Chapter 101: Chapter 100: Dabai’s Breakthrough and Planting Skill
Mr. Zhou Tongwen’s casual essays, though casual by name, contained characters written so tidily that they were a pleasure to look at.
However, they truly justified being called casual, for the content was essentially like a diary. He flipped through them briefly and could say that the vast majority of the three volumes had no significant meaning, mostly consisting of —
“Nothing to do today, having tea!”
“Having tea!”
“This won’t do, how can you allow yourself to be so idle, you must strive harder tomorrow.”
“Having tea!”
To put it simply, a large part of it was meaningless repetition, with some interesting events from the village scattered throughout. The entries weren’t consecutive; it seemed he would jot down something only when it came to mind, not on a daily basis.
Besides these, there were also some records of accounts, which were written alongside the casual essays without much care, yet Wang Sheng could tell that Zhou Tongwen was quite wealthy.
Of course, there were entries that seemed nonsensical yet felt laden with information.
For instance —
“It’s been so long since I left that place, yet I still dream of it occasionally. Do I still harbor some dissatisfaction?” It seemed like he was questioning himself.
And that was just one of the lines; Wang Sheng had found quite a few that could possibly be related to this entry.
“Could it really be fate? Is there absolutely no way to change it?”
Many entries contained similar remarks, with all having one thing in common: detailed content including “that place.”
The last similar line was “They drove me away; why should I cling to memories of that place?”
After writing this line, the old Scholar never penned anything similar again, seemingly at a stopping point.
As for “that place,” Wang Sheng had a rough guess: it was very likely the Great Zhou’s court, since old Scholar Zhou Tongwen referred to himself as “Scholar.”
Of course, this couldn’t be confirmed with certainty; it was only a possible speculation.
But there wasn’t much point in dwelling on this matter. Even if he had been a person of the court, he had been gone for decades, and now was even dead. When a person dies, all is extinguished — nothing extraordinary about that.
Following these entries were many more that were “nonsense.”
By this time, the old Scholar seemed to have started teaching as well, and the contents of the essays turned to tea-drinking, teaching, and the like.
Lastly, there were some studies on philosophy and thought, which frankly gave Wang Sheng a headache.
However, there was one line he cared much about.
“Everything is incomplete!”
This line recurred several times later on, and from those words, Wang Sheng could sense the old Scholar’s helplessness.
“If this one issue, Mr. Zhou’s helplessness is understandable, because there’s no solution. But what does his statement represent?”
Everything is incomplete.
The literal meaning is that something is incomplete.
But while the line appeared several times, not once did it contain a subject; he could only guess at its meaning.
But how could he guess?
There wasn’t much substance in the essays, so it didn’t take long for Wang Sheng to finish them, and even upon finishing, he couldn’t identify what was incomplete.
He surely gained more insight into his mysterious teacher after reading these essays, but his confusion only increased.
Especially that line “Everything is incomplete.”
The question in Wang Sheng’s mind hadn’t disappeared; it had only been replaced with a larger one.
But he wasn’t as curious about this new question as he had been at first; initially, all he had really wanted was to understand what kind of extraordinary person his teacher was.
Though he didn’t have a complete answer, he did have a plausible guess.
As for the new question, all he could do was leave it to fate; maybe one day, by chance, he would find out, right?
Of course, there was another very important reason.
He felt that the old Scholar was referring to something quite profound, something he felt he couldn’t partake in, or rather, didn’t yet have the ability to engage in.
It was an intuition.
But as his power grew, this intuition was not without its merits and might very well be true.
He should focus on increasing his power first.
What Wang Sheng didn’t expect was that, a few days later, while his own power hadn’t improved much, Da Bai’s power had.
Lately, Da Bai had been mostly lying down and sleeping.
Wang Sheng knew that Da Bai wasn’t getting lazier; in fact, it was because it was “evolving.”
Classified among humans, Da Bai was a spirit beast.
The progress of spirit beasts was generally not as rapid as that of Demon Beasts because, like Martial Artists, they required a lot of resources to accumulate or to grow little by little over time, favoring steady progression over quick improvement.
Da Bai had eaten so many Ten-Complete Great Replenishing Pills and quite a bit of Evil Flood Dragon Meat during the time it followed him, but the actual progress wasn’t particularly noticeable.
When Wang Sheng first encountered it, it was already a spirit beast comparable to a third or fourth-tier Martial Artist, but now it seemed to remain the same, barely capable of pulling an Evil Flood Dragon’s carcass.
Of course, the resources consumed wouldn’t just disappear into thin air; they had been stored in Da Bai, which had recently felt that its energy was sufficient. Thus, it started using that energy to enhance its own power, initiating its own “evolution.”
Wang Sheng had never witnessed the “evolution” of a spirit beast and had expected some significant commotion, but Da Bai’s “evolution” was mostly internal, outwardly unremarkable.
During “evolution,” it was extremely quiet, with nothing happening in the outside world.
Overall, it seemed that after simply sleeping, Da Bai had completed its power increase.