The next day, the fact that Cheng Qian stayed behind to learn spells with Yan Zhengming shocked everyone in the Fuyao sect.

A group of fellow disciples surrounded him, and they all asked the same question: "What? Have you been able to draw Qi into your body?"

Cheng Qian rubbed his ears, and at first he couldn't help feeling a little smug. But before he could show any emotion on his face, he was already startled. Thinking of the long and endless road of cultivation, he quickly poured a large basin of cold water on himself and calmed his mind.

He remained calm and humbly nodded, saying calmly, "Well, I've finally gotten started."

After hearing this, the disciples had different reactions.

Among them, Li Yun is the most normal one.

It cannot be said that Li Yun is not smart, and he has always been conceited about his intelligence. A person who indulges in unconventional ways and can create his own ways of playing is definitely not a stupid person. It's just that he is not serious about his work. He is quite proficient in swordplay. Li Yun has finally stopped playing with toads and has become addicted to playing with insects again.

However, he never expected that a junior fellow who entered the sect a year later than him would enter before him, and he felt bad for a while. Li Yun quietly put away his cricket cage, grasshopper cage... and a bottle of insect wine whose function was unknown. After practicing sword that day, he went back to study hard and didn't even bother to fool around with Han Yuan.

Master Mu Chun was very pleased to see this, knowing that Li Yun would feel sad for a while. Anyone would feel sad, but sadness is only temporary. Cheng Qian's spurring effect on him would be long-lasting.

Unfortunately, before the master could feel satisfied, he discovered that Li Yun was the only one in the sect who cared about the matter.

For example, Han Yuan, who was being tortured to death by the sect's meticulous rules, didn't feel anything.

Ever since Han Yuan listened to Li Yun's lies and returned from a day trip to the Demon Valley, he lost interest in pursuing the feeling of energy and only focused on eating, drinking and having fun.

He thought, why are you in such a hurry? Life is short, just have fun for a few years first.

At this time, seeing that Cheng Qian, who had entered the sect with him, could actually draw Qi into his body, Han Yuan was not envious, but rather gloated over his misfortune. Before leaving, he patted Cheng Qian on the shoulder and said, "Oh, you have to take extra classes. Your hard days are coming!"

So Han Yuan was picked up by the back of the neck by his master with a wooden sword and thrown out of the preaching hall.

And his sect's treasured first disciple, Yan Zhengming looked at the table that had been added next to him, and an identical hourglass was placed on it. He said with some emotion, "I have been practicing sword for almost four years before I felt the energy for the first time. Has it been a year since I started practicing with Little Copper Coin?"

Master Mu Chun thought that the young master was stimulated and was ready to work hard.

Unexpectedly, Yan Zhengming just sighed casually, then immediately smiled and said pretentiously: "Third Junior Brother, in the future, we can also learn from each other about spells like we do with scriptures."

Cheng Qian replied with a fake smile: "You want me to do your spell practice together with two more pieces of milk cake? Brother, don't dream."

Yan Zhengming: “…”

Oh, right, this little bastard had always treated him as a human-shaped key to the Sutra Tower! Now that he could go there on his own, he was no longer even worth a key!

Where is the dignity of the eldest brother?

In the first talisman class, the master gave Cheng Qian a knife and a wooden plaque. There were two lines on the top and bottom of the wooden plaque, one inch wide in the middle. What he had to do during this period of time was to carve a one-inch long vertical mark on the wooden plaque with scales.

"There will be some resistance at the beginning," said the master, "Don't be afraid, take your time. It took your senior brother half a year to carve a one-inch mark."

Yan Zhengming coughed awkwardly, feeling that he was not worthy of being a role model.

It was not until he cut the first blow that Cheng Qian realized that it was not so easy to carve the talisman.

He noticed very early on that the carving knife used by his senior brother when learning talismans was not an ordinary wooden carving knife. There were talismans on the knife itself, and it was specially used by beginners.

I have read in Cheng Qian's "Introduction to Talismans" in Jinglou that people who are new to talismans do not know how to connect their own power with the talismans, so they need such an auxiliary tool to get started.

However, this entry-level tool was not easy to deal with. At the moment when the tip of the knife touched the wood, Cheng Qian felt that the carving knife in his hand seemed to have become a huge whirlpool, and all the strength in his body seemed to be sucked out by it.

