Dragon Abyss Tiger-Subduing Art

The sun had reached its zenith, shining straight down on World-Aiding Hall's roof and making the gold lettering on its black-lacquered plaque gleam.

In the rear courtyard, the servants were eating.

Communal fare: one meat dish, two vegetable dishes, and all the rice they could eat. Today's meal was braised pork with radish, rich with oil, the chunks of meat cut into neat squares with fat and lean layered together. The vegetables were stir-fried cabbage and vinegar-tossed bean sprouts.

A group of people squatted by the wall, cradling rough porcelain bowls as they slurped noisily.

World-Aiding Hall's food was considered quite good in Dingshan County. The only problem was that its requirements were a little high: one had to be literate.

If one could not read, one could not recognize the labels on the medicine cabinets. Filling a prescription with even one wrong herb could cost a life. Thus, most of World-Aiding Hall's servants were children from fallen scholar families—able to read and write, yet with no other path open to them.

"Hey, did you hear? Alchemist Li died."

"Which Alchemist Li?"

"Who else could it be? Li Lang. Mountain bandits killed him the night before last. They say they stripped him bare and threw him into the stinking ditch west of the city."

"Is that true?"

"It's true! The man who collected the night soil found him early in the morning."

After that, the talk grew more and more outrageous.

"I knew there was something off about him. Remember last month, when he accepted a gift from Boss Liu of Liu's Cloth Shop? Said he would refine a batch of Essence-Congealing Pills for his son. And what happened? He took the gift, but where were the pills? Not even a shadow of them."

"That happened? No wonder Boss Liu started taking detours whenever he saw him."

"I'm telling you, I also heard he colluded with Steward Wang to sell off the pharmacy's pills. Li Lang refined the pills, Steward Wang managed the storeroom, and they would mark them down as losses in the accounts before the pills flowed out. They split the silver fifty-fifty."

"No wonder Steward Wang was so polite to him..."

"Polite, my ass. That was them dividing the spoils! Now that Li Lang is dead, Steward Wang is probably laughing behind closed doors. That's one less person to split the silver with."

"Served him right! He took gifts and never did the work. Even death came too cheaply for him."

"I heard he had a wife and children at home. They died terribly too."

"What's terrible about it? He embezzled so much silver. His wife and children enjoyed plenty of it too."

When a wall fell, everyone pushed; when a drum cracked, ten thousand men beat it. The more they spoke, the more animated they became, as though Li Lang had owed each of them three strings of cash in life.

Chen Chong stood some distance away, listening in silence.

When the servants saw him approach, some bowed and called, "Steward Chen," while others shuffled aside to make room for him. Chen Chong listened to their idle gossip without changing expression.

He had gleaned some information from their conversation, just as he had expected.

The wealthy households were now like torches in the night, watched by countless pairs of eyes. Which family had spare wealth, which family had a beautiful daughter, which family's men traveled abroad for trade and remained away year-round—everything had been thoroughly mapped out.

In troubled times, the wealthy were meat on the chopping block.

But was it really as the official notice claimed—mountain bandits? Chen Chong chewed his rice as he thought. After all, anyone could have taken that chest of silver.

He finished the last mouthful of rice, rose to his feet, and headed out toward the eastern part of the city.

Inside Li Zhaoning's study.

Sunlight filtered through the carved wooden window and fell across the xuan paper before her. She was writing, the tip of her brush gliding over the page like a quiet fish.

When Chen Chong entered, she lifted her eyes slightly, but the brush in her hand did not stop.

"Wang Zheng has started moving goods recently," Chen Chong said in a low voice as he stood before the desk. "The True Martial Pills in the storeroom are recorded as losses, but more are actually leaving the warehouse than the books show. I had people watch him for several days. Every three days, he sends out a batch through the black market."

Li Zhaoning nodded. Her brush paused on the paper, leaving behind a blot of ink.

