"It really works!"
"Was it because I'd been doing the wrong version of the eye exercises before?"
"Can the Attribute Panel only recognize the original version?"
Chen Jue looked at the new prompt on the panel, excitement stirring inside him.
He'd always assumed the Attribute Panel only offered skill options for relatively obscure sports.
He hadn't expected it to activate for something like [Eye Health Exercises], a routine focused on massaging acupoints.
By that logic, could all those martial arts techniques, traditional Chinese martial arts stances, and even the qigong and cultivation manuals that people raved about online work too?
"Other people can't see their training progress, but I can!"
"Maybe the greatest use of this Attribute Panel is turning skills that seem useless into real abilities!" Chen Jue's imagination ran wild, and his attention shifted beyond [Eye Health Exercises].
He even searched for some of the supposedly miraculous online tutorials, including Eight-Section Vajra Skill, Inner Strength Eight Brocades, Five-Animal Frolics, and Yijin Jing, and followed along.
After exhausting himself and working up a good sweat, Chen Jue was baffled again!
"I still can't activate any skills..."
"Could it be because the versions online are wrong?"
Chen Jue felt parched. He grabbed his water bottle, filled it, and gulped down several mouthfuls. Then he sat down to think.
The reason he'd managed to learn [Eye Health Exercises] was that he'd found the original eight-section Liu-style version online.
This eight-section Liu-style version was the source of every [Eye Health Exercises] routine currently available. Director Liu of the Capital Medical College Sports Research Group had developed it by drawing on traditional Chinese massage techniques and combining them with his own and his children's nearsightedness, using both personal trials and clinical experiments.
It consisted of eight simple, easy-to-learn sections, much like the [Twelve Taiji Forms] Chen Jue had learned before.
The material he'd found online also included matching massage techniques and diagrams of the eye's acupoints, along with a video of Director Liu demonstrating the routine himself. The video had a retro look and painfully low resolution.
It was thanks to the original creator's tutorial that Chen Jue had managed to teach himself the correct way to do [Eye Health Exercises].
As for those lofty practices associated with Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, they'd been circulated online so widely and altered, abridged, and simplified so many times that it was now difficult to find their original forms.
And the supposed sensations of qi described in the tutorials were so vague and confusing that they were hard to understand.
At that point, Chen Jue grew wary.
He suspected that many of the instructions in the tutorials available online were questionable.
If someone had bad intentions, they could easily slip in some of their own ideas!
After all, back in the day, old masters often deliberately held back a few tricks when teaching their disciples, for fear that once the disciple learned everything, the master would lose his livelihood.
As these teachings were passed down from generation to generation, few people received the true transmission.
Some disciples who practiced incorrectly were also eager for quick success and wanted to make a living in the martial world. They might even make things up, inventing fanciful techniques and adding their own ideas.
As a result, people with genuine martial arts skills had become as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.
Then the teachings spread across the internet, where they couldn't be verified, and curious netizens started practicing them blindly.
Sure enough, after browsing some online qigong forums and martial arts boards, Chen Jue found plenty of old posts where well-meaning veteran practitioners advised beginners to find a local master with genuine skills to guide them.
As the saying went, "The master shows you the door; the rest is up to you."
Without a good master to lead the way, it was easy to practice incorrectly and hurt yourself the more you trained.
Chen Jue's situation was exactly that: he had a powerful Attribute Panel, but no good master to guide him.
Unless he was willing to try countless manuals and tutorials online, one by one, until he found a skill the panel could record and then used the panel to correct his movements.
That would be like searching for a needle in the ocean—not worth the effort.
It would be better to find a local master with genuine skills!
"Where around here can I find a master?"
"Wait... wouldn't it be even better to find a young, pretty female master?"
Chen Jue's thoughts took a turn. He let out a couple of cheeky chuckles, then opened WeChat and sent Wu Fang a message asking for guidance.
He planned to start by learning the basics from Wu Fang, an experienced practitioner who also taught high school PE.
Perhaps she'd had enough harassment during the day, because Wu Fang didn't reply right away.
Chen Jue figured she kept a regular schedule: she went to the park to practice early in the morning and had classes during the day, so she was probably offline and in bed by now.
He glanced at the time. It wasn't even ten yet.
