World-Aiding Hall

When Chen Chong returned to his little courtyard, the sky was already dark. He shut the door, sat down at the table, and first picked up the book on pill-making to read.

Its cover was made of indigo coarse cloth. Inside, the pages carried a faint yellow tinge, and the inked characters were neat and orderly. Chen Chong flipped through it page by page. It was far more detailed than the booklet Chen Huaixu had given him.

When he reached the middle, his finger paused.

True Martial Pill.

Chen Chong let out a breath of relief. Having this pill formula was what mattered most. Tiger Bone Pills ultimately used the bones of ordinary wild tigers, and their medicinal potency was limited. Their effect on cultivation was simply too slow.

True Martial Pills were different. Their main ingredient was the flesh and blood of demonic beasts, supplemented by several precious medicinal ingredients such as Crimson Marrow Lingzhi, Goji Bark, Scrophularia Root, and Ophiopogon Root. The refined pills could directly nourish flesh and blood and stimulate the sinews and bones.

With it, the rate at which he advanced through the Nourishing Flesh Realm should increase by a great deal.

He closed the pill book and set it aside, his gaze falling upon the wooden chest on the desk. Its surface was smooth beneath his hand, its grain fine and close.

He suddenly recalled the way Li Zhaoning had leaned against the window as she spoke. The wind had blown peach blossoms into her hair, and she had seemed enveloped in a thin layer of light.

Chen Chong shook his head and opened the chest.

It was packed full of martial arts manuals, stacked in neat order. Four Directions Fist, Clear Spirit Sword, Falling Cloud Art, Azure Sun Breathing Art... there were more than a dozen in all. Some had yellowed pages, while others were fairly new, clearly gathered from different sources.

He casually picked up a few and flipped through them. Their grades varied, but all were stronger than the Green Mountain Breathing Method.

Prompts kept popping up on the panel—

"Consume ten taels of silver to fuse Falling Cloud Art?"

"Consume ten taels of silver to fuse Four Directions Fist?"

"Consume ten taels of silver to fuse Azure Sun Breathing Art?"

Chen Chong chose the two manuals that looked most promising and fused them. Light flowed across the panel:

[Technique: Tiger Roars Through the Mountains and Forests (Perfect 99/10000)]

[Technique: Five Tigers Severing the Mountain Blade (Perfect 102/10000)]

They had jumped straight to Perfect. Chen Chong sensed them carefully. The core of the techniques remained the old Tiger Roars Through the Mountains and Forests and Five Tigers Severing the Mountain Blade, but their finer details had improved.

His breathing rhythm had become longer and more continuous, while his blade trajectories had become smoother and more complete. It was like the same blade, newly sharpened once again.

He gave them a try. With a chopping hand strike, the blade wind was three parts more solid than before. A branch on the jujube tree in the courtyard snapped in response, its cut clean and level. Then he let out another "Awoo," and the sound waves shook dust from beneath the eaves in a rustling shower. Dogs began barking again in the neighboring courtyard.

However, he could only fuse one technique at a time, and after fusion, he had to train it to Great Perfection before he could continue. Chen Chong did the math. Grinding through them one by one would ultimately have its limits.

The higher the foundation of a technique rose, the thinner the improvements brought by fusion became.

He put down the manuals and swept his gaze across the bottom of the chest. Suddenly, a booklet caught his attention.

The booklet had no cover. It was merely bound with a hemp cord, and its uneven pages were clearly handwritten. Chen Chong picked it up, and a line appeared on the panel:

"Nameless Technique (Incomplete). Consume one thousand taels of silver to deduce?"

Deduce? A new function. And one thousand taels—one hundred times more expensive than simplification. This technique was no simple thing.

Chen Chong opened the booklet. The handwriting was beautiful, graceful yet edged with sharpness. The first page contained only one line—"Created by Zhaoning · Unfinished."

He continued reading, growing more astonished with every page. This was actually a technique Li Zhaoning had researched herself.

The opening was a passage of self-reflection:

"At fifteen, I was proud and arrogant, disdaining the Li Family's martial arts. I moved out of the Li Family, wishing to create my own technique. I searched through martial arts under heaven and tested them one by one. Only then did I learn that on the path of martial arts, my talent was mediocre. Yet at the time, I refused to believe in fate. Since there was no road to walk, I would carve out one myself. Thus this technique came to be

What followed were densely packed notes: the strengths of this or that technique, the flaws of this or that move, and the worthy aspects of this or that breathing method.

She had extracted the strengths of more than a dozen techniques and tried to piece them together, deducing and revising them over and over.

Some pages had been altered until the writing was almost illegible. Other places contained diagrams of meridians, marked with routes for circulating qi.

