Mountain Bandits and Noble Houses

Zhao Changhe had long wanted to leave this little pond, but he had never been able to settle on when. He had stayed here to build up his cultivation, yet until now, he had had no way of predicting how quickly he would progress.

Now, however, he could be certain.

When he had first crossed over and could not even find a single cultivation art, Zhao Changhe would never have imagined that he could be so calm about reaching the third level of the Profound Pass within a few months. It had only been a little over half a month since he had broken through to the second level, and already he was ambitiously planning for the third...

After all, Instructor Sun and Fang Buping were only at the fourth level of the Profound Pass, and both were well into their thirties, with over twenty years of training behind them. Cultivators at that level were already elites throughout the vast martial world. Fang Buping could command a branch, while Instructor Sun, as his right-hand man, held a position scarcely below his. Lin Feihu was also at the fourth level, and he was already the leader of a gang.

Each level of the Profound Pass was a whole new heaven. How many people in this world squandered their entire lives without ever seeing the end?

Of course, individual aptitude and the quality of one's cultivation art played a part. Not everyone needed to train for ten or twenty years. Yue Hongling had reached the eighth level at nineteen, and who knew what extraordinary encounters she had experienced in the martial world before then? There was no comparing one person with another.

Thus the masses toiled away, while hidden dragons lay in the depths.

Xia Chichi was also exceptionally gifted, and her mother had taught her a supreme divine art from childhood. She had reached the fourth or fifth level of the Profound Pass at sixteen. After the transformation brought by the Azure Dragon Seal, with the Four Symbols Cult now sparing no effort to nurture her, it was entirely reasonable to expect her to equal Yue Hongling, or even slightly surpass her, by eighteen or nineteen.

But Zhao Changhe had originally lacked those advantages. Most people, including a grandmaster like Vermilion Bird, had initially judged his prospects the same way: an older youth who had betrayed his master, with no future. He had only begun practicing martial arts at nineteen, and his foundation was far too poor. Reaching the third level of the Profound Pass might take ten years at the very least. He might even fail to reach it in his entire lifetime.

The Blood Baleful Art was practically the only art that could bypass the disadvantage of his age and instead let him take a shortcut through the advantages of his physique. No matter how many drawbacks it had, Zhao Changhe could not abandon it.

If he had wanted to cultivate both internally and externally, internal cultivation should have offered no way around that disadvantage. Instead, he had encountered Xia Longyuan's legacy, which not only let him skip the introductory stage but was also a compatible art. Perhaps his age would still become a disadvantage in its later stages, but he did not need to make it his primary art and slowly grind his way through the Profound Pass. If he used it only to help the Blood Baleful Art break through bottlenecks and as an extra reserve mana bar, it was a shortcut within a shortcut.

With advantages like these, why couldn't he attempt the third level of the Profound Pass? His progress might slow down later, but why worry about all that now?

The bandits of the Mountain Stronghold discovered that their chief's wife had run away. Their chief wore a dark expression for days, and the atmosphere in the stronghold grew so tense that no one even dared speak loudly.

Ah, they had known all along that, with the way Boss Zhao exercised his authority as a husband, he would lose control of his wife sooner or later.

He had better not find someone so beautiful next time. What good was looking like Yue Hongling when he hadn't actually married Yue Hongling? Come to think of it, with their boss's painful example as a warning, none of them would dare take the real Yue Hongling even if she stood right here. Just imagining their miserable place at the bottom of the household pecking order was enough. If she ran off one day, what could they do about it?

Their boss had barely spoken these past few days, but he seemed to have turned grief into appetite. He ate astonishing amounts: three jin of meat and three large bowls of rice in one meal. No one knew how his stomach held it all. If the stronghold hadn't recently come into money, his eating alone could have reduced their old stockade to poverty.

After eating, he practiced his punches, trained with his saber, shot arrows, and lifted a stone lock weighing several hundred jin up and down while holding a horse stance.

Then he went back inside for his medicinal bath. Even in the middle of the night, they could hear stifled screams coming from his room. It looked as though he had increased the dosage in the bath, too.

He seemed to do this every day anyway, but lately he really had been pushing himself especially hard.

After all, his wife had run away. He had one less outlet for his energy, and no one was squeezing him dry anymore.

Who could have imagined that Zhao Changhe was frantically taking in nutrients, converting them into the bodily vitality and blood needed for the third level of the Blood Baleful Art? He had only trained for a few months, yet he already dared to aim that high!

Zhao Changhe himself felt that it still wasn't quite enough. Although he sensed that the third-level bottleneck would not be too difficult, he had underestimated the strength of vitality and blood required between the second and third levels. At most, he had filled half of that requirement. Food and medicinal baths could only build it up day by day; achieving it in a short time was unlikely.