So Chen Jue started practicing the newly recorded [Eye Health Exercises].
The routine had eight sections, and the original version took nearly ten minutes to complete.
It was nothing like the simplified version he'd learned as a child, with four sections that took five minutes.
After finishing the routine, Chen Jue felt warmth around his eye sockets and a cool, refreshing sensation inside his eyeballs.
"So our whole generation had been practicing it wrong!" Chen Jue grumbled to himself, then went through the routine again.
He practiced for about thirty minutes, repeating the routine three times. His proficiency kept jumping up by +1, +1.
Then another prompt appeared on the panel:
------ [ Ding~ ]
[You have completed one eye-care exercise that meets the requirements. The pressure stimulation around the eye socket, on the internal carotid artery, ophthalmic artery, optic nerve, and other structures has accelerated blood flow in the eyeballs and promoted the metabolism of visual cells. Your vision has improved by an extremely small amount.]
[Constitution +0.01]
[Friendly reminder: These movements put pressure on the blood vessels around the eyes. Frequent use may cause vascular damage. Please schedule your exercise time appropriately.]
"Is thirty minutes or so the limit?"
Chen Jue wondered. He remembered the advice he'd heard from Nana, Xiao Mo, and the other massage therapists at Jingtanghui when he'd gone for hydrotherapy.
Massage, as a form of recreational relaxation, wasn't better just because it lasted longer.
Everyone had a different constitution and sensitivity, so their tolerance for a given duration had to vary too.
Most clubs... ahem... bathhouses divided their sessions into forty-five-minute or one-hour blocks, while longer full-body massages lasted ninety minutes.
Beyond that, further massage wouldn't do much good. It could even cause muscle fatigue or injury.
Since [Eye Health Exercises] involved acupoint massage, and the blood vessels and muscles around the eyes were even more delicate, it made sense that the same principle applied and there was a time limit.
That night, Chen Jue spent the evening exhilarated and had a deeply satisfying dream.
The next morning, he didn't go to the park.
Instead, he took the elevator to the top floor of the residential building. He watched the time until six in the morning, when an orange-red sun tinged with blue slowly rose above the city skyline in the east.
He tried staring at it for about three minutes, until his eyes couldn't take it anymore. Then he closed them and began doing [Eye Health Exercises] while facing the rising sun.
As the saying went, "A day's plan starts in the morning."
Thirty minutes of the eye exercises with his eyes closed left his eye sockets burning. His vision behind his closed eyelids glowed red as sunlight passed through them, and his eyeballs felt more relaxed than ever before.
The sensation was remarkable, like being back in elementary school, sitting on the playground with his eyes closed, basking in the sun while doing morning exercises.
It felt completely new, and incredibly comfortable.
His whole body felt warm, and even his eyes felt relaxed and relieved.
By the time he finished the thirty-minute [Eye Health Exercises] session, the panel had displayed a string of prompts.
Not only had his [Constitution] increased by 0.01, but a tiny bit had also been added to his free attributes.
"It's at 0.07 now. Once I save up a few more points, I can merge the skill slots!" Chen Jue grinned.
When he opened his eyes and looked at the world again, everything seemed green.
That was a normal effect of facing the sun with his eyes closed. His eyes had been exposed to red light for a long time, creating an optical illusion on his retinas.
He blinked a few times, and everything returned to normal after a few seconds.
He put his glasses back on and was delighted!
He realized that although he'd gone two years without updating the prescription on his glasses, which had grown somewhat blurry and no longer corrected his vision adequately, they now made everything clear again.
He still didn't have the 5.0 vision of a person with perfect eyesight, but things at a distance no longer looked so blurry or doubled.
"I've only been practicing for two days, and my prescription must have dropped by at least fifty degrees!"
"Even my astigmatism has improved a little!"
"These [Eye Health Exercises] are the GOAT!"
First update~
I went to the hospital again today. I've got a cold and a sore throat, but I'm still asking for votes.
P.S. You really shouldn't blindly follow online tutorials. It's best to find a reliable teacher. Pianfeng used to practice the Microcosmic Orbit and the San Ti Stance of Xingyi Quan, and ran into problems. I've experienced it firsthand.
Before you continue