The Importance of Martial Talent

The Lin Family was one of Qingcheng's top two great clans. The other family on equal footing with it was the Chu Family, whom you had served during your second simulation.

And you had taken first place in the Martial Arts Tournament to Choose a Spouse hosted by the Lin Family. You would receive a mysterious grand gift—the third daughter of the current Lin Family head, the seventeen-year-old young mistress of the Lin Family: Lin Youbai!

Following the Lin Family Steward to Qingyu Tower beside the arena, you saw Lin Youbai.

The first thing that caught your attention was not her appearance, but her bearing. She was neither the classic refined young lady nor a "tomboy." If you had to compare her to something... she was somewhat "fierce."

Not savage or spoiled, exactly. The way she looked at you was more like she regarded you as her private possession.

Yun Shou: "Can you fucking take that?"

After thinking it over, you felt that sowing wild seeds everywhere in a simulation was no good. Carrying too many burdens would just make things a mess, and you did not want to be hanged from a single tree. You only wanted to live a happy, free life led by your loins.

Just as you were about to begin by claiming you knew nothing, that you were only a child who did not understand anything, and that the arena match had merely been for fun, Lin Youbai's gaze abruptly changed. Her possessiveness swiftly turned into boredom.

She spoke before you could. "I don't want a child."

You: "..."

You nearly saw red. I hadn't even gotten the chance to refuse, and she's already looking down on me?

You little country bumpkin from the Lin Family—have you ever heard of a peerless genius who reached first-rate at fourteen?!

The Lin Family expressed their apologies and gave you a substantial compensation in gold and silver.

Whether their young mistress was interested was one thing, but they absolutely could not slight this Young Prodigy in any other regard.

With a cold snort, you took the money and left.

You gave away half of it, enough for the familiar people of Qing He Village to buy homes in the city and live good lives.

In the year 270 of Da Qing, having suffered humiliation in Qingcheng, you decided to seek opportunities in another city.

You settled down in East Forest City, but did not immediately reveal your first-rate strength. Instead, you quietly trained by yourself.

East Forest City was a small city without any martial halls stationed there. First-rate Martial Artists stood at the very peak.

From time to time, you swept through the large and small gangs within and outside the city, knocking down those third-rate and second-rate small-fry martial artists, taking the wealth they had taken from the people and putting it to your own use.

In the year 271 of Da Qing, you set out for Hengduan Cliff, the venue of this year's Young Talents Grand Competition. The Meteor Sect was responsible for hosting it, famed for sword strikes as swift and fierce as meteors streaking across the heavens.

If you took first place in the competition, you could receive a Grandmaster Martial Art authorized for teaching by the Meteor Sect. At the same time, your name would ring throughout the land, and you would be recognized as the foremost martial artist of your generation, also known as the "Great Young Hero."

(Regardless of whether changing your cultivation would ruin your foundation, they allowed you to practice it anyway.)

The matches at Hengduan Cliff lasted for seventeen consecutive days, involving various round-robin and alternating formats to preserve fairness as much as possible and prevent things like "second place encountering first place right at the start and being miserably eliminated."

In the end, you ranked twentieth.

All you could say about that result was: the top ten were all monsters!

Not just the top ten—even among those ranked ahead of you, there were two young martial artists who possessed only Second-rate level strength... You were the weakest of the seventeen first-rate Martial Artists in the entire competition.

Yun Shou: "..."

Fine. That was understandable.

Any martial artist who reached first-rate before the age of twenty-five could not possibly have merely met the hard threshold of 130 points in Martial Talent Aptitude and foundational strength. Some might even possess twice that of an ordinary person.

Thus, those second-rate Martial Artists with foundations twice as great—or even greater—could indeed defeat someone a full level above them!

"Once this round of simulation ends, just watch me pull off some wild moves and live to a hundred and eighty. I'll directly raise my foundation to three times normal, then come back and crush you freaks of talent!"

Yun Shou snorted coldly, painting a grand feast for his simulated self.

Though he could not hear him.

Though Yun Shou would still have to work for it himself before he could eat that feast.

But that did not matter. He had painted it anyway.

The Meteor Sect allowed you to choose one Advanced Martial Art and one powerful Combat Technique. After looking through them, you felt that none were as good as the Flowing River Technique. Still, free was free, so you chose the options you found relatively satisfactory.

Quite a few people asked which school you had trained under—do not be fooled by how weak you were. You were only sixteen, and everything you had displayed was already extremely impressive. You told them your master was a mysterious expert.

Among those inquiring was a core disciple of Tianhe Martial Hall. Cold sweat seeped down your back, but fortunately, the other party did not grow suspicious. There were far too many martial arts that made Force Qi appear blue, and the added flexibility of your Force Qi had not stood out excessively...

Moreover, throughout the competition, you had mainly relied on slashing with your saber, precisely to avoid encountering a successor of Tianhe Martial Hall. You had not used the Combat Techniques paired with the Flowing River Technique.

The main reason was that the martial hall had not shown the slightest sign of its martial arts being leaked over the past several decades.

It was like walking down the road and seeing someone who looked very much like you. You would never suspect that he was your biological brother; at most, you would sigh that it was quite a coincidence.

But if your parents had been sighing in your ear every day since you were little—"You had an older brother back then. It was all our fault for not watching over him properly; he got lost..." —then you would probably drag that person off for a paternity test.

The competition had yielded quite a good harvest. At the very least, you had obtained a formidable Combat Technique, though it was not paired with the martial art you had chosen alongside it.

You returned to East Forest City and continued your daily three-point, one-line routine of martial training.

In the year 272 of Da Qing, you were seventeen years old, with a foundation of 131%. You discovered that the speed at which you tempered your viscera was incredibly slow—not merely ordinarily slow, but so slow that it beggared imagination.

During the third simulation, you had achieved first-rate at forty-three. By the age of forty-seven, your Extreme Viscera Enhancement progress had already reached the third level. Considering that after breaking through, you might need a year to stabilize yourself and gain control over your Force Qi, you could probably advance one-tenth of the progress each year.

Even if your foundation was inferior to what it had been then, you were young now—the period when martial progress was fastest. Thus, after three consecutive years, you should have pushed your progress to at least fifty percent.

You did not think that was excessive. Even if Extreme Viscera Enhancement grew harder the closer it approached Perfection, it should not have been stuck so firmly in the early stages, because your current Extreme Viscera Enhancement progress was—less than thirty-five percent.

You thought of a possibility and said inwardly, This time, the Main Body absolutely has to choose foundation.

Yun Shou thought of that possibility as well.

He had seen a similar premise before while reading novels—it had been an immortal-cultivation story.

That immortal-cultivation novel had a setting called "Spiritual Power Dissipation." Simply put, if you went too long without cultivating, your cultivation level would decline!

Just like those muscle bros at the gym—if they stopped working out for too long, their muscles would naturally degenerate into fat.

In that immortal-cultivation novel, if you relied on popping pills and Spirit Stones to forcibly break through into a higher realm, then once you lost the aid of those external resources, you would discover that the spiritual power you gathered through normal cultivation was less than what you automatically dissipated each day—of course, if you did not cultivate, it would dissipate even faster.

So, if one's Martial Dao Talent Aptitude and foundation were too poor, would they be unable to sustain a higher Martial Dao Realm, causing their strength to decline?