Zhao Si thought to himself: The end of my official career is like being hit by a car, both are sudden disasters.
In the ancient society where everything was inferior except for education, losing one's career basically meant the end of one's life. However, Brother Yi later imagined marrying his childhood sweetheart, which might indicate that he had let go and lived an ordinary life.
"A year later, several Taoist nuns came to the village. They were the first immortal cultivators I met."
Zhao Si asked, "Are you on the path to immortality from now on? Are you going to be admired by others?"
"No." Li Yi shook his head with a bitter smile on his face, "They took my wife away. She seems to have some special physique that is very suitable for cultivation."
"Your wife left you?"
"No, I asked her to go. Since she can see a wider world, there is no need for her to be a frog in a well with me. Xier is also a very competitive person. What she likes most is the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period that I told her. I can see that what she longs for is to travel the world, not to play the role of a wife and children. After getting my consent, she left..."
"She later took you to practice?"
Li Yi still shook his head: "She never came back. She didn't come back until I buried my parents, my father-in-law and my mother-in-law, and the house she built when I got married collapsed when I was over 40 and my hair was half white."
"And you never saw her again?"
"Yes, but..." Li Yi slightly raised his head, as if recalling the past, "That was a thousand years later. I reached the state of refining the spirit and returning to the void, and she also went through the five decays of heaven and man and became a white-haired old woman. She hugged me and cried bitterly, and I could smell the old man's odor mixed in her rouge and powder. She still cared so much about her own smell."
A picture suddenly appeared: the beautiful wife had already grown old, while the husband was still a teenager when he came to her.
"She begged me to take her back, but I refused."
"Why?"
"It's been a thousand years. People are gone, houses have collapsed, and hometowns have turned into lakes. She has seen enough of the prosperity of the world, but I haven't seen it. The strong winds in the sky, the river of forgetfulness in the underworld, the endless mountains, the giant turtles carrying the mountains... I want to see them all."
"I also want to ask if there are immortals in the world? Unfortunately, there are none..."
Li Yi smiled, very lightly, but that almost arrogant smile made Zhao Si's breath stop, as if he really was a peerless master who dominated the world.
Strange, very strange.
Li Yi smiled with relief and said, "The path to immortality is long, and everyone is a solitary seeker. Even if Xi'er comes back to accompany me, I will most likely leave her in the end. Meeting is fate, and meeting again is a blessing. I dare not ask for too much."
"....." Zhao Si was silent. It was not bad that this made him depressed.
"Did Brother Yi become an immortal in the end?"
"No, the heaven and earth do not allow me to become an immortal. I am dull and can only reach the stage of refining the spirit and returning to the void, which is far from refining the void and merging with the Tao."
"Then how did Brother Yi embark on the path of cultivation?"
"It's a long story. My grandfather was a Taoist priest. With the help of a book he got from somewhere and the Taoist scriptures here, I studied for decades and finally drew the Qi into my body........."
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For the next three days, Zhao Si ran to the hospital and even neglected his own clinic business.
While he was communicating with the hospital about the treatment plan, he was also chatting with Li Yi as a psychologist, listening to him talk about his bizarre life of spiritual practice.
Li Yi's imaginary world is different from most patients with similar symptoms. His path to becoming an immortal is not smooth sailing. He has no one to guide him. He can only practice little by little based on his feelings. Most of the time he is on the wrong path. There were several times when he had problems with his practice and lay in bed for several years. It was not until he was 70 years old that he was able to barely enter the path.
He did not say how great he was, nor did he describe his "great achievements", and even glossed over some of his life's highlights. Instead, Li Yi preferred to talk about his difficult and dangerous exploration journey. Whenever he talked about how he had realized a solution, his eyes seemed to glow.
Maybe it's because he feels guilty, or maybe he feels it's not important.
Li Yi was very eloquent, and sometimes Zhao Si was unconsciously immersed in it, with countless scenes floating in his mind.
Zhao Si took his friend's medical record, and the hospital doctor said to him: "Doctor Zhao, you should tell him the reality. According to our observation, Li Yi's condition is better than expected. He has very complete logical thinking and no violent tendencies. He is calmer than anyone else and should accept the facts."
The hospital has also been observing their conversations over the past few days, and has seen Li Yi's sobriety, his logic, and his communicability. Li Yi's medical record has changed from severe paranoia to mild, which means that the hospital believes he is just a normal person with a little paranoia.
"You can also get him discharged from the hospital. You don't have to waste money. What do you want to spend hundreds of thousands a month?"
"How to do it?" Zhao Si asked. He knew very well what to do, but he still asked, as if this could alleviate his guilt. He had clearly used harsh words to wake up the patient more than once before.
"Tell him that ten years have passed. He is not an immortal. He is just a vegetable who has been sleeping for ten years."
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