At the end, she had written: "This book was finally completed. Yet my cultivation is insufficient. I merely took the strengths of various schools and kneaded them together, making something rather neither fish nor fowl. It is better than nothing, I suppose."

Chen Chong set down the booklet and fell silent for a moment.

Perhaps everyone had once been like this as a child, believing they would be the one to change the world.

Fifteen-year-old Li Zhaoning had been proud and arrogant. She had refused to practice her family's inherited martial arts, moved out of the Li Family, gathered techniques from across the world, and wanted to create a martial art that belonged to herself.

In the end, she had produced this incomplete manual, but her cultivation could not keep up, and she could only set it aside.

Chen Chong shook his head. For now, he still had to keep his feet on the ground. He did not have one thousand taels of silver, so deduction would have to wait.

What he needed to do now was train the newly fused Tiger Roars Through the Mountains and Forests and Five Tigers Severing the Mountain Blade to Great Perfection once more. Only techniques at Great Perfection could continue to fuse. He took a deep breath and assumed a stance in the courtyard.

"Awoo—"

Two days later, World-Aiding Hall.

Chen Chong stood at the entrance of World-Aiding Hall and looked up at its plaque. The three golden characters "World-Aiding Hall" on the black-lacquered plaque were larger and brighter than those of Jichuntang Hall. Its entrance spanned three bays, more than twice as wide as Jichuntang Hall's.

Two stone lions stood before the doors, one on each side, their paws worn glossy from touch.

A steady stream of customers came and went. Some carried medicine packets, some supported elderly relatives, while wealthy households in silk robes arrived in sedan chairs.

Chen Chong stepped inside, and a steward came forward to greet him.

The man was around forty, with a round face and a smile piled high upon it. But his eyes were small, narrowing into two slits when he smiled, making it impossible to see what lay within. He wore a somewhat worn blue cloth robe, its sleeves rolled up to reveal fair, clean wrists.

"Manager Chen, you must have had a tiring journey." The steward cupped his hands. "Manager Wang is occupied at the moment and asked me to show you around first."

By rights, Chen Chong had just arrived. Though the deputy chief manager stood half a rank below the chief manager, chief manager Wang Zheng ought to have come out to greet him. Yet Wang Zheng had not come.

The steward led the way ahead, with Chen Chong following behind. World-Aiding Hall was much larger than Jichuntang Hall. The front hall contained medicine cabinets and dispensing counters, with dozens of assistants bustling about. The central hall was the consultation area, where several resident physicians were taking patients' pulses. The rear hall housed the storerooms and accounting office.

Passing through a moon gate, they entered an even larger rear courtyard. Medicine-washing pools, herb-cutting tables, drying grounds, and medicine-baking rooms were all present, two or three times the scale of Jichuntang Hall.

The laborers busied themselves like an assembly line—cutting herbs, grinding herbs, sifting herbs, packing herbs—each performing his own duty. When they saw the steward bring Chen Chong over, they merely spared him a hurried glance without stopping their work.

The steward brought Chen Chong to a room at the deepest end of the rear courtyard.

When he pushed open the door, the room proved spacious, even broader than the main room of Chen Chong's pill-refining chamber at Jichuntang Hall.

A bronze pill furnace stood in the center, of even finer quality than the one at Jichuntang Hall. A bedroom had been partitioned off to the left, its bed neatly arranged. A study had been partitioned off to the right, fully furnished with bookshelves, a desk, and the four treasures of the study. The middle served as a reception hall, with tables, chairs, and a tea set. The windows faced south, providing excellent light.

It looked as though the place had been redecorated. Even the whitewash on the walls was freshly applied.

The steward smiled broadly. "Manager Chen, I heard that you were once a pill master, so I took the liberty of having this place prepared for you. Does it suit your liking? If anything is improper, simply give the word, and I will see to it at once."

Chen Chong looked around and nodded. The pill furnace, study, and bedroom—everything that ought to be there was there. He patted the steward on the shoulder. "Not bad. Thanks for the effort."

The steward's smile deepened, and he bent at the waist. "It is only what I should do, only what I should do. Then I will not disturb you further, Manager Chen. Call for me anytime if you need anything."

With that, he backed out and conveniently shut the door behind him.

Chen Chong sat down in a chair and lifted his teacup for a sip. The tea was warm and brewed just right. He looked out the window. Laborers moved back and forth through the rear courtyard, roofs overlapped in layers in the distance, and farther beyond them, the gray walls of Dingshan County stretched across the horizon.

Deputy chief manager of World-Aiding Hall. It sounded rather good. But Li Zhaoning had said that the chief manager here might have some problems.

Chen Chong set down the teacup and lightly tapped the tabletop twice with his fingers.