[Think of Elements your spiritual energy can manifest as]
This was the one and only direction upon which she focused her entire mind, regardless of how enigmatic of an instruction it was.
When it came to entering the meditative state, Tia didn't need any help. As someone who reached the seventh realm of cultivation before turning twenty-two, it was a skill she had long since mastered. Weirdly enough, though, as the spiritual energy, something she should be perfectly familiar with, stirred inside her, the meditative state she entered was…
It wasn't like the state she entered many times over in her past.
'The process of focusing, calming down, and then removing the thought inhibitions is pretty much all the same, but the end result…?'
Tia bit down on her bottom lip as she resisted the desire to sigh out.
On one hand, it was the same.
Her thoughts slowed down while, at the same time, freeing themselves from all the addendums, caveats, and buts that would normally inhibit their freedom. Her body relaxed too, muting away all the sensory experiences as it blocked away all that could break her focus.
Up until this point, everything was the same.
Normally, however, only raw focus would remain, with Tia's full attention focused on the task at hand, attention unbroken by any external stimuli or distractions.
But today, her meditation wasn't the same. For rather than having her focus sharpen up and zero in on the job, her attention soon started to wane, putting her mind into a dream-like state.
'It's as if I took the removal of inhibitors one step further, inherently pushing myself into the state of raw creativeness, unobstructed by logic or reason…'
There was a whole other point to this new, deeper meditation than what she expected or experienced before.
In this dream-like state, she could no longer remember or care about her worries, her fears, her embarrassment.
The potential of screwing up?
Gone.
The worry of failing to follow Theo's instructions to the letter?
It was as if it was never there to begin with.
And it was right in this moment, right as she stepped into the realm bordering a fudge state, that Tia's creativity exploded.
Her spiritual energy surged before her eyes, taking on a physical form against all the rules that Tia believed to be unbreakable. And as it reached the peak of its eruption… it dispersed like a jet of water in a fountain, flowering into all sorts of different colors.
To one side, her spiritual energy turned into sparks of fire, falling down from the peak of the mana-jet like still-burning particles of ash. On the other side of the jet, Tia's spiritual energy turned into the opposite of the fire, water.
To the side, the particles of her inner energy solidified into earth while, on the opposite end of the jet, they dissolved into nothing more than the speedy winds.
Each of those elements then transformed Tia's mind realm, splitting it into four equal parts, each perfectly reflecting the different kinds of manifestation she observed.
A scorched land full of natural fires and flowing lava where nothing but the fires could exist.
Wetland brimming with plants, insects, and small life of all kinds.
Open sky of nothing but gales of winds, destined to be dominated by the greatest of all beings—dragons.
And finally, the earth, upon which all the life that Tia personally witnessed was born on.
All of those four elements spread out in different directions, with Tia suddenly standing right in the middle of it, where the original jet of her spiritual energy had shot out from. And as she looked down, curious to see what happened right at the center, where all of those extremely different dominions met, there was little more than her own shadow.
'Wait, a shadow?'
The very moment Tia noticed it, the darkness exploded from underneath her feet, expanding at impossible speed in… exactly what direction?
It didn't follow the example of the four major elements that occupied four major directions of the world. Instead, it appeared to take dominion over something in a different dimension, splitting each of the realms into one governed by the shadows…
And, as the natural opposite of it, one governed by the light.
If the four basic elements manifested at four different directions on the plane Tia found herself standing on, then the light and darkness occupied the upside of this realm for the light and what lay below its surface for the darkness.
'Just what is this place?'
Dazed as much as she was awed by this profound, infinitely complex world, Tia could do nothing but witness it, mere spectator to it rather than an active part of the equilibrium established between all the elements.
Despite standing at the center of it all, despite being the obvious source of the spiritual energy that gave birth to this entire world… Tia was, at the same time, outside of it all, mere witness rather than an active participant in this miracle.
And then…?
[Now…]
With the emergence of Theo's voice, the whole world around Tia collapsed.
Each of the four major directions—the land of fires, water, winds, and ground—all started to rapidly shrink right into Tia's feet. The division between the light and dark vanished too, with both sides of the existence collapsing at a uniform rate, only to revert right back to just the different colors blossoming from the jet of spiritual energy.
Then, even the spiritual energy reverted its flow, sucking up all the manifested drops of it back into the jet before retreating back to the nothingness it came from.
For a second, Tia found herself in the world of absolutely nothing, with no light to brighten up her surroundings, nothing dry, wet, hot, or cold to stand at…
Just the sheer nothingness of it all.
[Think about the shapes. And if you are feeling really fancy, think about dimensions.]
Tia's entire sense of self jolted.
Because the very moment those words somehow sounded in her mind, the world around her started to change again.
It was still perfectly dark, filled with perfect void, but with those instructions here to now guide her, Tia could now see how the nothingness actually consisted of… smaller parts of itself.
At first, Tia's inner universe split into a set of uniform boxes, infinitely stacked upon each other in an ever-repeating pattern.
That, however, lasted for but a single instant, before each of those uniform cubes started to mutate, lose its strict form, melt into all sorts of curvy, smooth, or sharp shapes, with only one unifying factor between them all—at all times, whenever one shape changed, then so did all the other shapes that pressed against it.
If a cube's top suddenly started to bloat up, the bottom of the cube above it would grow indented, keeping the endless nothingness of this strange world perfectly contained in a way that left no part of the void outside of the shape.
And then, Theo's latter suggestion voiced out in Tia's mind, turning the already messy, abstract infinity of shapes around Tia into an incomprehensible chaos.