During the day, he sometimes leafed through books and sometimes strolled through the garden downstairs in the residential complex. Occasionally, he went to the market for groceries, then cooked dinner in the evening and waited for his sister and Yang Wanqing to come home.
The two girls had returned to Pengcheng University to continue their freshman classes.
But the atmosphere on campus was completely different from a few months earlier.
"Hey, bro, guess what I saw today?" Chen Siyao said when she came home that evening, tossing her backpack onto the sofa.
Chen Hao was chopping tomatoes.
"What?"
"Nobody was running on the track anymore."
"Huh?"
"They were all practicing martial arts." Chen Siyao leaned against the kitchen doorframe. "Nobody was playing basketball, either. A whole bunch of people were holding horse stances on the court."
"There were even people doing tai chi on the lawn—their movements looked awful, but they were really serious about it."
"The university has opened six new martial arts clubs, and every single one is full. Even the president of that anime club signed up for Xingyi Boxing classes."
Chen Hao tossed the tomatoes into the pan. Oil splattered with a sizzling hiss.
"That's normal. There are more and more Flame Spirit Stones around. Once ordinary people get their hands on them and grow stronger, they naturally want to find a way to put that strength to use."
"But they don't have any cultivation methods," Yang Wanqing said, poking her head in from the living room. "There are tons of people selling them online. 'Secret ancestral manuals,' 'Shaolin internal cultivation techniques,' 'Wudang Pure Yang Arts'—nine yuan ninety, shipping included. I looked at a few. They were all cobbled-together garbage."
"Some of the cultivation methods recorded in ancient texts are real." Chen Hao stirred the pan.