She set down the brush and raised her head, her gaze meeting Chen Chong's. Those eyes remained the same—neither cold nor warm, like a deep well.

Their eyes met, then quickly parted.

"Understood," she said. "I'll make arrangements."

Chen Chong did not ask further questions and withdrew from the study.

He did not return to the alchemy room, instead heading straight back to his own small courtyard.

He shut the courtyard gate, sat before the table, and opened the panel.

"Consume one thousand taels of silver to deduce the nameless cultivation art?"

Chen Chong drew a deep breath and chose "Yes." In recent days, he had refined vast quantities of pills, batch after batch of True Martial Pills rolling out, silver flowing in like water.

The iron box had become a silver chest, the silver chest had become gold leaves, and after saving for all these days, he had finally gathered enough.

Light swirled across the panel. Lines of text appeared and vanished, as if something were deducing, calculating, and reorganizing. Chen Chong felt a faint swelling in his head, as though something were slowly taking shape.

"Deduction successful. Nameless cultivation art—Wandering Dragon Crossing the Moon Heart Sutra."

"Detected a cultivation art at Great Perfection: Tiger-Subduing Art. Consume one hundred taels of silver to fuse?"

Chen Chong chose "Yes."

"Fusing... Fusion successful. Dragon Abyss Tiger-Subduing Art."

"Consume one hundred taels of silver to simplify?"

"Simplification successful. Dragon Abyss Tiger-Subduing Art—Dragon Stride, Tiger Roar."

His silver had nearly been drained dry. Chen Chong looked at the last few pieces of broken silver in the iron box and gave a bitter smile.

Yet the surging, majestic power within his body made him feel that the money had been well spent.

After the True Tiger-Subduing Art fused with the Wandering Dragon Crossing the Moon Heart Sutra, the cultivation art underwent another qualitative transformation. The pathways through which his qi and blood circulated had widened by nearly half again, while an invisible web seemed to have formed between his sinews and membranes, linking the force of his entire body into one whole.

If the True Tiger-Subduing Art had been a great river, then the Dragon Abyss Tiger-Subduing Art was a lake—bottomless in depth and boundless in breadth.

On the panel: Dragon Abyss Tiger-Subduing Art (Proficient 12/1000).

He had only just reached proficiency, exactly like the first time he had fused cultivation arts. Chen Chong nodded. The art had indeed undergone a qualitative change, but he would have to grind its proficiency up from the beginning.

Then he frowned.

Dragon Stride, Tiger Roar. Dragon?

Chen Chong began pondering dragons. I've never actually seen a dragon. I only saw them on television and in cartoons. The dragons in those films and shows from my previous life all seemed to twist and writhe as they moved.

Their bodies arched and unarched, their tails swished, and their heads swayed from side to side. Chen Chong stood in the room and tried to imitate one.

He twisted his waist once.

Then twisted it again.

Then he lay on the floor, arching his back. A tail—well, he did not have one. He kicked his legs backward and humped himself forward inch by inch.

The pose made him look like a stranded earthworm desperately trying to burrow back into the soil.

Luckily, his tiger roar had become fairly convincing by now.

Otherwise, a grown man lying on the floor indoors, writhing about while letting out an occasional "Awoo"—the sight would truly have been unbearable.

Chen Chong writhed around for half an incense stick's time, and the proficiency on the panel rose by three points. He climbed off the floor, patted the dust from his robes, and stared blankly.

"Is... is that how dragons swim?" he muttered to himself. "The dragons I saw in my previous life didn't seem to wriggle like this either..."

But his proficiency had genuinely increased. Chen Chong sighed and continued wriggling.

Outside the window, dusk crept in.

In the small courtyard, the sparrows in the jujube tree had long since returned to their nests. Everything was quiet save for the wind stirring the leaves.

If the occasional passerby drew near the courtyard wall, they could hear bursts of "Awoo" from within, along with waves of strange writhing noises.

They would probably think the household kept a dog that had gone mad.