Chapter 86: 86: Protip: Think About Society While Doing Something Boring

Spending the rest of the night just talking about random... whatever, Lin Songmei and Yan Mingqing didn’t get back to their apartment until long after the sun had set. They left back around 6 pm, and now getting back, it was already 11:30 pm. 

Five and a half hours!! That was way too much for dinner! Sure, the food was heavenly, and probably made it worth it but... damn that was still a lot of time. Time Songmei definitely didn't have! 

Well, she probably did, but that was beside the point. It was good to get to know Han Youhong and Wang Taigang more, so in the end—putting aside how amazing the food was—it was worth the time just for that alone. 

That sounded really cheesy, but Songmei didn’t know how else to put it, it was true! She liked talking with them, and Wang Taigang—she didn’t know when—managed to get Mingqing to open up! Maybe it was during that time Songmei’s eyes weren’t working for a bit... 

That itsy-bitsy problem that she was ignoring that for sure wouldn’t turn into a bigger problem later. For sure. 

Back at their apartment though, Songmei and Mingqing didn’t have much to do, they had a healthy sleep schedule—something that Songmei of the past could never relate to—so they just... washed up and headed off to bed. Simple as that. 

Songmei of the past would’ve been horrified and guilty to no end had she done that... 

She had always followed the logic of “If I’m not sleeping past midnight, I’m not putting enough time into my schoolwork.” 

Of course, looking back, that wasn’t the healthiest mindset, but that was the past, now... it was time to sleep!! 

Flopping into bed, Songmei did her nightly pat, hug, and squeeze to Plum—who was sitting on her nightstand as always. Afterward, Songmei wrapped around Mingqing (as per usual) and wandered off to dreamland. 

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Waking up in Mingqing’s arms, Songmei—to her astonishment—was the first one awake. It was already 9 am too!! When there wasn’t something like school forcing them both up at ungodly hours, Songmei was always the second one awake...

That sounded unclear... Well, it was just that Songmei could make herself wake up before the sun rose to get ready for school, while Mingqing woke up earlier naturally.

Sitting up in bed, crossing her legs under the covers and pressing her palms together, Songmei stared out the window. 

What the hell was she supposed to do?

She didn’t really feel like getting out of bed, but there wasn’t too much to do in bed either while Mingqing laid beside her. It was just a random Tuesday morning too, so it wasn’t like there was much going on outside the window either. 

The people outside the cultivating world—so the majority—were already at work. The streets below were empty, there weren’t any vehicles zipping through the air either. Just a distant globe, pulsing with light as it rotated on top of a building, all of it powered by Qi. 

Scooting back against the headboard of the bed she and Mingqing shared, Songmei slowed her breathing, closing her eyes to cultivate a little. Retreating into her mind, Songmei focused on pushing around her clear streams of Qi. Her Qi, surprisingly—or maybe unsurprisingly depending on how you looked at it—was crystalline. It seemed a little... jewel-like?

Songmei sure as hell didn’t know how to describe it. Just that while it traveled, it seemed more solid. It seemed a little more... crystal-y... 

Pushing it around and circulating it through her meridians, Songmei let out a long sigh as she felt it run against resistance. That would be where her 5th meridian was, but... eugh, opening it up, cycle after cycle, making it more smooth and more smooth was a mind-numbing task. 

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Settling into a rhythm of Qi circulation, Songmei sank into her thoughts. Why not? Who didn’t like to do a little bit of early morning introspection?

That sounded dumb now that she said it, but still, she wanted to spend some time doing it... 

Like... it was weird! It was so weird how the majority of people weren’t cultivators... 

The line was so thin, so invisible, yet... it was so hard to cross! 

Songmei had just wandered across it, with her magical talent. She didn’t really know where she got it from either, was it God? Was it the heavens? Was it genetics? Songmei didn’t know her parents, and only recently had the cultivation world started to make libraries of identification for cultivators... 

Crazy though, the cultivation world was still a little slower on the uptake in terms of technology. The “normal” people's world had already been using it for close to fifty years, yet the cultivation world didn’t start adopting it until twenty years ago. 

Of course, to cultivators, thirty years was a blink of an eye, but to non-cultivator people or weak cultivator people—categories Songmei was intimately familiar with—that was a long time!! Maybe to Xueli, thirty years was just a drop in the bucket, but in thirty years, if Songmei didn’t improve, she might be kicking the bucket!! 

What made it more weird was... why the hell did the cultivator people take so long to start making one? Sure, most technology took a long-ass time to get adopted by the cultivation world (as long as it didn’t have to do with ease of day-to-day life), but in this instance, it was so much, sooo much more useful to cultivators! Whenever they found a dead body–maybe it was mauled by animals, maybe it was mutilated by a gang, maybe it was half-eaten by a weird plant from the central continent—they could identify it, and send it back to the body’s sect, or family.

As sad as that was, it was a helpful thing to have... 

But because it didn’t start to gain popularity and widespread use until fifteen or something years ago, a little less actually, that also meant her parents, who were either dead or just hidden in some weird place out in the middle of nowhere, weren’t in the database! 

If her parents were cultivators of course, they could've just been normal non-cultivator people—that was totally a possibility. 

Xueli had mentioned to her that it was unlikely her parents weren’t cultivators at all, given her talent, but... you never know. 

Huh. 

She had used this in the past, but thinking about “deep” things had made the progress a little faster... 

Well, maybe faster was the wrong word. 

The time had just really... ambled on by, without her realizing. 

Cracking her eyes open, Songmei saw, it hadn’t been more than a couple minutes. Yet... here she was, having made a lot of progress without too much mental strain!

The classic, as always. Distract yourself from a painful thing in order to make it pass by quicker!!

Classic, basic strategies really.