novelraw Chapter 132: Grinding Through Problems Is the Optimal Strategy
Chapter 132: Grinding Through Problems Is the Optimal Strategy
Deep in the night, a set of footsteps suddenly sounded outside the door.
Someone knocked gently.
When there was no response from inside, the knocking gradually grew louder.
Li Qiuchen looked up, rubbed his aching eyes, and glanced at the stack of books piled three feet high on the desk. He let out a sigh.
A full-on exam-grinding session, this is...
"Come in!"
He called out, but there was no response from outside.
Only then did Li Qiuchen suddenly remember.
Right. He was inside an illusory realm, and the inn was haunted.
He had just read through this exact type of scenario.You open the door, find nobody there, and a little while later it starts knocking on the window. You go to push the window open, and a ghostly face comes dropping from above, giving you a heart attack on the spot.
Should he play along?
Li Qiuchen turned to glance at the books still remaining on the shelf.
So many left.
He had come all this way, and there wasn't exactly time to spare.
He stood up, rolled his neck, walked to the door, and pulled it open in one swift motion.
Sure enough, there was nothing outside.
The corridor was quiet and completely dark.
Li Qiuchen didn't close the door. He left it wide open and went to the window, pulling that open too.
He thought it over, then walked to the bed and lifted up the bed boards.
Now nothing could hide under the bed either.
Having taken care of all that, he returned to the writing desk and picked up where he had left off in his reading.
Before long, a dark shape flickered past the window.
A breath of wind drifted in from outside, making the oil lamp flame tremble and waver, threatening to gutter out entirely.
Li Qiuchen raised a hand and simply extinguished the lamp himself.
With his current eyesight, the oil lamp made little real difference either way.
There was moonlight coming in through the window.
A little while later, footsteps came again from outside the door. The half-silhouette of a woman appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame, staring at Li Qiuchen without making a sound.
Seeing that Li Qiuchen was absorbed in his book and paying her no attention whatsoever, she gave a soft deliberate cough. Still no reaction.
"Good sir..."
"Shh."
Li Qiuchen raised a finger to his lips, gesturing for her to be quiet.
"Go stir-fry me a couple of dishes first."
The woman was silent for a moment, then turned and left.
After quite some time, she returned to the doorway carrying a food box, walking in a swaying, deliberately graceful manner.
"Good sir..."
"Go fetch me a basin of cold water. Well water."
"You absolute $#@%..."
The woman drew a slow deep breath and swallowed everything she had been about to say.
When she appeared in the doorway again with the basin of water, Li Qiuchen finally set down his book and walked over to meet her.
"My apologies for the trouble. Please, come in."
Only once he said come in did the woman actually step through the door. In the moonlight her lovely figure and beautiful face came into view.
"My, how the good sir does like to give orders~"
"If I'm too much trouble, feel free to leave."
"..."
Li Qiuchen took the basin, splashed a generous amount of cold water over his face, washing away the fog of exhaustion. His mind sharpened at once.
A photographic memory had its drawbacks too.
Even if the eyes could take it, the mind didn't necessarily keep up.
No matter how good the graphics card, without upgrading the CPU you couldn't draw out the true performance.
Once his head had cleared, he turned to look at the dishes she had brought. One plate of moo shu pork. One plate of green pepper with dried tofu.
Li Qiuchen picked up his chopsticks, gave it a stir or two, and frowned. "Why isn't there any thickening sauce?"
A vein bulged on the woman's forehead.
The absolute nerve of him!
Then she watched Li Qiuchen produce a fist-sized earth elemental pearl, which hit the ground with a heavy thud, and cratered the water-polished stone floor on impact.
"..."
The woman pressed her lips together and reined the vein back in.
Li Qiuchen smiled and said, "Miss, let's not waste each other's time. Would you prefer to go through the scripted flow, or shall we handle this some other way? As long as you don't interrupt my reading, I'm flexible."
The woman drew a slow breath, composed herself, and said, "This place is extraordinarily dangerous. The good sir would be wise to leave as quickly as possible."
Li Qiuchen nodded. "Dangerous how? Tell me about it. The proprietor isn't a good man?"
"Mm..."
"He killed the owner?"
"Well..."
"You're the owner?"
