Monday morning, Yuzhi felt tired like always. But despite that, he never bothered with going to sleep earlier.
He wouldn't let some tiredness get in his way and decided to get a few more hours every day.
Yuzhi was currently sitting in class, listening to his professor explain how Qi would cause damage to weapons not created with Qi resistance materials.
The lesson was quite interesting and it made Yuzhi think about how science would apply to this world.
'Maybe the reason why those materials can resist the erosion Qi causes is due to them having a certain type atom.' Sadly enough, Yuzhi hadn't studied science a lot in his previous life, making the hypotheses he could come up with very limited.
(Same for me, maybe I can try to put some scientific reason behind some things, but I'm still a student and don't know everything so it will be pretty basic.)
After 2 hours of the professor being able to make sounds with his mouth, the lesson ended and Yuzhi went with his friends to the third training ground.
He was close with Zhou Jun and Jin Huang, but also many other people.
He had also tried making contact with Song Lying, but it was clear that she wasn't searching for new friends, acting hostile against everyone she didn't know.
The number of evil thoughts she had increased. And it reflected on her behavior. This made Yuzhi even more curious about Song Lying, wanting to treat her like a test subject to better his knowledge of this power he currently knew very little of.
Something very disappointing was that he had hoped to maybe unlock some new ability after breaking through, but nothing happened, the Ginseng didn't even react.
This made him kinda annoyed, he knew this Ginseng was very valuable, containing an entire universe. But at the same time, the benefits he received from it were so little.
He could see if someone had a lot of negative thoughts, but this in no big way helped him.
Most emotionally smart people could realize when someone was in a bad spot, he just didn't need to spend any energy on it.
And while he was annoyed with it, he tried not to think about it too much since it wasn't like he needed to climb countless mountains to get it.
And before Yuzhi knew it, he had arrived at the third training ground.
There, his professor was already waiting.
And just like the other lessons, they were still learning fist fighting.
And something that disappointed Yuzhi was that he hadn't been taught any technique at the academy.
There were only 3 ways to learn techniques he had learned, from a professor during class, and from a professor when they are your master, but then it can only be their technique, not one from the academy.
The last way was through the library, but they were hidden on levels that cost Academy Points. But even the third library floor, the floor where the worst and mostly incomplete techniques were, cost 10 Academy Points per 30 minutes.
All this made it very hard for anyone to learn techniques, but people who had cultivators as parents didn't have this problem.
But Yuzhi couldn't complain too much, because despite not learning any techniques, his fighting power had increased a lot with all the fist-fighting lessons his professor had given him.
The lesson started with the professor explaining what we would learn today, which was recovering from a situation where you were on the ground.
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After that, went into training this ourselves before we started with sparring.
Something Yuzhi found quite interesting was that there were a few students who had strengths you couldn't expect when looking at them.
He had asked a bit around, and this could be achieved through certain pills. But wasn't done a lot because those pills would even be wanted by Foundation Strengthening Cultivators.
After that, it was lunch and Yuzhi quickly ate before going to the library. He first started on the second floor, which had many books about the geopolitics of Rock Lake Kingdom and its cities.
Then he went on to the 1st floor where he started reading books related to the art of the Rock Lake Kingdom, but mainly those around Stone Frost City.
Everyone who knew Stone Frost City knew that its main export was Frost Stones.
Frost Stone was a kind of ice/stone that seldom smelted due to its strong ice properties but also has characteristics of stones.
They were deep underground, formed during periods when it was extremely cold.
This meant that no matter the weather, or the season, its export would always be stable.
But when looking at historical documents, he found that during certain periods in history, the amount of frost stones exported wasn't a lot.
He first thought this was maybe due to a war or disaster Stone Frost City was facing. But after looking at the history books of Stone Frost City, he couldn't find anything like that.
He couldn't even find a connection.
This mystery had become his obsession, and he felt like a treasure hunter who was close to a treasure.
After thinking about it for a while, he had this thought that the reason why he couldn't find anything in the history books was because it was scrapped from them.
The Frost Stone trade was something shared by the 4 powers of Stone Frost City.
The 4 Wind Directions Merchant Group, is the biggest merchant group within Stone Frost City. Even more interesting, while it seems that they held this position for 150 years, the 4 Wind Directions Merchant Group came after they, a subsidiary group took over Boundless Hills Merchant Group. The previous biggest merchant group that was the number 1 merchant group for 400 years before the 4 Wind Directions.
This meant they existed since 550 years ago, which was when Stone Frost Village was created.
The Stone Frost Academy was also one of the 4 powers within this city. Yuzhi was very interested in them because assuming Stone Frost City had some kind of private secret they didn't want the public to know.
And if the Stone Frost Academy was in on this secret, there must be people in their organization who knew about this.
But the Stone Frost Academy held many professors, some that didn't have an organization backing them, others that did have an organization backing them. In certain cases, professors came from organizations of nearby cities.
Yuzhi then decided to look into the upper echelon of the Stone Frost Academy.
The 2 Vice-principals and the principal. These people were quite interesting because never in history had they been someone with a connection to any force outside Stone Frost City, and in most cases they were connected to one of the 3 other forces.
The only exception to this was the first principal, but there was very little information on him. So nothing concrete Yuzhi could work with.
But all of this made it clear that the top of the academy was tightly controlled by the 3 forces. Making it almost strange to call the academy one of the 4 forces.
Interestingly, it was also the only of the 4 forces that didn't exist when the village was founded.
The next force was the Liu clan, and one of his roommates came from this clan. They had always been strong and existed since the founding of the village. The only interesting thing about this clan was their founder, who didn't come from the Rock Lake Kingdom, but the Ice Petal Empire. Which didn't exist anymore.
He tried to search for more about this woman, but there was almost no information about her. He had asked around, and the answer he got was that the Liu clan had this ritual of respecting the dead by leaving only a bit of information about them.
He didn't find this answer very convincing because while there wasn't a lot of information about any of the Liu Clan members, their founder had almost nothing of information left.
The last force is the Xu Clan had been the city officials for 550 years. All their Clan Heads had also been City Lords, which was very common.
They were the biggest one among the 4 forces, and their roots could be said to be everywhere.
The only interesting thing about them was that there wasn't anything interesting about them.
The 4 Wind Direction group was actually connected to the first Merchant Group ever, the Stone Frost Academy's top positions were tightly controlled by the 3 other forces and there was no information to find on the Liu clan's founder.
Only the Xu clan didn't have any secret Yuzhi could try to dig towards.
All of this felt so confusing to Yuzhi, and he almost felt like giving up, but there were still a few things he could do.
And the first one was to look at the art of the periods in which the bad sales happened.
If there was any mistake in censorship, it would probably be in art because it wasn't really something very trustworthy when trying to get information in the past.
Poems could be greatly exaggerated, paintings could just be fiction, and anything you see could have been used as propaganda.
Fortunately, Stone Frost Academy had a lot of things related to art, so today Yuzhi had decided to finally try and look into this path.