Practicing Swordsmanship

Jiang Ding sat cross-legged, drenched in sweat and pale-faced.

Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian, Main Branch 1 (100%)

Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian, Main Branch 10 (100%)

...

Looking inward at his body, he saw that the ten most important main branches of the Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian had already been tempered to completion. They were translucent and faintly luminous, with pale white inner qi flowing through them.

"Ten meridians in two days, with the Essence Supplementing Qi Boosting Pills constantly available." Jiang Ding calculated silently. "That's pretty fast. If I were cultivating the top-tier techniques those martial artists like Gong Caiyu use, with a thousand meridians, I could reach Inner Qi Perfection and begin breaking through to the Innate Realm in two months at most."

"Ha, even super geniuses are only this much."

He indulged in a private fantasy.

That was only natural.

The pills—Ginseng Flower Qi Stabilizing Pills—were utterly ordinary, rated by the education system as "cheap and barely usable." Yet if they were placed in the martial world of the Yue Kingdom, they would be heavenly pills that even the royal family would find difficult to obtain.

Aged Ginseng and the others had all sorts of medicinal ingredients over a hundred years old, but they could not enjoy pills of this grade.

The services Immortal Sect Citizens could obtain by casually sending a package through express delivery contained tremendous labor value. Comparatively speaking, calling it turning stone into gold was no exaggeration.

The gap in cultivation techniques and teaching resources was even greater.

"What a pity. Eagle's Takeoff Sword Art has one hundred and eight thousand meridians!" After indulging in his thoughts for only a moment, Jiang Ding's heart sank.

"Tempering and nourishing five a day means twenty-one thousand six hundred days!"

"Fifty-nine years!"

After roughly calculating the result, Jiang Ding was shaken to the core and could no longer remain calm.

"I'm not slow."

"My Eagle's Takeoff Sword Art is at the Minor Success level, and I have Hundred Essence Qi Transforming Pills refined from over ninety-year-old aged ginseng. Those are advantages ordinary students don't have. Taken together, even accounting for my reduced aptitude, my cultivation speed should be at least twice that of an ordinary student!"

"Hiss—"

No wonder Li Junhao had so easily given up cultivation. His grades in cultural subjects were so good that he had long known these things. No wonder Jiang Chaoyang had schemed and struggled for most of his life, only to reach mastery in Eaglet Inner Qi.

"To turn mortal into immortal is not something that can be done without the talent of a genius."

Jiang Ding regained his composure and thought rapidly.

"I can't belittle myself. Once the tempering and nourishment of my meridians reaches stages like the Minor Celestial Circuit, Lesser Celestial Circuit, and Greater Celestial Circuit, when the Twelve Meridians and Eight Extraordinary Meridians form a single circulating whole, the progress of refining essence into qi will accelerate by leaps and bounds."

"It's not that difficult. It's not hopeless yet."

After closing his eyes to regulate his breathing for a moment, Jiang Ding stood and walked to the equipment rack.

At some point, compared with before, a translucent camouflage uniform and a firearm over two meters long had appeared there. The array spirit had provided explanatory labels beside them.

Reconnaissance Infantry-1 Camouflage, top-grade special magical artifact. Woven with and inscribed with a first-grade Breath Concealment Array. Must be used together with the Minor Breath Concealment Technique. At Minor Success, it could conceal the spiritual sense scans of Ninth Level Qi Refining cultivators and evade scans from the first-grade vehicle-mounted radar carried by tanks.

If a Qi Refining cultivator had cultivated a spiritual sense scanning spell of the same level, it could conceal spiritual sense reconnaissance secret arts one grade lower.

For martial artists below the Innate Realm, it lowered the grade by another level.

In other words, if he used it now, even a Mastered Level Minor Breath Concealment Technique paired with Reconnaissance Infantry Camouflage could only conceal scans from the spiritual sense secret arts his classmates had at the Proficient level.

Jiang Ding knew a little about this as well.

Immortal Sect Qi Refining cultivators had never been interested in spells like Fireball Spells or Ice Arrow Spells, which only had ranges of a few dozen meters. Yet there was one spell that was compulsory.

Electromagnetic Induction Wave Technique.

It was the core of the Immortal Sect cultivator combat system. It produced electromagnetic waves of specific frequencies through spellcraft for reconnaissance and scanning, with a range starting at one thousand meters—far beyond the hundred-meter limit of a Qi Refining cultivator's spiritual sense.

When used together with Immortal Sect Spirit Particle Radar, the search range and precision of this spell increased dramatically.

