In the blink of an eye, another year was drawing to a close. A bitter, bone-piercing wind howled out of the land of extreme cold and raced across the Divine Land. Wherever it passed, frost formed, as though draping the earth in a flawless white veil.
In a fairly prosperous little village in Hedong.
In an utterly ordinary little courtyard, a young man sat cross-legged with his eyes lowered. At a glance, he looked like a clay sculpture, sitting there in perfect stillness, without the slightest movement. Only after a long while, when he slowly began to exhale, could the faintest movement be seen in his body.
Though he looked young, with even a trace of youthful innocence on his face, the aura he gave off while in meditation was incomparably serene. Standing beside him, one would feel as though heaven and earth had grown a little quieter.
"Please hold your breath for exactly seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds. Anything shorter or longer than the required duration will be a failure. The assessment will begin in five minutes. Please prepare yourself." A voice only the young man could hear rang out by his ear.
"Finally, the next question!"
The young man opened his eyes and let out a long breath. His cross-legged body relaxed, and he shook himself loose. With a push from both feet, he rose lightly to his feet, like a sheet of paper lifted by the wind.
"This is my third exam. I hope I can pass this time," the young man muttered.
His name was Li Xingkong, and this was his third exam since obtaining the system.
As long as he passed this exam, he could truly set foot on the path of immortal cultivation and would no longer be an utterly unremarkable ordinary person.
In the system's words, passing this exam meant he could graduate from immortal cultivation kindergarten.
This immortal cultivation system had bound itself to Li Xingkong when he was fifteen. On the day it happened, there had been no great experts fighting, no meteors falling from the sky or world-shaking changes, much less any spiritual energy revival or apocalypse.
It had been an ordinary day. The system had simply appeared in his mind out of nowhere. He had barely even felt anything; it was the strange progress bar that suddenly appeared before his eyes that alerted him to something different.
Aside from the so-called system that had appeared in Li Xingkong's mind and spoken to him, and a spinning progress bar before his eyes, there had been nothing else.
At first, he had thought he'd read too many novels and developed schizophrenia, that he was hallucinating. But after consulting a psychologist privately several times, he was told that, aside from lacking the adolescent restlessness a young person ought to have, he had no psychological problems whatsoever.
The doctor's proposed treatment was for him to hurry up and find a girlfriend, so as to awaken the hot blood a young man ought to have.
He was speechless. Didn't his little brother know whether his blood was hot or not? From then on, he gave up seeking further medical advice.
After ruling out mental illness and confirming that he really was the only one who could see the progress bar, Li Xingkong began to think the system might be just a little bit real.
At the time, Li Xingkong had been quite excited. This was a system, the standard equipment of a protagonist! What had he done to deserve such treatment?
Unfortunately, after greeting Li Xingkong, the system seemed to enter a loading state and fell silent, leaving only a spinning progress bar.
During the days the system was loading, he simply took time off and lazed at home, fantasizing about the days when he would cultivate immortality and slay any god or Buddha who stood in his way:
On the first day, I'll protect our Earth. On the second day, I'll protect my Earth. On the third day, I won't eat beef...
With a system in hand, what sensible person would still go to school?
After lazing at home and indulging in fantasies for two whole days, the system finally finished loading. Li Xingkong couldn't wait to find out what it could do.
The system was called the Immortal Cultivation Assistance System, but it wasn't nearly as awesome as Li Xingkong had imagined.
It had no invincible functions like giving him eternal life for signing in, nor any golden-finger functions like check-ins, prize draws, exchanges, or transmigration. Still less did it have Wind Spirit Moon Shadow, with one-click full health and mana. It didn't even have a newbie gift pack or an attached space.
Didn't the systems popular these days at least let people turn hard work into money? This one didn't even have that function.
The system's only function was assisting with learning. Put simply, it was a Subor talking textbook plus.
In other words, the system couldn't help him realize his dream of surpassing Britain and catching up to America in three years. If he wanted to cultivate immortality, he still had to study on his own.
Sigh!
Li Xingkong felt a little miserable. Other people's systems raised them a minor realm in three days and a major realm in five, handing out divine techniques, divine artifacts, and beautiful women, while his was just a talking textbook. The gap was honestly a bit much.
Still, people shouldn't compare themselves to others. Though he fell short of the protagonists of other novels, it was a system all the same, and that was already pretty good.
Learning brought progress. Before, that had been encouragement at best, or else meant spiritual progress that brought no tangible benefits. Turning it into money still depended on what one did with it.
