Let the System See His Potential

If Chen Ping still dared to set his sights on Electrolux, he really would be an old man swallowing arsenic because he had lived too long-practically begging Tang San to notice his existence.

Even when pies fell from the sky, you had to check whether your teeth were strong enough and your skull hard enough.

With bad teeth, you would shatter a mouthful of them. With a soft skull, the pie could crush you to death outright.

Chen Ping had a very clear head about this sort of thing.

He was no longer some young kid. This fucked-up world had trained his mindset quite well.

As long as he stayed alive, his day would eventually come. Jumping into certain death was not called finding life amid death. It was called being a fucking idiot.

With his innate rank-two soul power, Chen Ping was quite certain that, even though he had transmigrated, he had better not treat himself as the protagonist.

Well, even if he was a protagonist, he might be the kind in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.

After leaving the city, Chen Ping first strolled along the main road for a while to let his food settle, then switched to Shrek Academy's traditional means of transportation.

No matter where you were going, just run there.

Suotuo City? Run there!

Star Dou Forest? Run there!

The only exception had been when the Heaven Dou authorities chartered transportation for the round of sixteen in the Continental Advanced Soul Master Tournament.

Otherwise, given Flender's miserly nature, it was hard to say whether he would have made the original Shrek Seven Monsters run from Heaven Dou City to Spirit City.

Chen Ping's situation needed no explanation. He had only so much in savings, and all of it had gone toward medicine. Renting a carriage was naturally out of the question. He could only run to Star Dou Forest.

The formula the system had worked out for Chen Ping had already undergone one cost reduction after another, to the point that medicine dealers in the Sun Moon Empire would weep at the sight of it, and Xu Sanshi's family would have their hearts broken.

Even so, a base cost of several Gold Soul Coins was unavoidable.

Having spent so much money, he naturally could not let it go to waste.

After soaking in the bath yesterday afternoon, he had done four hours of anaerobic exercise that night. Now that morning had come, he could spend another whole day running, maxing out his aerobic training to ensure he absorbed as much of the medicine's potency as possible.

If squatting on the toilet earned top-student points, Chen Ping would seriously have considered whether it was better to strain anaerobically or keep crapping aerobically.

Feeling that most of the lactic acid accumulated during his training before bed last night had already dissipated, Chen Ping took off toward Star Dou Forest.

His schedule was not terribly tight, but it was by no means generous.

In less than three months, he not only had to defeat a soul beast through his own abilities, but also cultivate to rank fifteen, reach Shrek City, and find Wang Yan.

Actually, if you ignored the accelerated wear that weighted training inflicted on a soul master's knees, Shrek's running regimen did have a few merits.

Running was perhaps one of the few exercises that trained both inside and out, working the entire body. It strengthened not only the body but also the heart and lungs, and it cost nothing. Its cost-effectiveness really was impressive.

Yes, cost-effectiveness.

For Shrek Academy, which had gotten its start through swindling and deception and built its campus in a village, running was absolutely the most cost-effective form of exercise.

Even Chen Ping had no objection whatsoever to long-distance running while his purse was so thin.

But you could not make long-distance running your only training, much less pile on weight like mad and then think yourself an absolute genius.

The present-day Shrek was different from the Shrek of ten thousand years ago. It had been built by occupying Spirit City's land.

There was even a Shrek City outside Shrek Academy, with annual tax revenues reaching tens of millions, even a hundred million Gold Soul Coins.

To remain so miserly under those circumstances, with weighted running as the sole training method, could only mean being a brain-dead fossil who swallowed ancient teachings without digesting them and spent every day insisting that the ancestors' ways must never change.

Another four hours flashed by. By now, the sun had shifted away from directly overhead, and noon had passed.

The scorching sun hung high in the sky. Even breathing had become difficult for Chen Ping, and his lungs burned as though they were on fire.

Every step sent a spray of moisture splashing from the spot he passed.

It was sweat shaken from Chen Ping's body.

If a passerby had been running behind him, merely sniffing the medicinal potency radiating from his body would probably have let them eat three extra bowls of rice after going home that evening and doubled their metabolism for a week.

By now, Chen Ping was simply running forward numbly and mechanically. He had no time to register his body's protests after running this long. His attention was focused entirely within himself.

He studied a couple of knowledge points even while squatting on the toilet. How could he fail to make proper use of something as time-consuming as running?

In the original story, Huo Gua had quite clearly managed to circulate the Mysterious Heaven Skill while running, nourishing himself and restoring his stamina as he went.

Put plainly, the Mysterious Heaven Skill was just an advanced standardized cultivation method for gathering energy through meditation and absorbing the free-floating vital energy of heaven and earth. If the Mysterious Heaven Skill could be used while running, there was no reason meditation could not.

He had reluctantly spent over forty points to have the system work it out, confirming that even if his attempt to meditate while running failed, there would be no serious side effects.

Chen Ping slowed his pace slightly and tried meditating.

Meditating while running really was not easy.

The essence of meditation lay in "immersion" and "focus."

It required a mind free of stray thoughts, holding to the source and guarding the one.

Only then could a soul master sense the vital energy drifting through heaven and earth, draw upon their martial soul's affinity for and desire for that energy, and breathe it into their body.

After circulating through a full cycle, it would become soul power they could use.

Running, meanwhile, was an exercise that required highly coordinated cooperation throughout the body.

Splitting one's attention to meditate at such a time would make true immersion and focus utterly impossible.

But then again, Chen Ping had never been one to bow to supposedly impossible odds.

He would not dare hop around in front of Tang San with rank-ten soul power.

After all, that would not even qualify as clowning around. It would be courting death.

But he still had the courage to challenge the deeply rooted ideas of the Douluo Continent.

Ten thousand years ago, the Douluo Continent had possessed no soul core cultivation system.

Yet ten thousand years later, during the Peerless Tang Sect era, soul core cultivators had sprung up like bamboo shoots after rain.

There must have been pioneers who attempted to condense the soul cores that only Ferocious Beasts had once possessed.

After succeeding, they had organized their findings into a system, making soul cores standard equipment for Titled Douluo during the Peerless Tang Sect era.

Since the Douluo Continent's cultivation system had never been an unassailable truth, Chen Ping naturally did not mind giving it a try.

He was not sure whether meditation in his previous life was the same thing as meditation on the Douluo Continent.

But if Chen Ping remembered correctly, meditation could be divided into seated meditation and moving meditation according to the posture used!

Granted, even moving meditation probably meant practicing tai chi or yoga, not outright running, much less running long distances for hours on end. But Chen Ping could not be bothered with all those distinctions.

It was all movement. He refused to believe it could not be done.

Today, Chen Ping would let the system see his potential.