He was startled and his knife-holding hand paused instinctively. With this pause, the knife could not move forward any further on the wood.

Cheng Qian looked carefully and saw only a shallow scratch on the wood, like a cat's scratch.

Mu Chun did not tell Cheng Qian in advance that the strokes of the talisman could not be interrupted or stopped, and had to be completed in one go, otherwise all the previous efforts would be wasted. Seeing that he had suffered from the carving knife, he moved his feet and walked over slowly, intending to point out his previous mistake.

When he taught Yan Zhengming, he also liked to use this "hindsight" approach because he thought it would help them remember more clearly.

But the Master was a very slow person, and perhaps because he walked too slowly, before Master Mu Chun could get close to Cheng Qian, the boy had already clenched the knife in his hand and made a second cut straight and firmly.

The carving knife once again frantically consumed all his strength. Cheng Qian silently recited "Introduction to Talismans" in his mind, mobilizing his nascent sense of Qi, and tried hard to make the surrounding spiritual energy sink into his Qi sea and then go up along his arms.

Unfortunately, although Cheng Qian had grasped the trick, he was still a beginner after all. Even though he could draw Qi into his body, the amount he could draw was very limited and could not keep up with the amount that the carving knife was drawing from his body.

The first things that felt wrong were his legs and feet. Cheng Qian felt as if he had walked 108,000 miles non-stop. His feet were numb at first, and then an indescribable pain gradually emerged between his tendons and bones. The pain reached its extreme and turned into an even deeper numbness. In the end, he could hardly feel his legs.

The next thing to hurt was his waist. If Cheng Qian hadn't freed up one hand to hold down the table, his waist would have had almost no support. His back began to ache like needles, his heart was pounding, and his spine seemed to be bent by something invisible.

Finally, the head.

When people are extremely sleepy, they will experience confusion and hallucinations. Cheng Qian almost lost his grip on the carving knife several times - and even so, when he looked down, he found that he was still half an inch away from the one-inch length required by his master.

Cheng Qian felt a little dizzy. The feeling was hard to describe. It was as if he had run around the foot of Fuyao Mountain twenty times in that short period of time, and he was exhausted from head to toe.

No wonder his eldest brother, who is always afraid of hard work, would scratch his ears and fidget whenever he sits in front of the talisman.

But Cheng Qian was born without any idea of ​​what "gradual progress" and "knowing when to stop" meant.

The more difficult it was, the more the extremism and toughness in his bones were stimulated. The knife scraped against the wood, making a sharp "squeak". With every advance, Cheng Qian felt that he was exhausted, but then, he could always grit his teeth and push the blade down a little more when he was on the verge of reaching the end of the road.

Just when he was in a trance and had the illusion that his blade was about to reach the finish line, an adult's hand grabbed his wrist without saying a word.

The knife fell onto the table with a clang. Cheng Qian's hand softened, and his tense muscles could not relax for a moment, and he began to tremble uncontrollably.

Master Mu Chun held him with one hand and put the other hand on his back. Cheng Qian's eyes went dark and he finally managed to stand by holding on to his master's sleeve. Only then did he feel a gentle warm current on his back flowing into his limbs. Wherever the warm current passed, his numb and stiff parts of his body seemed to be pierced again by countless cow-hair needles.

Cheng Qian broke out in a cold sweat, feeling as if his heart was burning with pain. His breath was stuck in his chest and it took him a long time to catch his breath. He breathed too quickly and choked himself with a heart-wrenching cough.

Master Mu Chun patted his back with a look of deep concern, saying, "You kid, you kid..."

Yan Zhengming, who had been trimming nails with a knife for a long time and had not yet started to get to the point, was stunned.

Yan Zhengming said blankly: "Copper coins, you..."

He said "you" for a long while, but couldn't find the right word. Finally, he uttered: "Why are you so fierce?"

It took Cheng Qian a long while to recover. Master Mu Chun let him go, took the wooden sign out of his hand, and stared at the vertical mark with a complicated expression - the first part was relatively smooth, and it was obvious that he knew the trick of the talisman "without a teacher", but it was obvious that he soon lost strength, and the second half was tilted and weak, and it was obvious that Cheng Qian had run out of strength in less than half an inch. The rest was sometimes deep and sometimes shallow, and it almost broke in many places, but it never broke. Not only did it not break, but if he hadn't broken it himself, he would have refused to give up the knife.

