Reading

Not long after.

Ling Wuyuan and the others, who made up more than eighty percent of the new recruits, arrived at the Gang Academy.

The teacher before them was a white-haired old man dressed in a plain long robe.

He looked to be in fine spirits.

His legs and feet were still fairly nimble when he walked, too.

"Everyone, this is our first meeting. From now on, I'll be the teacher responsible for teaching you basic knowledge. You may call me Teacher Zhao."

"Here, I need to remind you that your academic evaluations will take place once every month. If you fail, the punishment will be severe. The Punishment Hall handles it directly, and at the slightest provocation, you'll be whipped until your skin splits and your flesh tears..."

"Of course, beyond that, I must especially remind you that learning to read and write is an extremely important matter. This is true even for martial artists. Unless you want to obtain a martial arts manual someday and be unable to understand it—or only understand part of it—you'd best study earnestly from the bottom of your hearts."

His words were filled with admonition.

As both a martial artist and a teacher,

what Teacher Zhao had not just said was that only understanding part of a manual while believing that one had understood it completely was countless times more dangerous than being unable to understand the manual at all.

In that situation, it was all too easy to train oneself to death or cripple oneself.

Even in a long-established force like the White Crow Gang, cases still occurred from time to time where new recruits crippled themselves despite receiving professional instruction.

As for those who followed purely wild, unorthodox paths?

For them, cases of training themselves to death were simply too numerous to count.

Therefore, although it had nothing to do with him,

as a teacher, if possible, he felt that it would be better for his students to study seriously rather than end up in such a miserable state.

It was for precisely this reason

that he was actually quite satisfied with the White Crow Gang's punishment system.

Being whipped was better than training oneself to death...

It was just that

many new recruits who had no understanding whatsoever of the value of knowledge simply could not comprehend any of this...

After he finished speaking, the students who had already found seats and sat down one after another all chose to voice their agreement, regardless of what they truly thought. At the very least, they acknowledged Teacher Zhao's words verbally.

Seeing this,

he gave a slight nod.

Then he began making various arrangements...

Time flew by.

One year later.

Within the White Crow Gang,

Ling Wuyuan, whose apparent age had now smoothly reached eleven, sat in a corner of the Library Tower. Bathed in sunlight streaming through the window, he calmly read the book in his hands.

The Library Tower was where the White Crow Gang specially stored all manner of ordinary books it had collected.

It stood twenty-five meters tall and was divided into three floors.

It was said that, after centuries of continuous collection, it now housed more than a hundred thousand books.

The first floor contained history, geography, customs, literature...

The second floor contained animal encyclopedias, ingenious contraptions and clever tricks...

The third floor contained mythological tales, strange stories, and curious anecdotes...

Ling Wuyuan was currently on the first floor.

Basically,

ever since learning this world's writing system, he had spent more than six hours here every day reading.

At times, he even spent the night here directly.

When tired, he would sleep right on the ground.

Once awake, he would silently continue reading.

As though he had become obsessed with books.

Moreover, the types of books he read were extremely varied.

He read practically any kind of miscellaneous thing.

He made no distinction between worth and category.

Even certain bizarre works of literature that seemed especially nonsensical, as though their authors were indulging in baseless fantasies, he accepted wholesale.

Because to him,

all knowledge was something immensely precious.

It might seem utterly inconspicuous, its actual contents amounting to only a few sentences and a mere few dozen words, yet it could very well contain truths painstakingly distilled only after countless people had been injured or killed.

Even things that appeared to be nothing but baseless fantasy might contain some exceedingly strange firsthand experience of the author.

And all of it would become stepping stones for his continued growth in the future...

However,

in the eyes of the others, his attitude toward reading somewhat gave the impression that he had read himself into madness.

Not only had he essentially sacrificed all time for enjoyment,

he maintained only the most basic contact with the other new recruits, never becoming close to anyone or engaging in further exchanges with them.

At most, he would have a little extra interaction with the teachers.

For example, he would take the initiative to ask some obscure and strange questions.

This made everyone's impression of him simple and direct.

[A solitary person who completely failed to fit in], [a weirdo with nothing but books in his head]...

Furthermore,

because he read so quickly, everyone often felt that he merely skimmed through a book before returning it, then immediately took out another to continue reading.

It looked as though he were searching through countless books for some specific information rather than carefully finishing every book he picked up.

Yet

Ling Wuyuan truly did read every single book carefully.

With the support of his special talent, he already possessed the ability to take in ten lines at a glance. He needed only a few seconds to completely commit a densely written page to memory.

Thus, memorizing the contents of an entire book now took him only a few minutes.

Because he read far too quickly, he often deliberately slowed down or specifically hid himself in a corner to avoid drawing attention.

After a year of natural growth, although he had yet to cultivate martial arts, that innate ability of his that could accelerate his own speed had, along with his body's natural development, reached fourfold acceleration.

And through repeated attempts, he had already managed to accelerate things other than his physical body.

For example, the speed of his thoughts.

He could even make a portion of his power constant.

For instance, without deliberately activating his innate ability to accelerate himself, he could maintain a permanent onefold acceleration to his thinking speed and neural response speed.

As for permanently accelerating every aspect of his own speed?

Ling Wuyuan felt there was no need for that yet.

Doing so would also accelerate the rate at which his lifespan drained away and his body grew.

He felt that if his control over and development of his innate ability continued to improve in the future, he might be able to accelerate only his body's growth without affecting his lifespan.

Of course,

thinking about such operations now was somewhat like aiming too high.

Those things should wait until he had first cultivated his martial arts realm to a certain level...