Chapter 1

『Status: Updated to: Chapter 1088』 『Content Summary: Martial arts have never truly died; the spirit of the chivalrous hero always dwells in the heart. A hero does not necessarily have to belong to feudal society, nor do they even need sects or rivers and lakes. Chivalry is, in truth, our dream—the dream of drawing our swords to champion the oppressed, the dream of honing a sword for ten years. This book begins with that ten-year sword, and the story unfolds at a university named Yijian... 』 1. The Boxing Teenager

The Lanying Republic was a small nation, yet it was also a mighty one. Prosperous in economy, brilliant in culture, and advanced in science and technology, in a sense—aside from its scarce land, limited population, and moderately modest military might—the Lanying Republic could be called one of the most powerful nations among the many countries in the East Blue Sea Region, holding top-tier political and economic status.

All of this stemmed from the developmental path established at the very founding of the Lanying Republic: the wholehearted investment in and maintenance of education. Across the entire Lanying Republic's territory of merely eight states, there were ninety-six universities. Aside from specialized academies—such as those for the arts, aviation, economics, military technology, and internal martial arts—there were forty-three comprehensive universities and colleges. Among them, Zijinfu University was hailed as the top-ranked comprehensive university in the East Blue Sea Region. It was the pride of the people of the Lanying Republic, and a shining pearl of the East Blue Sea Region.

Of course, besides Zijinfu University, the other universities of the Lanying Republic were by no means inferior. This was thanks to the nation's strategy: whenever education was concerned, the state made practically unlimited investments. Therefore, as long as it was a university in the Lanying Republic, it was bound to be exceptional.

And the story began in an ordinary university within the Capital Circle of the Lanying Republic, a university named Yijian...

Su Shiyan walked out of her dormitory and stretched lazily. Her joints popped with a few sharp cracks, a sound that made her sigh. She was practically burning with impatience to find a place to train and thoroughly stretch her limbs.

Su Shiyan was not a native of the Lanying Republic; she hailed from a country in the Northern Blue Sea, and she had come to the Lanying Republic as an international student. She had only registered and moved into the dormitory yesterday. Before that, she had spent dozens of days drifting on a ship across the blue sea. The cramped, palm-sized space of the cabin had made it impossible for even a sword to be swung, and a mere few dozen days had left her feeling as though her body had practically rusted over. Thus, on the very second day after moving into the campus, she was eager to find a place to properly work out.

The Yijian campus covered a vast area. True, the land of the Lanying Republic was not large, but that was relative to the nation as a whole; from a human perspective, if a country casually cordoned off a plot of land, it could easily be so huge that a person would lose their bearings. A university capable of serving as a campus was basically the size of a small city. Su Shiyan was entirely confident she could find a deserted, secluded, and spacious spot within it. After all, what she needed to do was practice martial arts; although her family's martial arts secrets were not something others could simply learn just by watching, practicing in front of crowds was still inappropriate.

With such thoughts in mind, Su Shiyan deliberately headed toward the remote areas away from the main roads. Along the way, she did encounter some training grounds, sports fields, and the like, but most of them had students practicing martial arts, or even instructors leading their disciples in group training. This left Su Shiyan quite helpless. Thus, she walked on unconsciously for some ten minutes until she finally found an orchard. The space outside the orchard was fairly open, and it seemed few people passed by here. Moreover, the trees in the orchard provided an environment well-suited for practicing footwork and lightness skills. This appeared to be a quiet training spot.

Just as Su Shiyan was overflowing with joy and unbuckling her treasured sword, a dull thud suddenly echoed from within the orchard. The sound resembled a mallet striking hardwood, yet it was somewhat different. However, coming from a martial arts family, Su Shiyan recognized the origin instantly upon hearing the sound: someone was practicing boxing, and specifically, hard striking techniques.

Su Shiyan felt deeply depressed—extremely depressed. She simply had no patience to spend another dozen minutes searching for a new location, so she strode straight into the grove, intending to ask the person training when they would leave, or see if she could offer some money to make them clear out. In short, she was truly running out of patience.

She had not walked far into the grove when she spotted the person she was looking for: a teenager, appearing to be about eighteen or nineteen years old. With a cropped crew cut, a lean build, and a height of around one meter seventy-five, he looked utterly unremarkable. Aside from a pair of sharp, piercing eyes, he bore no resemblance whatsoever to a martial artist.

