"Lord Yan, you actually made it to the eighth step!" Yin Fang shouted, pumping his fist.
"Su Yan's amazing!" Tang Chi shouted along with him.
Xue Ke furrowed her brow in confusion. "Teacher, why is Brother Su Yan moving forward instead of retreating?"
Zhu Zhuqing stared intently with her cool eyes and murmured, "Brother Yan."
No one had expected Su Yan to take an eighth step while pushed to his limit.
But the next second, he fell out of the waterfall.
Bibi Dong pulled him back to shore. Just like the three people and one mouse before him, he was wrapped in a towel and set to dry.
"Xiaoyan probably broke through." Bibi Dong's eyes crinkled with a smile as she looked at her increasingly powerful beloved disciple, her heart full of pride.
"What level is Lord Yan?" Yin Fang asked.
Everyone fell silent.
"Wait, you don't know either?" Yin Fang asked again, stunned.
"Unless something unexpected happened, Xiaoyan just broke through to level 16," Bibi Dong said. "If something did happen, then it's hard to say."
Everyone except Yin Fang knew what unexpected thing Instructor Bibi Dong meant.
"I don't know what level you all are, either," Yin Fang said, seizing the chance to ask. He was the first to introduce himself. "I'm a level 13 Beast... Tool Soul Master."
"Level 18 Tool Soul Master, Tang Chi."
"Level 18 Beast Soul Master, Zhu Zhuqing."
"Pika, pika-pika, Pikachu!"
"I'll leave mine unsaid," Xue Ke said with a helpless smile.
"That's impressive!" Yin Fang exclaimed.
"Keep training hard with the Saintess Instructor, and you'll catch up, too." Tang Chi patted his shoulder, then glanced at Zhu Zhuqing with his dark eyes. She had actually caught up with him.
Just then, Su Yan woke up and saw a fire burning above his head. He jolted in fright, struggling wildly.
Two seconds later, he realized there wasn't a fire on his head. He was hanging upside down above one.
He turned his head and saw a group of people gathered nearby. "Hey!"
Before long, Su Yan escaped his drying fate, changed into a fresh set of clothes, and stood to one side.
In response to Yin Fang's question, Su Yan smiled. "I'm already level 17."
"Level 17!" Tang Chi cried out. Without realizing it, he had lost his position as the one with the most Soul Power. Even Su Yan, who had always been several levels behind him, was about to catch up.
"When did you level up again?" Bibi Dong's beautiful eyes trembled. As his teacher, she had been terribly negligent.
Su Yan counted on his fingers. "About two months ago."
Bibi Dong breathed a sigh of relief. She had been away visiting Ah Rou around that time, so she hadn't been there to keep an eye on him. That meant she hadn't been too negligent.
With noon approaching, Bibi Dong took a small wooden table from her belt. "I recently got something interesting."
Then she clasped her hands in front of the little table. "Little Magic Table, serve lunch!"
As soon as she spoke, the empty table filled with food, drinks, and tableware for seven. Some of it could be found on Douluo Continent, but a large portion was food that didn't belong there—and it stirred a deep homesickness in Su Yan.
After transmigrating, homesickness was a Mud Truck. I was in this world, while you were in the other.
Su Yan gave a wry smile and looked up. A familiar line surfaced in his mind.
Steamed lamb, steamed bear paws, steamed venison tails, roast duck, roast chicken, roast goose...
"Wow!"
Exclamations rang out one after another.
A faint light glimmered in Bibi Dong's beautiful eyes. She hadn't expected this little wooden table to be so special!
"It smells so good!" Tang Chi's eyes were practically glued to the table.
Yin Fang's appetite stirred. "So many dishes—even I haven't tried some of these!"
Zhu Zhuqing's gaze wandered among the several plates of fish.
"Pika~" Pikachu was already sipping a glass of lemonade, looking thoroughly content.
Xue Ke swallowed quietly and wheeled her chair closer to the table.
Su Yan racked his brain until he finally found a story buried in the memories piled in a corner: Grimm's Fairy Tales.