How big a stubborn heart does this person have?

Master Mu Chun was a little scared. He found that it was a big mistake for him to regard Cheng Qian as a disciple of Yan Zhengming, and it almost caused trouble.

The initial practice of spells was actually boring and harsh, because they were basically not taught to carve anything useful. The carving knife only guided the disciples who had just begun to draw Qi into their bodies to exercise their meridians and thereby widen them.

Widening the meridians is not a comfortable experience; it requires exhausting the little energy that can remain in their qi sea over and over again.

But this is like stretching. If you practice it continuously every day, you can develop skills, but if you press down all the way down rashly, you might break the tendons.

I remember when Young Master Yan first touched the wooden sign, the tip of the knife basically poked a hole in the wood, and he started yelling and screaming about howling pain in his hands, legs, and buttocks, and he talked as if he was about to die, and he was full of energy when he made a fuss - he refused to touch the talisman again, no matter what.

Mu Chun had no choice but to personally teach him for more than two months before he could barely bring him in.

Even now, sometimes when he asked his eldest disciple to go back and practice some talismans, that guy would just use a peeler to casually scrape the wooden board - don't think the master doesn't know.

Master Mu Chun's face darkened. He first glared at Yan Zhengming who didn't understand what was going on, then asked Cheng Qian, "Have you been to the Sutra Tower?"

Cheng Qian: “…”

Yan Zhengming: “…”

Master Mu Chun sat on Cheng Qian's desk, looking down at the ignorant brat and asking, "I've read Introduction to Talismans in advance. What else have you read?"

Cheng Qian didn't dare to say anything.

"Let me think about it. Kung Fu, swordsmanship, mental skills, sayings of various schools, maybe there is also..." With every word Master Mu Chun said, Cheng Qian lowered his head. The master turned half of the table and spit out two words mercilessly with his thin lips, "The Devil's Way?"

Cheng Qian's heart skipped a beat: "Master, I..."

Master Mu Chun stared at the little whorl of hair on his head, waiting to see him deny it or cry out of fear.

Unexpectedly, the boy did not deny it, nor did he have the slightest intention of pissing himself. He stood there listlessly for a while, then admitted softly, "I was wrong."

Master Mu Chun didn't believe that Cheng Qian could truly repent. "What's wrong?"

Cheng Qian: “…”

It turns out that he is not sincere.

Yan Zhengming felt a little uncomfortable watching from the side. As the relationship between the brothers grew deeper, the hateful side of his third junior brother became more and more unrestrained. Sometimes he wanted to strangle Cheng Qian to death, but he would always forgive him quickly because he felt that Cheng Qian was like a cautious and bad-tempered little wolf cub who would bite someone when he got angry, but upon closer inspection, what was left were always just tooth marks. He knew in his heart who was good to him and was just pretending to be fierce. In fact, he was always careful not to hurt others.

Yan Zhengming defended him, "Master, you can't blame him. I was the one who brought him in. There's not much entertainment on the mountain, so I wanted to find some books to entertain my junior brother..."

Master Mu Chun: "Will you read the introduction to spells in casual books?"

Yan Zhengming: “I just saw it by accident.”

Master Mu Chun raised his eyelids and said, "Zhengming, do you think he is you?"

Yan Zhengming: “…”

He was a little unsure whether his master was scolding Cheng Qian or himself.

Master Mu Chun sighed and looked at Cheng Qian who was sizing him up cautiously. He felt that if he continued teaching him like this, Cheng Qian would probably look more than just like Master Zi Peng's father. In a few days, he might even become her grandfather.

He waved to Cheng Qiuqian and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He wanted to sound stern but failed. He just seemed a little deep.

"There are three thousand avenues that our predecessors have walked on in the Nine-story Sutra Tower," said Master Mu Chun. "Have you been to the second to last floor? Of course not, because there is nothing there that you would find useful. It records the paths that many of my Fuyao sect's predecessors have walked on and their final results... or fates. You are looking for your own path, and I hope you don't choose the most difficult one."

Cheng Qian seemed to understand, but he felt that the warning was extremely heavy and nodded involuntarily.

Then, in this state of half-understanding, the kind master punished them both by making them recite the scriptures thirty times each.

The unlucky eldest brother, it seems like he is always being blamed by his younger brothers.