Seeing this, Su Shiyan was actually rather astonished, because this teenager was striking a large tree step by step, strictly by the book. His footwork was simple and direct, his boxing was simple and direct, and even the force he exerted was simple and direct... This was a set of crude, mundane peasant boxing. Found in a bookstore, it was probably the kind of cheaply printed manual worth a yuan or two. Even slightly well-off ordinary commoners would likely not bother practicing such martial arts. It could be called a completely unranked hard-style boxing technique. Not to mention generating inner force, practicing it long-term—if nutrition failed to keep up—was likely to injure tendons and fundamental bones. Why on earth would this teenager practice such martial arts?

No wonder Su Shiyan was so puzzled. After all, this was Yijian University. Although it was a comprehensive university, it leaned more toward the martial arts side. To say nothing else, even the few sets of boxing forms officially issued by the school as compulsory exercises were dual-cultivation of internal and external, possessing both hard techniques and internal methods. Not only did they not harm the body, but the probability of generating inner force was also infinitely higher than this crude peasant stuff. What was going through this teenager's head? Was he an idiot or a lunatic?

Su Shiyan stood there watching as the teenager struck the giant tree blow after blow, momentarily forgetting to even voice her original intention. After waiting for several dozen seconds like that, she finally spoke up: "Excuse me... classmate, I'd like to discuss something with you..."

"Hold on, a hundred more punches!"

The teenager shouted aloud, then wholeheartedly continued executing his crude boxing routine. For a moment, Su Shiyan's mouth parted slightly, leaving her unable to utter another word.

After watching another few dozen punches, Su Shiyan suddenly realized that while this boxing routine was indeed a peasant routine, this teenager might not be as foolish as she had imagined. Because even with this garbage boxing technique, the teenager had actually managed to strike with martial might. The punching force, once unleashed, carried right through from start to finish, remaining just a single step away from a continuous, unbroken stream of power. Once he reached that stage, given the teenager's level, this set of boxing could be considered to have attained Great Accomplishment. Taking it a step further, when the teenager threw this routine and achieved the state where extreme hardness gives birth to softness, and extreme softness gives birth to hardness—blending hardness and softness together—he could be said to have reached the pinnacle of perfection, attaining the ultimate realm of this boxing form. By then, even though this boxing was of unranked garbage tier, in this teenager's hands it could unleash the might of a second or third-rate boxing style. That would truly be terrifying.

Seeing this, Su Shiyan hardly knew what to say. Was this teenager a freak of innate talent, or simply a fool who stubbornly slugged away at martial arts? Two utterly conflicting possibilities made her mind spin. One had to realize that to bring a martial art to the realm of Great Accomplishment, an ordinary person might need twenty or thirty years. Even a prodigy blessed with innate talent would need at least close to a decade. Martial arts had always been thus: easy to learn, difficult to master. With a teacher or a manual, an ordinary person could easily pick up a martial art after practicing it for a few dozen days, but to truly master and thoroughly comprehend that martial art required ruthless effort—training through the three depths of winter and the three dog days of summer, enduring seasons of bitter cold and scorching heat over several years—only then could it possibly be achieved. To advance further to the realm of Great Accomplishment required total devotion of body and mind, expending massive amounts of energy and time... This teenager looked no more than eighteen or nineteen. If he wasn't a peerless genius, then he must be an idiot who had started practicing this dead-end, garbage martial art every single day since he was eight or nine years old...

Was it of any use? Was it of any use?!

For as long as one failed to generate inner force, martial arts remained merely a means of physical conditioning—at best, combat techniques capable of handling a few ordinary people. Yet with a garbage boxing routine like this, decades—no, perhaps even centuries—might pass without ever generating inner force...

For a moment, Su Shiyan truly had mixed feelings. Should she sigh in awe, or offer a warning? Yet a second later, she thought of her own past—hadn't she herself been just as stubborn and foolish back then...?

At that exact moment, the teenager suddenly delivered a fierce punch into the giant tree. With this strike, his fist seemed to glue itself to the trunk, and the sound of the fist striking wood was entirely different. This final punch—this final punch... had actually reached the realm of Great Accomplishment, with punching power flowing ceaselessly and continuously!

