Leaving the Temple

"Change!"

"Get stronger!"

"Arms, grow thick and sturdy!"

As Zhang Xuezhou muttered the words, he felt no change in his body.

Even when school let out, he looked just the same as before.

For a moment, he was bitterly disappointed. Then he decided to take another look after he fell asleep and see what effect the Qi and Blood Pill had.

There was no way he could have obtained a Realm Entry Seed and cultivated the Supreme Purity True Technique in his dream, only for the Qi and Blood Pill not to have the slightest effect.

If it had no effect, Zhang Xuezhou thought, it might have passed its medicinal shelf life.

In the dream world, people had little concept of shelf life. Even when dried meat grew moldy, they would wash it, cook it, and eat it all the same.

Zhang Xuezhou thought Li Jiao had given him an expired Qi and Blood Pill, whose effect was too slight to influence his body.

"My delusions really are getting worse. I actually expected a dream to make me stronger!"

Zhang Xuezhou couldn't help suspecting that his schizophrenia symptoms were growing worse.

"Maybe the Supreme Purity True Technique just came about by pure accident?"

"After all, I learned Doctor Ren's key instructions for recuperation. Maybe I followed them in my dream and made up some nonsense that could be cultivated to gain abilities!"

"But in that case... am I a genius?"

When Zhang Xuezhou thought about how he could even come up with a theory of cultivation in his dreams, he found it incredible, but couldn't help thinking his talent points had all gone into schizophrenia.

He had read plenty of biographies of famous people. Many of them had been a little mad, and their patterns of behavior had differed fairly noticeably from those of ordinary people.

"But what if I don't have a famous person's destiny, only a famous person's illness!"

As his thoughts became tangled in the conflict between doubt and self-examination, Zhang Xuezhou felt his illness had worsened yet again.

He clutched the electronic wallet in his pocket, feeling that Zhang Weimeng ought to pay him for his articles more often.

Only when he had enough money could he go to the Sunshine Psychologist Clinic and clear up his doubts.

He lacked close friends to talk to and lived alone. Zhang Xuezhou felt that all this wild speculation was bound to bring on an episode.

"Wait, does this Supreme Purity True Technique I'm practicing actually count for anything? Could a hallucination from my dream be affecting reality?"

Zhang Xuezhou's thoughts ran wild for a while.

He was about to punch himself in the nose and see whether he could use the Supreme Purity True Technique to suppress a nosebleed, but then realized it was a dangerous thought of self-harm.

"Calm down. I have to stay calm!"

Zhang Xuezhou looked closely at himself and saw a faint black haze rising from his body, the sign of an episode that Ren Anran had mentioned.

He quickly reached into his pocket and felt around, then shakily took out the diazepam he had bought from Ren Anran.

After swallowing three tablets, Zhang Xuezhou immediately felt much better mentally, and the black haze in his vision faded away completely.

"I was having an episode. No wonder my thoughts kept running wild!"

Zhang Xuezhou finally settled on an answer.

His head was in a muddle and his body swayed slightly as he staggered back to his old, run-down little school district apartment.

He threw together a casual dinner.

His studies were naturally put on hold.

Zhang Xuezhou kept changing hand gestures and murmuring under his breath, casting the Supreme Purity True Technique over and over.

As long as he wasn't putting it to medical use, the Supreme Purity True Technique consumed very little of his strength.

Nearly an hour passed before Zhang Xuezhou felt mentally and physically drained.

His eyelids fluttered, and for once, he went to sleep early.

Zhang Xuezhou felt as though a very, very long time had passed before he opened his eyes.

At the Nine-Foot Daoist Temple, the faint light of the sun was already shining over the grounds.

By the light coming through the window, Zhang Xuezhou laboriously pushed himself up. His body ached all over.

"It really was expired medicine!"

Zhang Xuezhou raised his hands and saw that they were completely red. When he pulled open his clothes, his body was covered in the same flushed red color.

In just one night, it was as though he had changed races.

"Did that poison me? Could Li Jiao have given me a poison pill, so I'd have to use the Supreme Purity True Technique to suppress it? Did he think my cultivation conditions weren't good enough?"

He had no injuries in reality to experiment on, but in the dream, Zhang Xuezhou promptly found a test subject for the Supreme Purity True Technique.

He murmured softly, and as the Realm Entry Seed traveled through his meridians in its prescribed pattern, a speck of white light appeared on his middle finger.

When Zhang Xuezhou pressed his middle finger to the center of his forehead, the redness covering his body slowly began to fade.

The aching quickly subsided, but a burning sensation remained on his skin.

Zhang Xuezhou felt he had suffered a terrible stroke of bad luck.

He rolled his neck, and a series of creaks and cracks rang out.

Only when he got out of bed did he notice something different about his body.

Although he still felt discomfort in various ways, Zhang Xuezhou noticed how light his steps were.

He reached out, grabbed a small tea table in the bedroom, and lifted it with ease.

"Did my strength really increase?"

Very little time had passed between his suspicion that Li Jiao's Qi and Blood Pill had all sorts of problems and his putting it to the test, but the result was real enough.

Yesterday, Zhang Xuezhou would never have been able to pick up a tea table so easily with one hand.

His strength really had increased.

Even his constitution had improved, and he no longer looked weak and feeble as he once had.

If he set out for Zhang Household Village now, he certainly wouldn't be the sickly, delicate figure who had to stop and pant after walking a dozen or so li along mountain paths.

A single Qi and Blood Pill had almost matched the work of creation itself, far surpassing all the dried meat Zhang Zhong and the others had scrimped to feed Zhang Xuezhou over the years.

"The Qi and Blood Pill truly is a wondrous thing!"

Zhang Xuezhou reconsidered.

He thought the Qi and Blood Pill and diazepam achieved much the same result through different means.

Although both medicines had harmful effects, the benefits they brought him far outweighed the harm.

"What a pity. I probably can't keep deceiving people in this treasure land where Realm Entrants gather!"

By borrowing the title of student to Daoist Kongxu, Zou Bugui, Zhang Xuezhou felt he had gained more in these three short days than he had in over a decade.

But the time for him to leave was drawing near.

Zhang Xuezhou pushed open the wooden doors of the Nine-Foot Daoist Temple.

Far below Nine-Foot Slope, he could already see three figures.

Two of the figures were recognizably his parents, while the other was a wild boar the two were carrying.

As veteran hunters, Zhang Zhong and Lady Yourong had judged the situation quite accurately and had caught a rare quarry, a haul no worse than what the village hunting party might bring back after turning out in force.

But as for taking a master, that was out of the question.

Zou Bugui had run off to who knew where, and given what Zhang Xuezhou had done at the Nine-Foot Daoist Temple, he thought there was no hope of becoming his disciple.

If Zou Bugui discovered the truth, Zhang Xuezhou would be lucky not to be beaten to death.

In just a few days, Zhang Xuezhou had come to understand the difference between the strength of cultivators and that of ordinary people.

Even if Zou Bugui was only a cultivator who refined pills and treated illnesses, he was still not someone they could resist. If they fell out with him, they had a ninety-nine percent chance of losing.

Zhang Xuezhou glanced at the Nine-Foot Daoist Temple, cleared away some traces of his stay, and changed back into his own freshly washed clothes. Only then did he scamper down the mountain.