Chapter 32: 32: Is It Bad To Have No Other Hobbies?

Having chosen their arts, Lin Songmei and Yan Mingqing returned to their residence. It was mid-afternoon, but there were still a fair amount of people walking around, going back to their houses, going to restaurants, going to training fields, or going to the library. 

Back in their residence, by their shared courtyard, Songmei and Mingqing sat there, making some idle conversation while discussing their plans for the rest of the day. Liu Xueli had mentioned that she could bring them to go see a movie, but after perusing the catalog, both Songmei and Mingqing sat there with dead eyes. 

There wasn’t anything interesting. 

It was like choosing between a brick and a block of concrete. 

Songmei wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, at first, Xueli had told them that the selection would take the whole day, but after Mingqing’s heroics in eliminating swath after swath of arts, they had managed to finish before the cafeteria started to even prepare dinner. 

“Are you not going to grind your brick-laying game, Mingqing?” Songmei asked, rolling over on the wooden walkway, her cheek squished against the ground. 

Kicking her feet up against one of the columns, Mingqing let out a long sigh. “I’ve already grinded to a point where I don’t have to do anything for a while, I can let my auto-brick-laying bots do the work.” 

“I see...” Songmei murmured, unaware of anything to do with the brick-laying game. At least Mingqing seemed to be having fun. “Do you have any ideas of what you want to do? The only thing that was getting me excited was thinking about going to try and learn a new technique from the art I chose... ” 

Sighing, Mingqing stretched out, pushing the tips of her fingers as far as she could. “I was thinking we could go and cultivate with Lu Qiang and Cai Yufei, but they’re also like... focusing while in seclusion. They want to open their first meridian as soon as possible after all. Other than that I was just thinking the same as you.” 

“I would go with you to hang out with them, but yeah... I don’t want to disturb them. I feel like Elder Wu would chase us away if we went anywhere close to their residence.” Songmei shuddered, remembering the demon-like Elder Wu who handed out disciplinary punishments like they were free meal vouchers. 

It was lucky that Elder Wu liked her and Mingqing. 

For now at least... 

Silence... 

Laying there, Songmei and Mingqing stared at the tree in the center of the courtyard, watching it sway in the gentle wind that blew by. 

“Want to go?”

“Yeah... let’s go.” 

---------

The training field. 

The lights illuminated the large windows that lined the building. They illuminated the balconies made up of rest and viewing areas and the varied training fields for every environment created to cater to every training need. 

Under the bright warm lights, Songmei and Mingqing sat on a bench by one of the smaller training fields, pulling up the cultivation manuals on their terminals. 

Opening the manual, Songmei was greeted by a... short list. There wasn’t much to learn at her current level, there was a movement technique and a body strengthening technique. 

Although the body strengthening technique was tempting, she’d need to reinforce her injury-riddled wrists to shoot a bow after all, Songmei felt more inclined to learn the movement technique. She had just spent a couple of days mastering the technique taught in class and... body strengthening was boring... 

There wasn’t anything flashy to it! It was just... feeling stronger. 

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Songmei didn’t have interest in feeling like she could crush a brick in her hand, what was the point? She didn’t have any bricks to crush anyway... only homework to do and meridians to open. 

She wasn’t Lu Qiang, she wasn’t part of the ‘a strong body equals a strong mind’ club... 

Opening the manual for the butterfly movement art, Songmei’s hands came to a stop as she read the manual. 

Raising an eyebrow, Songmei couldn’t help but murmur to herself in disbelief, “You must... move like a butterfly, floating in the wind... what? How...” 

“Your feet must flutter, and your steps must be brief... I feel like whoever wrote this had butterflies for brains...” Songmei grumbled, skimming over the manual as it continued with its flowery language. Shaking her head, Songmei thanked her lucky stars as she remembered the stories that Elder Zhang told of his youth. 

Thank the heavens that there were pictures, thank the heavens that it wasn’t a vertically written scroll. 

Standing up, Songmei brought her terminal with her, bringing it into the center of the training field. Bending over and stretching her hamstrings, her quads, her calves, and other parts of her legs, Songmei set down her terminal as she got started. 

The overall prerequisite for this basic technique was to have at least one meridian open. This would allow for a smooth enough flow of Qi in the legs to start learning the technique, but from what she gathered on the manual, it wouldn't show its true effectiveness until many many realms later. 

At least she met the bare minimum, she would take whatever she could get. 

Shuffling her feet around on the ground though while channeling Qi through her legs, Songmei was confused, to say the least. Practicing the movements outlined, she felt more like a limp worm struggling on the ground rather than a fluttering butterfly soaring through the air...

Unlike the diagrams from the fist technique in class though, the diagrams for the butterfly movement art were at least diagrams of humans. Songmei didn’t know which she preferred, they were both confusing either way and the panda was cuter by a long shot, but... the human going through the movements seemed to be more clear. 

Emphasis on the “seemed”... 

Watching the person go through the movements, Songmei watched as they went through it step by step, then, when putting it all together, the person seemed to move like a haze, disappearing from one spot to another. 

Very helpful! 

Super helpful! 

If Songmei was to give it a rating, without a shadow of a doubt, no hesitation, 0/10!! 

Truly ahead of its time! 

In the past, Songmei had seen channels on the streaming site Live that did step by step tutorials on techniques, but... well... 

The channel was only useful to people who practiced those techniques... 

It was run by a fire-cultivator, so, totally unhelpful to Songmei or Mingqing. However, in addition to that, the cultivator didn’t post much. It was similar to the other cultivator-run channels on Live, they’d have some audience of normal people who found the techniques interesting, but it was hard for them to gather much of an audience as very few people would benefit from watching the videos. 

But hey, at least sometimes there’d be videos put out by hunting squads that recorded their adventures... 

That was a whole other weird corner of Live though.