Even after using all of the healing items he could find, Avery still suffered just as much, so his first priority was to investigate this phantom pain. He thought he had an idea on what caused it, but if it was right, then he had no clue as to how to solve the issue.

He had often referred to the three components of his being, namely his body, mind and soul, but as far as he knew, only the Body and soul were real things. The body was easy to understand, it was Avery’s physical form. As for his soul, that was harder to explain. He knew for sure that it existed in this world, as he had seen references to it in the Tao, but he wasn’t clear on its function, only that it was the spiritual part of his being.

Those two parts of his being were very different, but they weren’t dissociated. Instead they were intrinsically linked, perfectly suited for each other and acting in unison.

That was what Avery called his mind, the fusion of his body and soul, a place where he could process both the signals from his body, like hormones and nervous signals, as well his spiritual desires and thoughts to finally make decisions.

Unfortunately, Avery had been using time warps for years now, and while his soul had grown to an absurd degree, especially after being elevated by the Tao, his poor mortal body had stayed exactly the same.

This meant that they no longer fitted well together, and that was the source of the terrible pain he was feeling. It wasn't an unhealable wound, and he had suffered no damage, but he had become incompatible with himself. It was like he was trying to assemble two different puzzles, and of course the pieces did not match.

According to his insights on how the body/soul relationship worked, Avery was pretty sure that was the source of his pain, but even if his diagnosis was correct, he had no clue as to how he could heal himself.

Unable to find anything in the system or in the insight he had gained from the Tao, he could only bear with the headache and turn his attention back to his mental world, hoping to find a fix like when he had sown his vision back together.

However, what awaited him in his dreams was only more distress.

While his visualisation had undoubtedly been greatly elevated, as it radiated a sacred aura, it had also suddenly become uncontrollable.

He tried imagining the Azure dragon roaring in anger, a volcano erupting or a shooting star falling to the earth, but nothing happened. The world was barren and still, only following established cycles.

The moon was still orbiting the earth, and the earth was orbiting the sun, but the rotation of the moon had no impact on the tides. That was normal, as it wasn’t something Avery had thought to include into his original visualisation, but the problem was that he was no longer able to add a tidal system.

The mental world was no longer a dream he could modify freely, it was now in a fixed state, and that state was imperfect. The world was now half-real, so everything had to follow cause and effect according to established rules.

Before, his visualisation had been like a gooey liquid, free-flowing and extremely malleable. It would not retain its shape and constantly collapse back into a flat puddle, but it was extremely easy to temporarily take a specific form.

When the Tao had elevated his mental world, it was like it had frozen this liquid. Its properties had been inverted, taking a permanent shape that was no longer difficult to keep, but it could no longer be effortlessly managed and changed.

It had never occurred to Avery that he may be unable to affect this sanctified world, as he had been able to control the golden dragon. He had forgotten he had never tried to change the dragon's shape, and had just used it as it was.

If you had a thread and were sewing with it, you were not actually making any changes to the thread, only displacing it. You could pick up your ice sculpture and move it around, but you couldn’t easily change its shape.

Similarly, Avery could technically still control his world and make it move around, but could not change it’s inner workings. And since he was only interested in what happened inside the world and not around it, it had become useless.

His visualization had been a masterpiece, and one that he was immensely proud of, but that wasn’t enough. For it to function as a complete world, it required perfect internal consistency, and right now it was imprisoning itself with many unclear rules.

Avery was probably the mortal with the most knowledge of the Tao and it’s rules, but the creation of a world required perfect understanding. If even a single factor was not taken into account, it would mess up cause and effect,

Limited by his human brain, he had often claimed “the dragon moves because I want it to”, and that had been fine when it had only been a story he told himself, but now it would not fly.

In reality, everything needed to be eminently logical, and leaps in logic could not be tolerated. There might be multiple ways to make everything work, but whatever way he chose had to make perfect sense.

It did not matter if the dragon moved by virtue of his muscles or strange mechanical pistons, as long as it made sense. But even if he had thought to define all of the muscles of its humongous body, it would not have been enough. He would need to detail how millions of cells worked together to compose muscles, and how these cells were made of atoms which are themselves made of smaller and more complicated stuff. And he needed to have etched out all those rules during the creation of the universe.

In reality, there were 26 dimensionless constants that described the fundamental nature of the universe, and the rest of the cosmos flowed from the interactions of those 26 constants. Those constants were not random either, but were uniquely tuned to facilitate the apparition of life with inhumane precision.

That was why the multiverse theory was postulated, because it was illogical to believe we were just that lucky and that the only existing universe was perfectly suited for life to develop. For us to be the lucky ones, there needed to be an infinity of failed universes. For example, one with a 1/10120th faster speed of expansion would not allow any planets or stars to form, leading to a barren world. Either that or it was all perfectly designed to be perfect by a conscious creator.

All this to say that the universe was incredibly complicated, but also beautifully simple, and for another universe to exist and function, it had to at the very least reach that impossible standard of quality. Anything else would be useless, and would be like carving a car shape out of a block of wood and expecting it to work and be able to drive it as if it had a functional engine.

If Avery was capable of creating a perfect world, he would already be a saint, and there would be no need for him to create one. To create a world requires a perfect understanding of everything in it. In other words, it required complet comprehension of the Tao, and that was what Avery was pursuing in the first place.

Upon realising that his risky move, even when successful, had resulted in him being worse off than before, Avery fell to the ground, his spirit crushed.

Cultivation was a step by step process, and his shortcut had once again had disastrous consequences. He did not regret what he did, as he still believed it had been his best shot at managing to engrave without a pen in twenty years, but he was devastated by his failure.