It was essentially bodybuilding, and that had never been something that produced results overnight.

But there was one notable difference from bodybuilding: with good medicine, he could directly make up the required vitality and blood. That worked far better than eating protein powder.

"Tiezhu, any news about the medicine I sent you into town to find?"

"Boss, they don't sell that Qi-Blood Powder you wanted in town..."

"Of course they don't sell it ready-made. It's a damn supplementary medicine recorded in our Blood Baleful Art. Why would anyone else sell it? Are you a pig?" Zhao Changhe snapped irritably. "What about the medicinal ingredients I listed? We can prepare it ourselves. It's just brewing a decoction and making powder, not a Daoist refining pills. What's so difficult about that?"

"They do have the ingredients, but not much." Tiezhu pulled out a package. "Just these..."

Seeing that there were at least some ingredients, Zhao Changhe's expression eased, though he was still puzzled. "Why so little?"

"Uh, Helmsman Fang's people buy these sorts of ingredients pretty often, too. They use quite a lot."

Zhao Changhe paused, then scratched his head.

This probably wasn't Fang Buping targeting him. If it were, they wouldn't have left even this one package for him. Rather, everyone in that branch practiced related arts and needed the same supplies, so naturally they used plenty. It was normal for a small, remote town like this to have little stock left.

He had been shortsighted, then, not stocking up on these ingredients beforehand... But who could have known in advance that he would be preparing to attempt the third level of the Profound Pass so soon? Fang Buping's people would never have imagined it either, or they would have bought everything up already...

"These will do. They'll keep me going for a few days, so I'll use them first. Go look in some farther towns for me. A delay of a few days doesn't matter." Zhao Changhe sighed. "She told me never to be impatient in training. I've been a little too impatient these past few days."

The bandits stole glances at their chief with peculiar expressions. A man whose wife had run away was truly pitiful. It had been days, and he still couldn't get through three sentences without mentioning her.

Zhao Changhe knew what these fellows were thinking, but he had no intention of explaining himself. He could hardly tell them that their chief's wife had actually been Yue Hongling, and that she had naturally left once her business was finished. What a load of nonsense that would sound like.

He picked up the ingredients and quietly returned to his room to measure them out and brew them. Let people say what they liked.

It felt as though every parting made a person grow up a little.

In fact, with the New Year past, he was already counted as a year older anyway. Twenty now...

Somehow, these few months in this world seemed to have made him grow up faster than years in his old life. Was this what people meant when they said the years in the martial world hastened one's aging?

Watching the steam rise from the medicine pot, Zhao Changhe suddenly chuckled.

"Your training these past few days has been fairly composed. You haven't been hopping all over the place like a rabbit anymore." Cui Yuanyong looked at his younger sister with a deep sigh. "If you could settle down and apply yourself, how could you still be at a mere second level of the Profound Pass? You should have been the most gifted genius in our family. What a pity to squander your talent like this."

"All right, all right. You've been going on about this since I was little. My ears have grown calluses listening to it. Isn't it enough that you all train well? Why do I have to train? It's painful, exhausting, and boring."

"If you were content with poetry, books, and needlework like girls from other families, and eventually married into a good household, that would be fine. But you want to catch bandits and thieves, and you think being a bounty hunter sounds fun, yet you won't work hard... Isn't that practically asking to die?"

"Who in this world would dare touch someone from the Cui family?"

"Troubled times are coming. The Cui family name won't necessarily work everywhere. Never mind anything else, the Four Symbols Cult would love to kill a member of our family to consecrate their battle standard... Besides, Father and I can't protect you for your entire life." Cui Yuanyong sighed. "The New Year's over. You're sixteen now. It's time to grow up."

"My birthday is at the end of the year! That's ages away. I'm only fifteen. Fifteen!"

"Fine, fine. Fifteen." Helpless against his younger sister, Cui Yuanyong shook his head and handed her a pill. "Your progress these past few days has been decent. If you can keep this up, you should be able to break through in another ten days or so, instead of the two months we expected. This is a Pure Profound Pill. Take it when the time comes, and you'll be sure to break through the bottleneck."

"Stingy. Just one?"

"All right, all right, I'll give you three." Cui Yuanyong sighed again. "The human heart never knows contentment... Zhao Changhe sent people into town to buy medicine, and even those low-grade ingredients could only be scraped together in pitiful amounts. You're sitting on superior pills and still complaining that there aren't enough."

"What's he buying medicine for? Is he sick?"

"If I'm not mistaken, he's also trying to break through to the third level." Cui Yuanyong gave his sister a meaningful look. "He's been practicing martial arts for about three months, relying on the little that stronghold has. At one point, he even had to fight people over a piece of meat."

The girl's eyes went round. "Impossible! This time, I'll definitely be faster than him!"