But now, for Li Xingkong, those words had real value. Learning brought not just progress, but even evolution.
Once the system started up, it didn't waste words. It immediately began arranging Li Xingkong's first-stage courses, called preschool education for short, also known as preschool. As far as Li Xingkong was concerned, the preschool curriculum was already mysterious enough.
First was a memorization method that, with long-term practice, could improve memory and even grant photographic recall. Second was the Hibernating Dragon Technique, which, simply put, involved controlling dreams and allowed him to remain conscious in them.
According to the system, these two skills were the foundations for entering immortal cultivation. Without a good brain and enough time to study, he might already be past the best age for cultivation by the time he finished the basic courses.
It reminded Li Xingkong of playing The Sims, where the first achievement trait he always bought was Never Weary...
Li Xingkong spent a full three years on the preschool curriculum. Only in the third year did he pass the system's preschool assessment: given one night to study in a dream, he had to memorize an entire Arabic dictionary in no more than three read-throughs.
Li Xingkong had originally thought that, as long as he read enough books, the exam would eventually contain familiar material he could draw on. Unfortunately, the system knew him better than he knew himself. Whatever Li Xingkong had read, the system had also seen through his eyes, so its exam questions perfectly avoided everything he had prepared in advance.
After all, this stage tested his memory and ability to study in dreams, not the breadth of his knowledge.
After he successfully completed the preschool curriculum, the system's courses moved on to the next stage: junior kindergarten.
The junior kindergarten curriculum was more complicated than the previous stage, but the memorization method and Zhelong Technique gave him plenty of time to study. After looking over what he had to learn at this stage, Li Xingkong could only be glad he had built a reasonably solid foundation in the previous one.
If he had tried to study it as an ordinary person, he might have been an old man by the time he finished.
While studying in the system's junior kindergarten, he also casually got into a university. It was neither a diploma mill nor first-rate, just an ordinary university. After all, now that he had a path to immortal cultivation, school held little attraction for Li Xingkong. It was simply something he did to give his parents an answer.
Since he had yet to begin cultivating immortality in earnest, being an ordinary person who went along with the crowd was better for his development than standing apart.
He had no plans to aim for a 985 university or score full marks on the college entrance exam. What he could learn at school was no longer his top priority, and a relatively ordinary school would have a more relaxed academic atmosphere.
He had only one thought now: study, study himself to death, and fucking study some more!
He also found those incredible people in novels strange, the ones who could prepare for a week and get full marks. He had tried it himself. Aside from subjects like English, where a good memory practically guaranteed a high score, the other subjects took far more time than that. Apart from the sciences, which had definite answers, every subjective question required him to learn to get on the examiner's wavelength.
A thousand people had a thousand faces, and no one could completely match another person's views. One examiner might think his answer deserved full marks, while another might disagree. It still came down to luck.
Of course, more importantly, he needed to spend more time on his immortal cultivation courses.
For this entire stage of study, even a rough outline of the contents was enough to make ninety-nine percent of people shrink back:
It included research on the human body accumulated by several civilizations, down to the function of every set of DNA sequences in every cell. There was introductory theoretical physics, though "introductory" was from the system's perspective; to Earth Star, many parts were like a book from heaven. There was how to efficiently promote the body's growth, how to control its various parts, and so on.
Basically, the studies at this stage were all theoretical knowledge, encompassing everything under the sun. Some subjects far surpassed the most advanced technology of the present day, while others were less thoroughly researched than existing technology and received only a few cursory lines of introduction.
Aerodynamics, for example. In all the knowledge the system gave Li Xingkong, there were only four Chinese characters on the subject: with enough force, even a brick could fly.
After roughly five years of study, Li Xingkong completed the junior kindergarten curriculum. By the end of this stage, his store of knowledge had reached a truly astonishing level, and those five years of study had nearly made him forget that his system was an immortal cultivation system.
What kind of immortal cultivation system made people study math, physics, and chemistry? If not for the system, he would have given up hundreds of times along the way.
Then came senior kindergarten, which had continued until now.
The material at this stage was utterly insane, and he had spent roughly four whole years studying it.
This stage involved putting the previous stage's lessons into practice, mainly in human biology. Through the training methods provided by the system, Li Xingkong could take over any function of his body with his mind. Put simply, he had rooted himself. Before rooting, he had been like any ordinary person: his consciousness could control his everyday actions, but not the processes his body ran on its own, such as heartbeat, blood pressure, shutting off pain, opening and closing pores, and so on.
With the system's help, he could now basically control his body completely.
