"Enough!"
Tang San abruptly shut his eyes. He couldn't bear to watch anymore.
Watching Big Brother Su Yun being humiliated by a clown who'd mutilated himself for a meager advantage, watching the mocking looks cast by the mediocre people around them, Tang San felt a fire burning in his chest.
"This is outrageous... absolutely outrageous!"
"How could this trash meditation technique, this idiotic method of harming yourself a thousand times to hurt your enemy eight hundred, possibly beat Big Brother Su?"
Tang San gripped his trouser leg tightly, his knuckles turning white from the strain.
If only...
If only he could teach Big Brother Su the Mysterious Heaven Skill's formula...
He wouldn't need to comprehend anything profound. He'd only have to adjust his breathing and clear a few meridians.
Big Brother Su's cultivation speed would increase tenfold in an instant!
He could immediately stomp that blood-soaked fatty into the dirt!
But...
The towering Ghost-Seen Sorrow cliffs of the Bashu Tang Sect from his past life suddenly appeared in Tang San's mind.
He saw the cold stone tablet, and heard the elders' utterly emotionless ancestral injunction:
Tang Sect Secret Arts are passed down within the sect, never to outsiders.
Those who steal them will be killed without mercy!
Those who reveal them will die!
In his previous life, he had been forced to leap from the cliffs and end his life to atone for his sins because he was an outer-sect disciple who had secretly learned the inner sect's secret arts.
That despair, that reverence for the sect's rules, had long been carved into the depths of his soul.
Big Brother Su had given me a new lease on life. He's the one who showed me the way in this world...
But the Mysterious Heaven Skill is the foundation of the Tang Sect.
To secretly teach it to an outsider would be betraying his teachers and ancestors. It would mean turning his back on the Tang Sect!
After living two lives, would I, Tang San, really break my oath and betray my principles just to win an argument?
On one side were the conservative sect rules and faith in his order, engraved in his soul.
On the other was his benefactor, Su Yun, who had trusted him completely and was now suffering an unjust accusation.
The two conflicting thoughts clashed wildly in Tang San's mind, plunging him into the most agonizing inner struggle of his life.
His face looked even worse than Luo Bu's on the platform, and his body was trembling slightly.
Earth Command Center.
The atmosphere was a little awkward.
Dozens of meditation cushions were lined up neatly in the center of the hall, and every person seated on them was a leading figure in their field in Huaxia.
A High Monk in a richly embroidered kasaya sat with his eyes lowered. A Taoist Priest with an otherworldly air held a hand seal, while even two newly crowned Olympic gold medalists sat with flushed faces, trying to sense the so-called Heavenly Energy by following the three-long, two-short breathing method taught by the otherworldly Teacher Li on the screen.
Lei Zhan paced back and forth in front of the command console, arms folded and brows knitted. His anxious gaze swept over these powerful figures who could usually move mountains with a word.
Half an hour passed.
"Ahem..."
At last, a white-haired biological sciences expert opened his eyes. He rubbed his numb, aching legs and looked at Lei Zhan helplessly.
"Captain Lei, I can't do it. Forget light spots—I can't even sense static electricity. Besides feeling a little dizzy from holding my breath, nothing happened."
The Taoist Priest beside him, who had practiced Taoism for sixty years, also shook his head with a wry smile. He flicked his horsetail whisk and sighed.
"May boundless blessings be upon us. Layman Lei, we must trust in science. From a materialist perspective, Earth's atmospheric composition is quite stable."
"It's 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. The rest consists of noble gases, water vapor, and some PM2.5 particles. I sensed carefully just now, and there are no free high-energy particles of the kind described in that other world."
The Taoist Priest paused and advised him solemnly:
"The claim that meditation can make you stronger is pure feudal superstition. We must firmly resist it."
Lei Zhan looked at the old Taoist in front of him, who was wearing a robe and holding a horsetail whisk. A giant question mark slowly appeared above his head.
"?"
That Earth's environment didn't support cultivation had been expected.
But the problem was, if they couldn't verify the meditation technique on Earth, they couldn't provide technical support to Su Yun.
Were they really supposed to stand by and watch Su Yun take that blank account with its 1.0x speed and risk his life against natives who came with cheats built in?
Just as the experts were at a loss and the atmosphere had reached a dead end, Professor Zhang, a bespectacled man with thick-lensed glasses who specialized in folk history, suddenly let out an "Oh?"
He squinted at the Soul Power circulation diagram Teacher Li had drawn on the Large Screen. His expression shifted from confusion to shock, then to a look of disbelieving amusement.
"Old Zhang, what did you find?" Lei Zhan immediately asked.
Professor Zhang shakily pulled a yellowed notebook from his coat, flipped through a few pages, and pointed at the screen. "Look at this route for directing energy through the dantian and gathering it after three cycles... Isn't this the same illustration from Quick Mastery of Qigong in Thirty Days, the book I bought for fifty cents from a street stall in Panjiayuan during the qigong craze of the 1980s?!"
The whole room erupted in an uproar, and everyone crowded around.
"A street-stall book?!"
"Quick! Intelligence team, pull up the archives and compare them!" Lei Zhan ordered.
A few minutes later, the comparison results came in.
Looking at the two meridian circulation diagrams on the screen, which were 85 percent identical, everyone fell silent.
"No... No! A fraud couldn't come up with such a rigorous, self-consistent theory! And there's no way he could invent a cultivation method out of thin air!"
Professor Zhang lunged at the control console, his fingers trembling as he pointed at the original scan on the screen and shouted:
"Quick! Trace the source in the ancient texts! Compare this breathing method from Quick Mastery of Qigong in real time against every unique copy in the national collection of ancient books! I want to know exactly where that fraud copied it from!"
"Yes! Searching now!" The operator's fingers flew across the keyboard.
Data cascaded wildly down the Large Screen.
"Found it!" The operator quickly reported the result.
Professor Zhang pushed up the glasses sliding down his nose. Staring at the ancient-text facsimile that had just appeared on the screen, he read aloud, breathing rapidly:
"According to the comparison just completed... the breathing method in this book wasn't original. It was copied verbatim from a fragment of the Outer Sect Chores Strengthening Exercise, belonging to a minor sect called the Iron Bone Sect!"
At this, the old professor abruptly lifted his head.
"Because it was meant to keep the unskilled outer-sect servants—those who did heavy labor—fit, the method was extremely crude in its logic and terribly inefficient."
The sentence struck through the fog clouding Lei Zhan's mind like a bolt of lightning.
"So... the meditation techniques of that other world have something in common with our ancient cultivation methods?"
A brilliant light suddenly shone in Lei Zhan's eyes. "Then what if we find the complete, top-tier ancient internal arts?!"
"Since Su Yun's body from Earth isn't suited to the otherworldly meditation technique... what about techniques from our own world?"
Before you continue