Su Shiyan was struck dumb with astonishment. What was this supposed to be?! A genius's breakthrough in the heat of battle? But how could that be possible? No matter how gifted someone was, no matter how profound their sudden enlightenment, to bridge the gap from ordinary punching force to an unbroken, continuous stream of power required at least days and nights of cultivation followed by repeated trials! She had never even heard of a scenario where someone was on the verge of Great Accomplishment one second, and instantly achieved Great Accomplishment the next!

Meanwhile, the teenager had already halted his strikes. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, flashed a broad grin, and muttered to himself.

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"Nine years, more than nine years... finally... finally reached level ten. My..."

"Arhat Fist."

2. Hao Qi's System

Hao Qi had arrived in this world for nine years and five months.

Damn it all—he had merely applied a cheat while playing a standalone game. Though the modifications were admittedly a bit exaggerated, it was just a single-player game after all! Why on earth had it resulted in him transmigrating?

When he transmigrated, Hao Qi was only nine years old. Stuck in an orphanage, parentless and utterly dependent on no one, coupled with the corruption within the orphanage—whether it was the staff embezzling funds or the older kids forming cliques and bullying the weak—he had suffered through no end of misery.

Good grief, where were the benevolent orphanage directors from novels?! Where were the steadfast, sworn brothers and sisters of the orphanage from novels?! As expected, fairy tales were nothing but lies!

In his youthful body, Hao Qi had once even contemplated death. After all, he could never return to his former world; his parents, his relatives, friends, and his lover had all left him far behind. In this brand-new world, no matter how one looked at it, he wouldn't live to reach adulthood. Such a transmigration was truly the unluckiest stroke of bad luck in eight lifetimes.

Then, in the second month after his transmigrating, just as he was searching for a painless way to die, he suddenly discovered that he might still be salvageable... A gaming system!

Yes, the golden finger that came bundled with transmigrating—a gaming system! That overpowered, no, that heaven-defying thing...

Then he realized he had been screwed over again.

The system he carried was the standalone game he had been playing right before his transmigration, titled *Legends of Wuxia: Title Reset Edition*. It wasn't the original *Legends of Wuxia*, but a completely different version independently remade by a large group of gaming enthusiasts who kept the same art style but completely altered the content. At the time, because he was ambitious and aimed too high, he had chosen the highest difficulty—Legend Mode—and had been brutally abused by the NPCs a hundred times over. In a fit of anger, he found a hacker buddy to decompile the source code and modify a save file. The save file wasn't even excessively cheated; it simply stuffed every single martial arts manual in the game straight into his inventory—such as top-tier techniques like the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, Nine-Sword of Dugu, Nine Yin Manual, Nine Yang Divine Skill, and so forth—and expanded the protagonist's martial arts skill slots from ten to twenty, nothing more... And then, the moment he loaded the save and eagerly stepped into the game, he soul-transmigrated directly into this world.

Heaven and earth as witness, having just turned thirty in his previous world, he had long since lost any delusions from his teenage years. Magic, martial arts, gods, otherworldly races—none of those crossed his mind anymore. He had only wished to find a stable, well-paying job, buy an apartment, find a pretty and sensible woman, have two kids, and spend his free time reading novels or playing games. But who could have predicted that this world was so vibrant it actually engineered his transmigration? And right when he was drowning in despair and craving death, it handed him a Wuxia gaming system. How—how was he supposed to die now?!

They say even a lowly ant clings to life; upon acquiring this system, Hao Qi cast aside his thoughts of suicide. After carefully examining the system and cautiously testing the waters of this world over the following months, he gradually developed a desire to keep living.

First off, his system featured his character template. In other words, every single martial arts manual he had modified into his inventory was right there! Yes, those legendary peerless martial arts that he used to drool over as a kid were entirely his for the taking! Furthermore, he could selectively practice up to twenty of them! Twenty!

Practicing the Nine Yin and Nine Yang simultaneously, playing with both the Sucking Stars Technique and the Northern Kunpeng style, unleashing the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms and Universe in Lesser Movement together—it simply couldn't get any more exhilarating!

Then there was this world—a bizarre world... Well, after gradually coming to understand it, Hao Qi had no other thoughts left. This was a modern world with martial arts... not like the worlds in urban wuxia novels, but a world where martial arts had formed academic disciplines akin to physics or chemistry, possessing a technological level roughly comparable to the 1930s or 1940s of his pre-transmigration Earth.

