A Place to Spend the Night

"Yin Yang Great Compassion Nine Heavens Incantation."

Compared with the various media used to store knowledge in the real world, everything in this world seemed exceedingly primitive.

The entry-stage cultivation method given to him by the Daoist Zou Bugui was recorded on bamboo slips. The text was only a little over a thousand characters long, but the slips weighed four or five jin.

When the thought crossed Zhang Xuezhou's mind, he couldn't help feeling that memorizing it would be easier than lugging the bamboo slips down the mountain.

For him, memorizing a little over a thousand characters really wasn't difficult.

As a model student in Class 62 of the senior year at Yucai Middle School, Zhang Xuezhou spent very little time studying, but he studied with great efficiency.

For that very reason, he was also frequently near the bottom of the class, hanging on at the tail end of Yucai Middle School's most outstanding experimental classes.

"Some of the characters are just a little hard to recognize!"

Unlike the conditioning instructions Ren Anran had given him, Zou Bugui's "Yin Yang Great Compassion Nine Heavens Incantation" contained quite a few characters that Zhang Xuezhou had trouble recognizing.

That had to do with the standard of education in Zhang Household Village. The elders knew only so many characters, and Zhang Xuezhou could learn only as many as they knew.

Otherwise, Zhang Xuezhou wouldn't have needed to supplement his diary with drawings when writing it in this world's language.

He unrolled the bamboo slips and read through them three times, memorizing most of the contents while puzzling repeatedly over nearly a hundred characters he didn't know.

"I have to go to Hibiscus City and ask Auntie for help. I also need to learn some basic common knowledge about cultivation here!"

He had an entry-stage method in hand, but Zhang Xuezhou didn't dare act rashly.

He knew little about the many technical terms mentioned in the "Yin Yang Great Compassion Nine Heavens Incantation," such as the Qi Sea and the pathways through the meridians. That was completely different from the detailed explanations and illustrations in the conditioning instructions.

They might even belong to two entirely different systems.

"I wonder where Sunny Slope is?"

After a while, Zhang Xuezhou finally came back to his senses.

Surviving in the boundless wilderness was an exceptionally difficult task.

That was to say nothing of the fact that Zhang Xuezhou would return to the real world whenever the time came, losing all consciousness on this side.

Never mind encountering jackals, wolves, tigers, or leopards-even a swarm of ants or mosquitoes could very well pose a danger he couldn't withstand.

"I'm one of the Ten Yin Holy Son's people. I'm one of the Ten Yin Holy Son's people. I have a powerful backer..."

After swindling someone out of his belongings, he had to run. Zhang Xuezhou understood perfectly well that he should quit while he was ahead.

But Zhang Xuezhou couldn't find his parents, much less spend the night alone in the wilderness.

He slowly shuffled down to the mountainside, his expression changing repeatedly, before he finally began slowly climbing back up.

Never mind all the grand principles, he had to make it through these two days until his parents came to fetch him and see him safely on his way.

As for whether the Daoist would see through his act, Zhang Xuezhou couldn't worry about that now.

"What exactly is that fishy smell on me?"

Besides finding somewhere to shelter, Zhang Xuezhou had a few things to figure out.

As an impostor, Zhang Xuezhou had no idea why he had been taken for one of the Ten Yin Holy Son's people.

He couldn't smell the fishy odor on himself at all.

People were never very sensitive to their own scent. Zhang Xuezhou turned the matter over and decided he could try bluffing the Daoist again when the time came, to see if he could coax the relevant information out of him.

He had many plans in mind, but by the time Zhang Xuezhou climbed back up the mountainside, no sound came from the Daoist temple.

Peering through a crack in the door, Zhang Xuezhou saw that the temple was completely empty, without a soul in sight.

"Daoist priest?"

"Daoist priest?"

"What's the meaning of this? Shutting the temple doors and refusing to see anyone-is this how you show disrespect to our Ten Yin Holy Son?"

"There's something wrong with the entry-stage method you gave me. Open the door at once!"

After calling out several times, Zhang Xuezhou changed his tone and began to scold him.

