Something Happened

When Chen Yiming got home that evening, he took out the plastic box containing the Gold-Eating Insect eggs.

He opened the lid, tipped one into his mouth, and chewed.

The egg was tough enough that he had to chew hard to break it open.

The inside was soft and sticky.

It tasted a little sweet.

Unfortunately, one egg was too little. He swallowed it before he could savor it and had no idea whether it would do him any good.

Time flew.

Two months passed in the blink of an eye. During that time, Chen Yiming settled back into a routine of going between the martial arts school and home.

The reason was that Zhang Youde had been sent to the front line only days after Chen Yiming became a prospective core disciple.

He had finally found a way, through Zhang Youde, to get involved in East Lake City's martial arts disputes and secretly learn different kinds of swordsmanship.

But with Zhang Youde gone, no one could take his place.

Among the people he knew, Wang Bowen and Teng Zhihui were too far above him in cultivation. Apart from occasionally giving him pointers, they did not include him in their activities because the gap between them was too great, at least on the surface.

In their eyes, he should be building his foundations at the school, not getting distracted by other matters.

There was nothing Chen Yiming could do about it.

The other students at the school lacked the connections he needed.

Even Liang Lele and Zhao Jingru came from families of small-time merchants. Neither could help him gain access to the swordsmanship techniques he wanted.

His plan to secretly learn more swordsmanship had to be put on hold.

For now, Chen Yiming could only save money from his part-time teaching job at the Libei Martial Arts Training Center, the occasional household-registration check with Chen Shaojie, and the rent from three shops downtown.

But that income came from work suited to people below the third Body Metamorphosis. The techniques he wanted to buy were meant for core disciples, most of whom had undergone more than three Body Metamorphoses.

It was like working in a small city in his previous life while trying to buy a house in a big one. It simply could not be done quickly.

He could leave the city alone, enter the Wilderness Zone, and earn money as a hunter by killing Mutated Beasts.

But for someone who had undergone only three Body Metamorphoses, the risk was too high.

An ordinary Mutated Beast was already at his level. Even with his superior fighting ability, one man could not hold off a pack of wolves. If several Mutated Beasts targeted him at once, he would struggle to survive.

He had no intention of leaving the city before his sixth Body Metamorphosis.

Life returned to the way it had been when he first joined the school.

Then one day, a thought struck Chen Yiming. If he could not yet gather enough swordsmanship techniques to combine them into one versatile art, perhaps he could start by combining the ones he already knew into a first version and see how it worked.

He acted on the idea at once.

That night, after returning home, he tried combining moves from Mantis Snake Swordsmanship, Phantom Light Sword, Rainbow Swordsmanship, and Mountain-Splitting Sword as he practiced.

After only a few rounds, he had created an entirely new swordsmanship technique by instinct.

He was grateful for the boost from his level-one swordsmanship talent. He could learn techniques at the Apprentice Realm level like these almost instantly.

From then on, he continued practicing Mantis Snake Swordsmanship at the school during the day, but switched to his new technique when he got home at night.

Within days, he noticed something unusual about the rate at which he gained skill points.

It had risen from three points a month to four.

He was thrilled. It meant his new technique was a higher grade than Mantis Snake Swordsmanship.

So he named it Chen-Style Swordsmanship.

After that, Chen Yiming wished he could stay home and practice all day. But without a suitable excuse, he still had to go to the school during the day.

He estimated that if he practiced Chen-Style Swordsmanship all day, he might gain five skill points a month.

During this period, he quietly broke through to his fourth Body Metamorphosis one night.

Chen Yiming

Talent: Swordsmanship—Level 1

Realm: Apprentice Realm, Fourth Body Metamorphosis

Skill Points: 12

He was another step closer to the thirty skill points needed for level-two swordsmanship talent.

Yet nothing else about his life changed.

There was still no major change in the fighting at the front. A month earlier, Lin Yixuan had taken two core disciples there as well.

The atmosphere at the school had grown much more serious. Even its senior disciple had been forced to go to the front, and everyone felt the pressure of the war. The days when they could treat training like clocking in for work were over.

Nearly half a year passed this way.

Then, one night:

Chen Yiming

Talent: Swordsmanship—Level 2

Realm: Apprentice Realm, Sixth Body Metamorphosis

Physique: Beginner Sword Body

Skill Points: 3

His latest martial arts talent panel had a new field: physique.

Beginner Sword Body?

Before Chen Yiming could examine it closely, his second uncle arrived unexpectedly.

In the Chen family living room, the coffee table was piled with fruit, while some Mutated Beast jerky Chen Yingying had not finished lay on the dining table.

Thanks to Chen Yiming, the family now lived comfortably. His parents no longer needed to work and spent their days strolling and chatting around the residential compound.

As soon as his second aunt, Li Qingping, came through the door, she collapsed to the floor and sobbed.

"Please, have Yiming save Shaojie!"

Chen Yiming's mother hurried over, helped Li Qingping up, and sat her down on the sofa.

"What happened?" his father asked.

"Shaojie still hasn't come home, and it's almost midnight.

"We went to the City Patrol to ask. There were plenty of other families like us there, but no one would tell us anything. They just told us to go home and wait," Chen Zhipeng explained.

His voice trembled as he fought back tears.

Hearing the commotion, Chen Yiming opened his door and came out of his room.

After listening to his second uncle, Chen Zhipeng, he asked, "No news at all? Have you tried finding the captain of Shaojie's squad?"

Chen Yiming and Chen Shaojie had worked together on household-registration checks for only three months. Their arrangement had ended when Chen Shaojie's squad captain recovered from his injuries.

"We couldn't find him. We think the whole squad may have gone missing together," Chen Zhipeng replied.

"Did Shaojie tell you what he was doing tonight?" Chen Yiming asked.

"At dinner, he said he was going on a routine assignment," Chen Zhipeng said.

After getting all the information his second uncle could give him for now, Chen Yiming fell silent.

He and Chen Shaojie had done household-registration checks many times, and Chen Yiming knew the work well.

The assignments usually ran from dusk until eight in the evening, and rarely later than nine.

One reason was that people who worked outside the home would have just returned by then. Anyone who belonged there would be present, making it a good time to check.

Another was that, as the arrests of unidentified people in the urban villages continued, the remaining suspects became harder to catch.

Most of those still at large were tough and difficult to deal with.

A little over a month after Chen Yiming and Chen Shaojie began taking these assignments, the City Patrol started sending several squads to check an urban village at the same time.

The squads watched out for one another. After nine, the others would generally be off duty, and no single City Patrol squad would dare linger alone.

So with Shaojie still missing at nearly midnight, something had almost certainly happened to him.