True Masters

"First of all, when all of us were dressing up for Zhao Liya, you were the only one still dressed like an old-fashioned bumpkin, completely ignoring your appearance. That morning, we even laughed and called you hopeless. Only later did we realize that you had planned it all along. Your move was called winning through surprise. When everyone else was dressed to the nines, you alone looked so plain and so conspicuous. That way, in the first round, the beauty immediately noticed your unusual appearance! If that were all there was to it, you wouldn't count as a master. What was even more impressive was that when everyone else was ogling Zhao Liya like a bunch of pigs, you alone showed complete disdain and didn't even look her in the eye. A woman as beautiful and well-born as Zhao Liya was extremely confident in her own appeal. But you challenged that confidence, so she refused to admit defeat and, unwilling to believe it, sat down beside you!" Chen Youmi's analysis was so precise that everyone listened with admiration, repeatedly praising him as a master. Only Zhang Hupan kept thinking, Damn it, even this can turn someone into a master at picking up women!

"Actually, the youngest one left out one point—and that point is why I think the fourth brother has reached the pinnacle of the art of picking up women!" Hu Zhiming suddenly added.

"What do you mean?" almost everyone asked in unison. Even Zhang Hupan pricked up his ears curiously. He genuinely couldn't figure out what other tricks for picking up women the eldest brother could dig out of him.

"I imagine that when Zhao Liya sat beside the fourth brother and he didn't move a muscle, everyone must have wondered whether the fourth brother was gay, impotent, or something like that!"

Everyone nodded. Zhang Hupan was so furious that he wanted to call down a Five-Thunderbolt on every one of them. What kind of society was this? If you ignored a beautiful woman, you were gay or impotent... It was incredible that they could even imagine such things. Could Zhao Liya think that way too? Although Zhang Hupan didn't really take Zhao Liya seriously yet, being wrongly accused by a beauty still made him extremely uncomfortable.

Hu Zhiming looked around at everyone, clearly satisfied with their reaction, and continued, "I think everyone else, including Zhao Liya, must have thought the same thing at the time! If things had really been as everyone imagined, Zhao Liya would have felt at ease. But the way the fourth brother ogled that Scottish beauty was even more shameless than anyone else's! Zhao Liya's confidence suffered a devastating blow! In my experience, beautiful women always have extraordinary confidence in their looks. They are determined never to admit defeat when it comes to their appearance. Next time, she will definitely sit beside the fourth brother again. That is the fourth brother's brilliance—he provoked Zhao Liya's competitive spirit and made her willingly follow him of her own accord!"

"Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!" Everyone gave Zhang Hupan a thumbs-up and cast admiring looks at him.

As the person involved, Zhang Hupan was dumbfounded. In nearly a century of cultivation, his mind had never been this muddled or confused. Judging by his own assessment, even if he had suffered cultivation deviation, his mind should have been clearer than this.

"I propose that our dorm elect Comrade Zhang Hupan as our eldest brother. I'll step down to second, and everyone else can move down accordingly. Does anyone have any objections?"

"None!" Everyone, Zhang Hupan excluded, shouted without hesitation. This was a grandmaster-level master at picking up women! As long as they followed him, how could they worry about failing to pick up girls at university?

In truth, considering his actual age, Zhang Hupan was the natural choice to be the dorm's eldest brother. But he had never imagined that he would take the position that should have belonged to him for such an absurd reason. It was truly laughable and exasperating.

A month passed in the blink of an eye. During that month, Zhang Hupan was deeply shaken by another civilization created by humanity, and he felt immensely fortunate that he had chosen university as his method of entering the secular world for cultivation. Otherwise, he would never have been able to experience such a dazzling and profound civilization. Just one month of study brought about a qualitative leap in Zhang Hupan's understanding of cultivation. It could be said that no one in the entire cultivation world now understood the true essence of cultivation better than Zhang Hupan. That was because there wasn't a single Nascent Soul Stage master in the cultivation world—no, more precisely, not one cultivator would tirelessly study the civilization created by beings regarded throughout the cultivation world as weak as ants. They worshiped the Heavenly Dao, pursuing power and immortality. Yet, it was precisely this civilization created by the humans they ignored that revealed many of the most fundamental truths. Unlike the cultivation world, which liked to explain the Heavenly Dao with things so mysterious they bordered on the incomprehensible, science used a rigorous attitude and sound logic to reason out and explain the mysteries of the universe. Although it had only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg, it still knew far more than those immortals struggling through cultivation. Of course, the cultivation world's wondrous, almost bizarre arts and its ability to overturn mountains and seas were things modern scientists could never understand. Those required flashes of insight from many exceptionally gifted minds and centuries of enlightenment before one could comprehend those profound truths. Otherwise, Zhang Hupan's four senior brothers would not have spent their entire lives regretting their inability to enter the Nascent Soul Stage.

Science and cultivation of the Heavenly Dao could be said to be two entirely different systems. Science was a discipline that relied on facts and reason, a field of knowledge that could withstand logical deduction. As long as one was willing to study, one could generally learn and understand it. The Heavenly Dao, however, was a profound and mysterious discipline that could only be understood, not explained, and was not something everyone could learn. If a scientist tried to cultivate the Heavenly Dao without extraordinary talent, he might never enter the Innate Realm in his entire life. But if a cultivator studied science, the powerful mental strength and physique they possessed beyond ordinary people would let them learn at an astonishing speed. Zhang Hupan, for instance, had mastered in one month knowledge that ordinary people needed years to learn. Yet what cultivator in the world would be willing to spend time studying a civilization created by people they considered as weak as ants?

Yet everything in the world was interconnected. When science and the Heavenly Dao were mastered by the same person, they were bound to open up a cultivation path never seen before and create an unprecedented cultivation prodigy, an unparalleled immortal. It was like inconspicuous charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur being mixed together to create a bomb of tremendous power.

"Universal gravitation. So the reason I can't fly to the moon yet is that my speed hasn't reached the point where I can escape Earth's universal gravitation. Plants can grow because chlorophyll absorbs solar energy. If I could create something like chlorophyll inside my body, couldn't I absorb the sun's powerful energy too? That energy is even purer than the spiritual energy of Heaven and Earth..." These were all strange ideas Zhang Hupan had developed after learning human knowledge.

To ordinary people, some of Zhang Hupan's ideas seemed like wild fantasies. But for someone as powerful as Zhang Hupan, those ideas could be realized completely through research and experimentation. However, the scientific knowledge Zhang Hupan currently possessed was still extremely limited, and there was a great deal more he needed to learn. Moreover, Zhang Hupan did not want to increase his cultivation at present. After all, his state of mind still lagged considerably behind his cultivation. Although he tried his best not to raise his cultivation, the shock science brought him and the sudden enlightenment it gave him still caused his cultivation to break through unconsciously from the stagnant early Nascent Soul Stage to the mid Nascent Soul Stage. This frightened Zhang Hupan so badly that he no longer dared cultivate recently. Still, the benefits studying science brought him made Zhang Hupan continue absorbing the knowledge created by humanity without fatigue, and strengthened his resolve to remain at university for further study. (To be continued)