This world seemed remarkably vast. At any rate, textbooks explicitly stated that the Lanying Republic where he resided spanned an area of 820,000 square kilometers. This was close to twice the size of Sichuan Province in his former Earth, roughly equivalent to two and a half Japans or one and a half Frances. It couldn't strictly be called a small country, yet in this world, it was actually referred to as a small nation, and there were over twenty countries of similar size within this East Blue Sea Region...

The world is so big, I want to go and see it!

Time is the greatest healer of wounds. After spending over half a year sinking into depression while grieving for his parents, relatives, friends, and lover from that other world, Hao Qi gradually began to pull himself together. During those months, he also learned to play the part of a vulnerable orphan and an inquisitive newcomer to this world.

This was a world where everyone practiced martial arts. Even ordinary commoners knew a thing or two; fists, kicks, staffs, clubs, sabers, swords—all eighteen categories of weaponry were practiced. Moreover, the government of this world vigorously promoted martial arts in every household, even incorporating specialized martial arts instruction into elementary school curriculums.

At the same time, this was a stratified world. Ordinary people who practiced martial arts remained ordinary people; they worked, paid taxes, and labored. As long as they failed to generate inner force, they were completely identical to the ordinary citizens of Earth before Hao Qi's transmigration—the only difference being that they knew a few more sets of physical conditioning routines than the people of that world...

The single greatest difference between the two worlds... was inner force!

It was something that only one in a hundred thousand people could manage to cultivate: inner force. According to the paths of this world, whether it was external martial arts, internal boxing styles, or internal skill manuals, their singular purpose was to guide an individual in generating inner force. That was the critical threshold transcending the ordinary world. Once a person successfully cultivated inner force, the descriptions in books stated they instantly became a match for a thousand men, possessing great strength in every gesture and movement. As long as they didn't walk into a death trap, they could no longer be defeated by any number of ordinary people relying purely on numerical advantage. This was also the guarantee of a nation's core military might. Yes, even though the technology of this world had reached the standard of the 1930s and 1940s, boasting firearms, artillery, and even the earliest developments of airplanes and missiles, the political trajectory of this world was still dictated by those who possessed inner force. This was a world where inner force had flourished for countless ages, and where a prosperous future could be safely anticipated!

Upon learning all of this, Hao Qi wasted no time selecting an internal cultivation mental method from his system and equipped the Nine Yang Divine Skill onto his character template without a second thought. What kind of heavenly joke was this? The inner force of this world seemed entirely different from the wuxia novels he had read on Earth; no technique could directly generate inner force out of nowhere. The so-called internal skill manuals of this world were merely methods of vibrating the body internally—utilizing muscles, the air in the lungs, and blood flow—to temper the physique and accelerate the generation of inner force. Rather than calling them internal skill manuals, they bore a closer resemblance to Earth's internal martial arts (Guoshu). They were fundamentally different from the inner cultivation methods in Earth's wuxia novels, which guaranteed the generation of inner force simply upon cultivation!

In other words, he had struck it rich! His system contained manuals straight out of wuxia novels—things that were absolute... uh...

The system prompted him that to cultivate the Nine Yang Divine Skill, one had to practice at least three types of Yang-attribute external martial arts... The game hadn't featured this restriction. Well, a rationalized adjustment for the reality of a gaming system... The Nine Yin Manual required around three Yin-attribute external martial arts... The Taixuan Sutra required one boxing, one sword, one blade, and one specialized external technique... The Muscle-Tendon Changing Classic required a Buddhist external martial art, but demanded it reach the pinnacle...

Every single top-tier internal skill in the system had prerequisites—no, every single internal skill in the system had requirements, demanding anywhere from one to several external martial arts first. This dealt a crushing blow to Hao Qi, who had planned to cultivate inner force before the age of ten, live in luxury and ease, or at least gain the ability to support himself and immediately ditch this toxic orphanage. Yet it also cooled his frantic, impatient mind.

This was a real world, not a video game he was playing. There were no such things as saves or reloading. Once he died, he was truly dead. If he wanted to survive and roam this world to see the sights, he had to be cautious, cautious, and more cautious...