Hu Xiaotian said, "But I've practiced for so long without making any progress."
Zhou Mo said, "That shouldn't be. With your intelligence, learning a martial arts manual ought to be easy."
In truth, no one understood the root of the problem better than Hu Xiaotian himself. Quan Dean had forcibly transferred ten years of internal power into him. The old eunuch probably hadn't intended to harm him; he had worried that Hu Xiaotian would have no means of defending himself after entering the palace. Teaching him martial arts had been a way of insuring his investment. What happened afterward had proved that without the martial arts the old eunuch had taught him, Hu Xiaotian couldn't have dealt with Wang Desheng, much less joined forces with Little Princess Qiqi to kill Wei Hualin. In Sunken Sky Valley, too, he had relied on the Dark Nether Yin Wind Claw to fight an assassin from the Heavenly Secrets Bureau to a standstill.
But to truly make all ten years of the old eunuch's power his own, he had to cultivate the Internal Arts Manual he had been given. Hu Xiaotian remained stuck in place because he hadn't actually been castrated. There was nothing wrong with Quan Dean's Internal Arts Manual; it would have worked perfectly well for any eunuch. Yet with Hu Xiaotian, it became a problem. To master a divine skill, take up the blade and castrate yourself. Hu Xiaotian finally understood just how true those words were. If he wanted to master the martial arts Quan Dean had taught him, he would have to harden his heart and snip himself. He had gone to enormous lengths to preserve this last scrap of masculine dignity, and he wasn't willing to give it up so easily just to practice some martial art. Though