After finishing the college entrance examination last year, Li Xiangdong had attended a driving school with a few good friends and had long since obtained his driver's license.
It so happened that the winter break coincided with the epidemic, forcing them to stay indoors for a long time. Taking advantage of the empty roads and sparse traffic, he frequently drove the family's Volkswagen Tiguan out for joyrides, and driving alone on the road was now completely second nature to him.
"Xiangdong is here. Look, Grandpa's eyes are practically glowing! Right now, I feel full of energy—I'm at least twenty years younger. The drink you gave everyone is truly amazing stuff."
Seeing Li Xiangdong walk through the door, Grandpa happily pointed to his eyes, wanting his grandson to see. Grandma nodded vigorously as well.
"Of course it's good stuff! This is a high-tech product. After drinking it, not only can you become younger, but you can also live to a ripe old age. Grandpa, just sit back and enjoy your blessings."
Although Mom and Dad had also changed significantly, compared to Grandpa and Grandma, the transformation wasn't quite as striking. Yet, faced with these heaven-defying results, the traditionally honest and simple rural couple still felt a bit uneasy. "Xiangdong, where did you get these drinks? There aren't any side effects, are there?"
Li Xiangdong hurriedly explained, "Mom, Dad, both of you can rest one hundred percent assured. Although the origins of the items are a bit hard to believe, there shouldn't be any side effects. However, the effects really are too astonishing—even I didn't expect it beforehand. So let me remind everyone again: you must absolutely not let outsiders know, not even relatives or friends. Anyway, during the epidemic prevention period, everyone should try not to go out or meet with people from the village. Once some time passes, even if some changes are noticed, it won't attract too much attention."
He had originally planned to tell everyone about the Intermediate Gene Evolution Fluid and the practice of cultivation as well, but seeing their hesitation, Li Xiangdong had no choice but to keep it a secret for now. There was plenty of time ahead, after all. For now, he repeatedly urged everyone to walk carefully and prudently, and to adapt to the strength in their own bodies as quickly as possible.
The family certainly had deep personal experience with this, sharing a whole bunch of funny incidents caused by it. Fortunately, since they were all staying at home, no matter how many laughable mishaps occurred, only their immediate family knew about them.
When the topic turned to their lack of physical coordination, Little Sister was the most excited, gesturing wildly and dancing around—only to end up smashing another bowl, earning her a severe scolding from Mom.
Breakfast was filled with laughter and chatter.
After the meal, leaving Grandpa behind to keep an eye on the house, the rest of the family headed into town to buy clothes.
Over the next few days, the daily life of Li Xiangdong's family continued in a state of relative isolation from the world. His sister concentrated on her online classes, though one could tell from her daily smiling expression that studying was even easier than before. Aside from stepping out to buy a few daily necessities or tending to the vegetable plots in their assigned fields, Mom, Dad, Grandpa, and Grandma basically stayed holed up at home.
Apart from taking time to practice his driving, chat with his family, and occasionally stroll into the mountains with his little friends, Li Xiangdong spent all his remaining time cultivating, venturing at most to the bamboo grove behind the house. His daily schedule was relatively fixed: almost every morning was spent studying for half a day, the afternoon tinkering with several supercomputers for half a day, and the evening spent cultivating until midnight.
Time slipped away unnoticed. One day, Li Xiangdong saw a millstone-sized rock near the edge of the bamboo grove and decided to try channeling his vital energy into a single finger. The result was that he poked a hole straight through the thick stone slab, which was at least fifteen centimeters thick. One could easily imagine what the consequences would be if that finger were poked into a person's body.
During this period, Li Xiangdong had replaced the broken windowpane. However, instead of throwing it away, he took it to the bamboo grove behind the house to use as a target, continuing to practice the Li Xiangdong version of the "Six Meridians Divine Sword".
Now, standing thirty meters away, he only needed to channel a little bit of energy to poke a small hole right through the glass. Moreover, by regulating the amount of energy, he could control the size of the hole pierced into the glass. Within a few days, the single pane of glass was riddled with round holes of all sizes. In the end, Li Xiangdong simply smashed the glass, piled the pieces together, and unleashed a few consecutive finger strikes, reducing all the shattered glass to powder so it wouldn't prick anyone working in the bamboo grove.
After a period of adaptation, the precision of Li Xiangdong's control over his body reached a mind-boggling level.
During junior high school, Li Xiangdong had spent a period of time passionately reading wuxia novels by Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, Gu Long, and others. Aside from the "Six Meridians Divine Sword," he had deeply envied the legendary martial arts masters in the books who could pluck flowers and snap leaves to injure people from a hundred meters away. Armed with his experience with the "Six Meridians Divine Sword," Li Xiangdong also tried practicing throwing tree branches and leaves. After several attempts, he was eventually able to use a single piece of bamboo leaf to casually kill flies over a dozen meters away.
This tested both the flexibility of his opponent's movements and his grasp of force, as well as being a severe test of eyesight.
As the number of practice sessions increased, Li Xiangdong tried infusing energy into the bamboo leaves. After flicking them out, he was actually able to accurately hit targets over fifty meters away.
When he replaced the bamboo leaves with short tree twigs, the distance reached over a hundred meters. Later, when he switched to one-inch-long iron nails, he could achieve a hundred percent accuracy from over two hundred meters away.
"This is truly awesome! Aside from the 'Six Meridians Divine Sword,' I've even mastered an peerless divine skill—the 'Xiao Li Flying Nail'." Li Xiangdong desperately wanted to let out a roar to vent his joy, but reason told him he had to keep a low profile—maintain an ultra-low profile. So he had no choice but to silently give himself a mental thumbs-up.
With the elevation of his cultivation, Li Xiangdong's learning efficiency became even higher. First was his memory, which could be described as photographic. A few days ago, Li Xiangdong had attempted to memorize the *Xinhua Dictionary*. In less than an hour, he had memorized the entire *Xinhua Dictionary* word for word without a single omission—which page and which line a character was on, and all its various meanings, were etched in his mind as clearly as if printed there, making them hard to forget even if he wanted to.
During that time, Li Xiangdong particularly looked forward to the start of school. When that time came, he planned to grab a huge stack of books in the school library and imitate the protagonists in web novels showing off their skills—just thinking about it made him happy.
Aside from a massive boost in memory, his comprehension skills had improved just as much. After finishing the "Popular Science Learning Materials," he spent a week not only thoroughly studying the introductory textbooks from cover to cover, but also completing all the junior, intermediate, and advanced textbooks. Furthermore, many problems that had previously been difficult to understand now seemed to resolve themselves effortlessly, and he rarely encountered learning difficulties anymore.
By April 10th, he had already fished out all the computer textbooks and professional technical materials he could find in the Time-Space Ring, reading them repeatedly twice. He had essentially mastered quantum computer technology and intelligent software programming.
Programming languages in particular: through his studies, Li Xiangdong discovered that the ring contained a very advanced system of Chinese Programming. According to the reference materials, as an ideographic language, Chinese was far better suited for quantum computer language programming. Because each Chinese character could only express its precise meaning within a specific linguistic context, the semantic richness of a single word was immense. Consequently, when it came to programming intelligent programs, Chinese was far more advanced than purely phonetic English. Coupled with the extreme conciseness of Chinese expression, programs with identical functions required significantly less code when written in Chinese.
To ensure the security of the intelligent software he used, Li Xiangdong rewrote an intelligent program to replace Xiaoqiang in his Portable Smart Brain. He kept the name Xiaoqiang, but the level of intelligence was raised by a massive margin.