Liberi Reader

Let us continue where we left off. We tell of the lame scholar's disappointment and return, and henceforth, his melancholy of lost hope.

From whence does his story come?

Naturally, a painting.

What painting?

The scholar's loss of an old friend, his heart like unto ashes, and his decade of footing astray, before their minds once again moved in concert—he made his resolve, and devoted his mind in full, vowing to finish that lifetime's work.

To paint what?

To paint that never before seen.

How would he paint it?

He would think thoughts never before thought.

Ah, now that we're here, this has gotten quite interesting. As you all know, the limits of one's imagination are set at what one has seen, known, experienced. Relying on imagination to trick those, outlining that which is yet unknown, is simple enough. But to do so and trick yourself, that is hard as scaling the heavens.

After all, under our heavens, where can you find one capable of thinking something as yet unseen?

The scholar faced the blank paper and strained his mind for about ten days, losing more than thirty jin of weight. He had already been lame, and his appearance grew ever more fearful.

Come the deep winter, the scholar's house had long run out of food. His neighbors feared him, and none dared to approach him.

Until one day, the lame scholar again woke in a haze, his limbs powerless, yet his mind clear.

He knew well his limits were soon coming. He looked around him, his home a bare four walls and a dim room, and felt only that all around him was void, that he truly had become alone in the world.

The scholar gradually became unable to see the floor before him wet and frozen by the snowstorm, unable to hear the biting wind coming through his door and window. He opened his eyes and blinked, fallen into primal chaos, and felt that the walls were wandering far away, his desk dissipating, his brush, paper, ink and stone all ephemeral as smoke.

At a certain moment, he suddenly came to know the exact number of snowflakes in the flurry outside his window, came to know the angle of the moonlight and the truth of the clouds. He reached out fumbling for the curtain of night, and crashed to the floor in carelessness, but the floor was no longer a hindrance to his legs. He fell underground, and then flew into the empty depths.

He could not see with his open eyes, could not hear with his rapt attention, the darkness surrounding him whole—he suddenly went into an ecstasy, as if only in this boundary where naught existed to disturb him, he could seek his true work, rather than copy or desecrate that which already existed.

He continued to wait, wait until all had faded to null, until he could not feel even his own withered flesh, before he began to think—only when all creation and all beings had ceased to exist, and his consciousness was alone in clarity, had he briefly become master of his soul.

His imagination would never again be restricted, creating works of that which simultaneously existed and did not exist—on his territory of thought, all strangeness arose equal, and enveloped reality.

It was deep in the night, and as a teacher awoke next door, he saw the lame scholar's thatched cottage overflowing in brilliant light, spectral and dazzling, letting out all manner of sounds never before heard in life, defying description. The teacher summoned his courage, and stole a look through the wall.

With just that one glimpse, he dared not investigate further. He hurried himself back indoors, and for a very long time could not fall asleep.

The next day, neighbors thronged before the thatched cottage. They forced the door and entered, discovering the scholar's remains, and naught else inside. All thought he had died of cold, and as the village headman stepped forth to look, he saw sprawled before the scholar a blank scroll of paper, covered full in frost, and nothing drawn on it.

Afterwards, the people lamented that the scholar could not leave his past, dying obsessed in front of his scroll. Others said the scholar had long since contracted some strange disease, could not control his own Arts, and only thus did this strange case unfold.

The teacher, who alone had glimpsed the truth, never talked of the matter with anyone else. It was only in his final moments he told his son; that the disdained lame scholar, even his name forgotten, was a true master of all eternity.