited the words alongside the chanting voices, his consciousness vibrating with every syllable.
"Vanquish the demon, or be the demon,
Merciful is He, yet ruthless are You.
As your suffering birthed peace, let your pain birth freedom.
The world shatters; the Golden Heart awakens."
With every line he recited, something deep within him responded.
His eyes shone with ecstasy as a courage he had long since lost began to return. It was not the reckless confidence of someone who believed himself invincible, nor was it the temporary relief of someone who had escaped danger.
It was something deeper.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Lican no longer wished to retreat from the power awakening within him.
He did not hold back.
He continued chanting, allowing the ancient words to flow through his consciousness as the golden ocean roared beneath him. The colossal Buddha remained seated within his soul, its countless arms stretching across the heavens while the opposing forces of darkness and light surged around it.
Then Lican felt something shift.
A wheel began to form behind him.
At first, it was little more than a faint outline, a circular trace of golden light suspended in the void. But as his chanting continued, flames erupted along its circumference, turning the wheel into a blazing halo that revolved behind his formless body.
The golden scriptures floating across the heavens began to move.
One by one, they detached themselves from the sky and streamed toward him, their glowing characters flowing into his illusory form like rivers of light. They merged with his existence, disappearing into him as though his body had become a vessel capable of containing the ancient words.
The wheel behind him spun faster.
The liquid gold ocean surged.
And within the depths of his soul, the Golden Heart began to awaken.