When facing Immortal Sect Qi Refining cultivators, Outer Realm Cultivators of the same level often could not even see their enemies before they were drowned beneath artillery fire and bullets arriving from nowhere.

Jiang Ding briefly looked through the Minor Breath Concealment Technique supplied by the array spirit. He found it obscure and difficult to understand, its difficulty matching its effects, not the slightest bit inferior to the Electromagnetic Induction Wave Technique.

He looked toward the next piece of equipment.

Type 03 Anti-Materiel Sniper Rifle, top-grade special magical artifact. Caliber: 12.7x108 millimeters. Length: 2,124 millimeters. Weight: 89 kg. The barrel was inscribed with a first-grade breath concealment and invisibility array and a first-grade Law Breaking Array. A hit could break through the defensive magical artifacts of Ninth Level Qi Refining cultivators and consume some of a Foundation Establishment Cultivator's spiritual power (5%–10%).

Note: Innate Martial Artists needed to input internal force for three minutes to activate one shot. Inner Qi Realm martial artists needed to input inner qi for over ten minutes to activate one shot, or might be unable to activate it at all.

Two top-grade special magical artifacts!

Jiang Ding held his breath.

Unlike the mass-producible Semi-magical Artifacts such as the Heavy Machine Guns he had practiced with before, magical artifacts required all kinds of spiritual ore alloys to produce, and only Qi Refining cultivators could manufacture them with the aid of industrial machinery.

Every magical artifact cost more than a hundred times as much as ordinary weapons. They were also military supplies, unavailable for purchase to anyone who had not served in the military.

These two magical artifacts alone made the worth of a Reconnaissance Infantry soldier exceed that of ordinary infantry by an unknown amount.

Yet even so, not a single one of the dozen or so classmates in the Inner Qi Realm had chosen the Reconnaissance Infantry path. There had to be some obstacle that could not be crossed.

The third and fourth periods were Chinese exams.

At the desk near the back, Jiang Ding gripped his pen and racked his brains. Only after a long while did he write down an answer with some unease, completely unlike his high-spirited confidence in Moral Education class.

Chinese mainly tested cultivation theory, talismans, and the use of Spiritual Script, which could better convey information about immortal cultivation.

Even so, compared to before, he had improved greatly during this period after gaining enhanced comprehension from the Rusty Sword Tip and having inner qi as a concrete reference.

Ring, ring!

"Time is up. Candidates, please hand in your papers."

Two hours passed in the blink of an eye. Jiang Ding had barely finished the Spiritual Script composition. Looking at the two major questions that were still blank, he sighed mournfully and let the teacher take away his test paper.

"Ugh, I really messed this one up..."

As he followed the crowd out of the classroom, Jiang Ding glanced at Li Junhao beside him, whose face was filled with bitterness.

"Heh."

Half an hour for eating, half an hour for sleeping.

Jiang Ding opened his eyes, sat by the bed, and closed his eyes to regulate his breathing.

His next cultivation goal was to achieve the "Minor Circuit." Therefore, what he needed to cultivate next were the ten most important meridians in the second of the Three Hand Yin Meridians, the Hand Jueyin Pericardium Meridian.

Each of the Twelve Meridians had ten main meridians opened, nourished, and linked together according to the array diagram provided in Eagle's Takeoff Sword Art, then stabilized to form a circulating whole.

Only then could the inner qi meridian system be said to be initially stable, and cultivation speed would rise dramatically.

Internal force emerged from the Hand Taiyin Lung Meridian and surged into the starting node of the adjacent Hand Jueyin Pericardium Meridian, spreading toward the ten main meridians around it.

A faint stabbing pain touched his senses. The internal force entered only a little before being withdrawn.

More than ten minutes later, Jiang Ding once again controlled the internal force to enter the meridians he had nourished before, repairing and advancing, expanding step by step without ever stopping.

The afternoon exam was mathematics.

Tomorrow would be the science and liberal arts comprehensive exams, followed by the cold weapon and hot weapon assessments, and finally the Combat Assessment.

The forms of combat varied. Some were one-on-one duels, conducted under a teacher's supervision while wearing full equipment and using reduced-charge ammunition for the Combat Assessment.

Others took the form of squads, generally requiring them to complete an objective—stealth, assassination, and the like.

Finally came campaign-style assessments, usually involving cooperation between multiple classes and grades, forming a corps to besiege a Foundation Establishment Cultivator who employed the tactics of Outer Realm Cultivators, among other scenarios.