The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack.
What he'd wanted most back then was the donkey.
Bibi Dong took out another, larger table and moved all the dishes over. "Sit down, everyone. Let's eat!"
In front of Su Yan sat a plate of drunken pork ribs, crispy and tender, fragrant and tempting.
But he held his chopsticks without moving, a traitorous tear of drool slipping from the corner of his mouth.
Bibi Dong looked at him curiously. "Xiaoyan, are you..."
"It's nothing, Master. I just remembered some things." Su Yan wiped away his tears, picked up a rib, and took a bite.
It tasted like home!
In his previous life, his mother—who had been as lively and innocent as a three-year-old—had loved drunken pork ribs most of all.
His father's specialty had been drunken pork ribs, too.
And the first dish Su Yan had learned to cook was drunken pork ribs.
As he chewed, Su Yan's eyes reddened. He missed home.
Two years before the Mud Truck had hit him and sent him into another world, both of his parents had also died at the hands of a Mud Truck while they were out together.
At least he hadn't had to watch his parents bury their child. That was probably the one thing Su Yan could feel grateful for.
Good times never lasted long.
Once everyone had eaten their fill, they lay on the ground, content.
They treasured this hard-won time to rest.
Soon, their happy break would be over, and they would have to return to the waterfall.
The Endurance Training Method required them to hold their position for at least an hour in the middle of the waterfall—that is, at least fifty steps out.
So far, Su Yan held the record, at the eighth step.
They still had a long way to go before passing.
The four of them and one mouse plunged into the waterfall again.
Su Yan reached the eighth step.
Zhu Zhuqing and Pikachu both made it to the fifth.
Tang Chi stopped at the third, gritted his teeth, and took another step.
Yin Fang was still pinned at the first step, unable to move.
All four of them, along with the Electric Mouse, tried their best to enter a meditative state, struggling to endure toward that elusive half hour.
On the opposite bank, Bibi Dong handed Xue Ke a copy of Hundred Solutions of Martial Soul (Revised Edition). "This trash book is barely good enough for beginners."
"Why are there so many people everywhere?"
At the gates of Notting City, an eight-year-old girl wondered to herself.
Her hair was tied into two symmetrical buns. Beneath a gray-white roughspun coat, she wore a fiery red dress, along with matching gray-white cloth shoes. On her back was everything she owned.
People streamed in and out of Notting City's gates without end.
The little girl stood at the entrance, watching from daylight until nightfall.
At last, when there was hardly anyone around, the gates closed.
"I'll have to come back tomorrow."
Just then, a carriage slowly approached. Bibi Dong was bringing the children back to Notting City after their training, exhausted to the bone.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed a little girl standing motionless by the roadside, bathed in starlight. She stopped the carriage and walked over. "Little one, I'm with Spirit Hall. Are you trying to get into the city, too?"
The girl broke into a cold sweat and ran into the forest without looking back, grumbling to herself, How can someone be so overly familiar?
"Master, what's wrong?" Su Yan's tired voice came from inside the carriage.
"Nothing. I ran into a strange child." Bibi Dong leapt down from the carriage, left the children in the care of the gate guards for a while, and ran after her.
But once she entered the forest, Bibi Dong couldn't find any trace of the little girl. It was as if she had vanished into thin air.
She widened her search area, but still found nothing.
Too many things had happened in Notting City lately. Bibi Dong couldn't rest easy, so she summoned several Death Poison Spiders and searched the area thoroughly with them. Still, they found no trace of the girl.
"How strange. Where did she go?" Bibi Dong murmured. She leapt back onto the carriage and drove into the city, heading toward Spirit Hall.
On a dim street in Notting City, the little girl suddenly appeared in the middle of the road. "I finally made it inside. Thank you, kind-hearted, overly familiar big sister from Spirit Hall."
She closed her eyes. In the darkness, she sensed a wisp of fiery red Soul Power gathering into a strand, like a ribbon guiding her forward.
The corners of her mouth lifted slightly. Her red tongue licked her upper lip. "I've found you!"
Before you continue