Indeed, who besides a top student from Shrek Academy would dare brazenly write a slogan like that on a sign?
Besides, they were only a few dozen li from Shrek City. This Mr. Chen Ping standing before them had to be a genuine top student from Shrek!
"Break it up, everyone, break it up! This gentleman is a top student from Shrek Academy. A bunch of sweaty, stinking fellows like us shouldn't be crowding around him. Go on, disperse."
Once the middle-aged man connected the dots, he hurriedly dismissed his men and sat down beside Chen Ping.
"Young sir, to tell you the truth, I have a niece through a distant relative who's also a student at your Shrek Academy. Maybe you even know each other."
"My niece is a Blue Silver Grass Soul Master, just like my son, but she's far more talented than Xiaolong."
"The last time she came to visit me and her aunt, she was already a Soul Grandmaster, not far from becoming a Soul Elder."
Chen Ping's mind stirred at once. In the years since he had transmigrated to the Douluo Continent, he had spent all his time scrambling to make a living and had only a very vague idea of where he stood in the timeline.
Only after Chen Ping learned from a student of an advanced Soul Master Academy that their team had been eliminated in the Continental Advanced Soul Master Tournament by a single member of Shrek's reserve team, who had defeated all seven of them, did he finally get a rough fix on the timeline.
The Shrek reserve team member who had swept through all seven of them was named Dai Yueheng!
"You mean Senior Tang Ya, right? I've heard of her."
Without blushing or missing a heartbeat, Chen Ping tacitly accepted his identity as a Shrek student.
Just as Bei Bei and Xu Sanshi were hailed as the Outer Court Twin Stars, Bei Bei and Xiao Ya, that match made in heaven, were probably quite famous at Shrek Academy too.
Chen Ping was fairly confident that he could get into Shrek Academy anyway, so he might as well board first and buy his ticket later, enjoying a taste of being a Shrek student in advance.
"Well, now! Isn't that a coincidence!"
Chen Ping had guessed who he meant before he had even mentioned Tang Ya's name, making the middle-aged man all the more certain that Chen Ping was a top student from Shrek Academy.
He also became even more convinced of Chen Ping's claim that a Blue Silver Grass Martial Soul user could obtain the "Vitality Refraction" Soul Skill by absorbing a Soul Ring produced by a Gem Crystal Bug.
A few Gold Soul Coins for an invaluable piece of advice, along with knowledge passed down through a family-Wang Xiaolong's family had undoubtedly landed an incredible bargain.
Still, there was no denying that those few Gold Soul Coins were a substantial sum for their family.
From everything Chen Ping had seen during his travels over the years, he had more or less figured out how the various empires, apart from the Sun Moon Empire, treated ordinary people, as well as how much those people earned in a year.
The way it all worked was essentially that same thirty-three taels of silver scheme.
Taxes took away most of what ordinary people earned each year beyond what they needed to survive, and only what remained counted as disposable income.
For an ordinary farmer, after land rent and agricultural taxes, only a few Gold Soul Coins remained.
It was only because the Douluo Continent had practically no natural disasters and high crop yields, allowing most people to grow enough grain to feed themselves, that they did not starve to death.
Once they reached the cities, however, the price scissors between industry and agriculture meant that even laborers like those before Chen Ping, who likewise earned their living through physical toil, could make twenty or thirty Gold Soul Coins a year.
After paying for food, they could still save a dozen or so Gold Soul Coins each year.
The labor crew captain before Chen Ping, who had the cultivation of a Soul Elder, earned more than a hundred Gold Soul Coins annually.
Even so, paying Chen Ping several Gold Soul Coins at once amounted to half a month's income for the man.
No wonder he had called his men over to surround Chen Ping as soon as he found an opportunity. If he had been cheated out of that much money, he probably would not have slept soundly for the next month.
After chatting a while longer with Captain Wang, Chen Ping bid him farewell and continued toward Shrek City.
The information Chen Ping sold was indeed worth more than its price, but family teachings were not the reason he knew something so obscure.
Which Soul Beast's Soul Ring would allow Blue Silver Grass to develop toward a healing-type Soul Master, with that Soul Beast preferably being common and easy to find-Chen Ping had spent thirty Academic Genius Points to obtain that information.
This was one of his system's few abilities: it could help Chen Ping simulate and deduce various scenarios, provided he had enough Academic Genius Points.
That was also why Chen Ping disliked his system so much.
He did not dare hope for one of those systems that made its user invincible right from the start, but surely he could at least get a system that handed out supplies for daily check-ins, or divine equipment for completing missions?
Yet all Chen Ping had ended up with was this Academic Genius Training System, and it had only awakened recently.
Chen Ping had awakened in a pile of corpses when his original body was six years old.
The sight of bodies strewn everywhere had dealt a shock that was hard to overcome to Chen Ping, who had grown up in a peaceful society.
Among the dead lay the original owner's parents, siblings, and other members of his sect. It seemed that only the grand elder and a handful of others had escaped the slaughter.
According to the original owner's memories, the place where he lived was called the Coiling Dragon Sect, a hidden sect similar to the Body Sect. Normally, they lived peaceful, happy lives, content to keep to their own little corner of the world.
The sect's inherited Martial Soul was the Coiling Dragon Staff, the same Martial Soul possessed by Qian Jun and Jiang Mo, two consecrators of Spirit Hall ten thousand years ago.
Chen Ping's Martial Soul, however, was an exceedingly rare mutation of the same sort as Yu Xiaogang's.
Rather than mutating for the better, it had become worse: a Willow Wood Staff with only rank-two innate soul power.
Chen Ping had no idea what had happened to bring the calamity of extermination down upon the Coiling Dragon Sect.
But after Chen Ping cautiously scavenged stored food from the sect grounds and survived his first night, a system activation progress bar appeared before his eyes.
To Chen Ping at the time, it was an unexpected blessing falling straight from heaven. For an ordinary person who had just witnessed a landscape of corpses, nothing could have offered more reassurance than a system.
What even Chen Ping had never anticipated, however, was that his system would take more than five years-nearly six-to activate.
Those years had not gone smoothly for Chen Ping.
A sect extermination of such magnitude had drawn visits from the Shrek Inspection Team, the local city lord, and even the provincial governor.
Clearly, though, Chen Ping, with his rank-two innate soul power, was not worthy of their attention. As for being taken in by a major power and carefully nurtured with its resources, that was something he could only dream about.
One could say that the only reason Chen Ping, a modern man without any cheats and with such low innate soul power, had survived wandering the Douluo Continent for so long was the stubborn fire he kept bottled inside, waiting to turn his fortunes around once his system finally emerged.
Yet in the end, as though heaven had played a joke on him, what he activated after all those years of waiting was an Academic Genius Training System that could not provide Chen Ping with any actual supplies.
Fortunately, it was still a system after all. Put simply, it let Chen Ping reap two measures of reward for every measure of effort he put in. How much he gained depended on how hard he worked.
Before you continue