Significant progress in materials science of the past decade is associated with the emerging paradigm of phase complexity and cross-coupling phenomena in functional complex materials, in which various degrees of freedom are intricately coupled and mutually interacting. Such mutual interactions couple the charge-spin-orbital-lattice, and often induce various emerging phenomena such as colossal magnetoresistance, multiferroicity, relativistic Mott instability, Ising-type magnetism, etc. Fundamental understanding of such phenomena requires detailed microscopic information on each physical degree of freedom for different physical qualities of charge, spin, orbital, and lattice. In this presentation, I will briefly present how to approach to the microscopic information on charge, spin, orbital, and lattice using various soft x-ray spectroscopic techniques, and discuss the emerging phenomena in various complex material systems based on the microscopic physical pictures.