If an ordinary person drank pesticide, the toxic substances would cause pulmonary fibrosis. But he could control his stomach acid and digestive organs to pause digestion, and control the opening and closing of his stomach and digestive tract, letting the pesticide come out just as it had gone in.
Likewise, he could precisely control his blood pressure, keeping it steady at whatever level he wanted.
Through his studies at this stage, Li Xingkong had gained one hundred percent control over his body's existing functions. Though in practice this meant manually switching functions that his body had once performed automatically on and off, it was already a height ordinary people could never reach. As he was now, he could thoroughly beat up those soldier kings and boxing champions from melodramatic urban novels.
The time for the breath-holding exam was approaching. Li Xingkong broke free of his brief recollections, took several deep breaths, and adjusted his physical condition. He fetched a ladle, drank a ladleful of water, then returned to sit down by the bed.
"The assessment will begin shortly. Five, four, three, two, one..."
As the system's announcement sounded by his ear, Li Xingkong took a deep breath and began holding it. At the same time, he started keeping track of the time in his mind. Thanks to the training methods provided at this stage, his biological clock was already comparable to a mechanical clock, with an error of less than one second per year.
One minute, two minutes, five minutes. Li Xingkong's expression didn't change at all; he even looked somewhat relaxed.
At ten minutes, Li Xingkong's chest and abdomen had begun to swell. Under his control, movement in his limbs had temporarily ceased, leaving only the minimum energy consumption needed to maintain their functions. Even the respiration maintaining those functions broke down body fat through anaerobic respiration. Only his heart and brain were actually consuming oxygen.
The carbon dioxide produced by respiration accumulated in his lungs, and he did not exhale it. The human body did not make complete use of oxygen, so some was expelled when a person breathed out. While holding his breath, he could reuse the gas in his lungs, maximizing his consumption of the oxygen he had inhaled.
At fifteen minutes, Li Xingkong began to exhale slowly. Under his deliberate control, his breath was so slow that a person holding a hand beneath his nose would not have felt it.
The hardest part of this test was not holding his breath, but keeping precise time while doing so. On one hand, he had to count the time in his head; on the other, he had to control the operation of the muscles and organs throughout his body. Even for him, it was no small challenge.
Three, two, one.
Li Xingkong counted silently in his heart. The moment he reached one, his whole body shuddered. Then he let out a long breath and opened his eyes.
"Did I make it?"
"Breath held for seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds. Challenge successful." After checking, the system delivered its conclusion. "Congratulations, little Li Xingkong. You have passed all your immortal cultivation kindergarten subjects, and your theoretical foundation has met the requirements for advancement."
"I finally did it!" Li Xingkong gave a laugh. Folks, who could understand? After twelve years of studying, he could finally set foot on the path of immortal cultivation in earnest.
"Damn system, I want a vacation!"
There was no such thing as a vacation from the system's courses. After all, he and the system were one; how could there be a vacation?
"I cannot answer your request. After all, I have never forced you to enter a state of study." The system's words were icy. It really hadn't forced Li Xingkong to do anything over the years; he had done it all willingly.
After all, the moment he fell asleep, he entered the system's classroom. Other than paging through textbooks and reading, he could only sit in a daze, and time in his dreams was much longer than in reality. What else could he do but study?
"According to the system's projections and your current rate of progress, you can expect to enter the Foundation Establishment stage before the age of sixty."
It certainly didn't force him, but it knew how to twist the knife softly.
"Foundation Establishment at sixty? If I'm already sixty, what's the point of Foundation Establishment? I want Qi Refining in three years and Foundation Establishment in five!!" Li Xingkong retorted. At sixty, who knew how badly his bodily functions would have deteriorated? He'd be lucky to run a couple of steps, let alone establish his foundation.
"I think you have a good point about wanting a vacation. Let's take three months off before we start again," the system said, stroking Donkey Li's fur the right way.
"No! We start tomorrow. If I take today off and tomorrow off, I won't reach Foundation Establishment even when I'm old. No vacation!" Li Xingkong was getting anxious.
The facts proved that the system had a knack for handling Li Xingkong.
P.S.:
The earlier plot really was written a little lazily. Some longtime readers offered a fairly suitable solution: after reading the first few chapters, you can skip ahead to Chapter 121 and continue from there. If you're interested in the setting details in between, you can selectively skim those chapters.
Emmm, I'm reworking this part of the plot and have already started writing it locally. I plan to replace it all at once after the rewrite is complete.
(It isn't easy being a new author. At the beginning, things got a little too much like a wild horse breaking loose. Please forgive me.)