But after all that performance, there was no response from the temple.

"Looks like there really is no one here. When did that Daoist leave? How come I didn't run into him going down or coming back up?"

Zhang Xuezhou looked around and pricked up his ears, listening for quite a while.

He finally confirmed that no one was left in the temple.

A living, breathing person had vanished into thin air. It was a little uncanny, but as Zhang Xuezhou looked at the faint white crescent moon rising on the horizon, not a ripple stirred in his heart.

If he didn't make preparations to spend the night with An Ran soon, he might be the one to disappear.

He gave the wooden door two quick pushes, but it didn't budge an inch.

Far from discouraging Zhang Xuezhou, this gave him a small, pleasant surprise.

A safe place to stay was exactly what he wanted.

This Daoist temple lacked the village's patrols and guards, but its brick-walled buildings offered better protection than the earthen houses of Zhang Household Village.

Zhang Xuezhou was quite pleased with such a secure place.

He looked at the white wall, which was more than two meters high, and found a few stones to stand on. After several minutes of scrambling and clawing his way up, Zhang Xuezhou fell inside with a thud.

"Nice place!"

Having grown accustomed to living in earthen houses here, Zhang Xuezhou felt rather as if he had moved from an apartment into a villa upon suddenly entering these brick-and-stone buildings.

He didn't have time to worry about the minor injury to his scraped knee and quickly inspected the empty temple.

The temple wasn't very large. Aside from the three statues enshrined in the central hall, there were only a kitchen, a privy, and living quarters on either side.

The doors weren't locked. Zhang Xuezhou even found meat congee in the kitchen that still retained some warmth.

He smacked his lips and looked at the sky. With no time to worry about various taboos, he promptly put the Daoist's meal in his belly.

"I'm one of the Ten Yin Holy Son's people. I have a powerful backer..."

After muttering it a few times, repeatedly persuading himself as though brainwashing himself to bolster his confidence, Zhang Xuezhou steeled himself and claimed the Daoist's bedroom.

The Daoist had left several changes of clothes in the bedroom, made of material far superior to the coarse cloth shirt Zhang Xuezhou wore. Zhang Xuezhou saw his misdeeds through to the end and changed out of his sour-smelling old clothes.

Only after getting everything in order did Zhang Xuezhou light the poisonous herbs used to fumigate venomous insects.

Given how the Daoist reacts to the Ten Yin Holy Son's reputation, being overly cautious would make me more likely to slip up. The more arrogantly I act as if everyone is beneath my notice, the more likely he is to fear me. I'll be safer that way!

Zhang Xuezhou thought it over for several dozen seconds before settling on precisely how to treat the Daoist.

He didn't know where the Daoist had gone and could only stay alert and wait.

But even when the moon rose above the branches, the Daoist still hadn't appeared at the temple.

When the time came, Zhang Xuezhou's wide-open eyes had no choice but to narrow again.

"Leaving the village for the first time really did bring all kinds of inconveniences. If I wandered around blindly in that world, how could I possibly stay safe?"

Upon waking, Zhang Xuezhou picked up his fountain pen and quickly wrote today's diary entry.

He even copied out the entire "Yin Yang Great Compassion Nine Heavens Incantation" he had memorized.

For Zhang Xuezhou, the important thing was to get through these two days safely, until he reunited with Zhang Zhong and Lady Yourong.

As for whether to return to Zhang Household Village or go to Hibiscus City afterward, all those matters could be dealt with in due course.

"Wait, I seem to have overlooked something!"

Zhang Xuezhou had always been a careful person. Otherwise, he wouldn't have recorded everything he experienced in his dreams, or kept reinforcing his memory of things such as the writing in the dream world, hoping not to forget the relevant details so he could describe them accurately to a doctor during treatment.

But Zhang Xuezhou had a vague feeling that he seemed to have overlooked something.

Unable to recall it for the moment, he could only finish up the various matters of the day.

By the time he closed his diary, he had put everything else aside, and his memories and awareness had all returned to real life.

Chapter eleven was blocked. It has been completely revised and submitted for reinstatement; it should be back up within forty-eight hours or so.