"No..."
"Then you're a demon, impersonating the owner?"
The expression on the woman's face finally cracked.
"How on earth did the good sir arrive at that conclusion?"
I spent the first half of the night grinding through problems.
Li Qiuchen picked up the earth elemental pearl, brushed the dust off it, and said with a smile, "I heard this inn was haunted. If it's haunted, there's a strong chance someone died here."
"The owner of this inn is a cultivated person. Not only does he have such a large book collection, he also paints and writes couplets. But the proprietor behind the counter is a thoroughly vulgar man who cares only for money. For someone like that to hold down a steady position at this inn, why would I have no reason to suspect he killed the owner?"
"If the owner were still alive, there is simply no way he would rent out his own study as a guest room."
"Judging from the owner's skill in calligraphy and painting, he was likely an older man, and a scholar. You clearly have no blood relation to the old proprietor, so you're most probably the owner's daughter."
"If the owner is dead, his daughter would have no particular reason to still be alive. She may have already been taken advantage of and disposed of by the proprietor. So I suspect you're not the real thing. You're wearing a human appearance, but your cultivation isn't refined enough. You couldn't even enter the study without the owner's permission, which rules out a ghost and points toward a demon or spirit. Factoring in contextual clues... should I be addressing you as Miss Huang?"
The woman's expression changed dramatically. She spun and bolted, and Li Qiuchen caught her by the back of the neck.
There followed a burst of frantic squeaking. The woman's clothing fell in a heap to the floor, and all that remained in Li Qiuchen's hand was a trembling weasel.
More specifically, what country folk called a yellow pelt. A stoat.
"Let's come to an arrangement."
Li Qiuchen set the terrified weasel down in front of him and said quietly, "You stay here quietly and don't disturb my reading. Before dawn I'll take care of the old proprietor, and we'll call it even. What do you say?"
The weasel shook from head to tail and nodded desperately.
Li Qiuchen gently set it down on the floor, returned to the writing desk, and continued grinding through his reading.
This time, the Yellow Fox Maiden finally stopped making any further disturbances.
The night passed without incident. When the first pale light began to color the sky outside the window, Li Qiuchen stood up, stretched out a long and thorough stretch, and returned the towering pile of books one by one to their places on the shelf.
When he turned to look for the Yellow Fox Maiden, she was nowhere to be seen. All that remained were the two dishes on the table, now turned a dark, blackish color that looked unpleasantly like human flesh, and giving off a smell of rot and decay.
Li Qiuchen walked out of the study with the earth elemental pearl in hand, pushing open the other guest rooms one by one.
Every room was completely empty, not a single guest in any of them.
In the very last room, he pushed the door open and found the old proprietor cowering against the wall in a state of sheer terror.
"Sir, there's a ghost..."
Li Qiuchen raised his hand and flung the earth elemental pearl at him, caving his skull in on the spot.
I could have been wrong.
But, well, wrong or right, better to commit to it. I came here to temper my state of mind, not to act as a judge.
Either I trust you, or I trust that Yellow Fox Maiden. Why would I put my faith in a lecherous old man who swindled me out of thirty taels?
Li Qiuchen retrieved the earth elemental pearl and looked around the room. He found a hidden compartment beside the bed and recovered the thirty taels he had paid the previous night.
He left the room and made his way to the kitchen.
The stove in the kitchen was cold. No fire had been lit at all.
Li Qiuchen raised his nose and sniffed, then looked up. A partial female corpse hung suspended from the rafters, evidently dead for some time.
This was one of the hidden plot threads.
Notice something wrong with the food, come to the kitchen to investigate, discover the corpse, and uncover the buried secrets of the inn.
Grinding through the reading had been worth it after all.
Li Qiuchen glanced at the weasel that had appeared from somewhere and was bowing rapidly toward him with its forepaws clasped together, and understood there was still one final step left to complete.
Take down the body and let the owner's daughter be laid to rest properly.
But there was no time left.
No time was no time.
He was someone who followed his instincts rather than chasing a perfect score.
Now that the full span of the reading was lodged in his head, why concern himself with the score on a beginner's orientation level?
Li Qiuchen raised a hand and sent out a surge of true qi, severing the rope from which the body hung. He didn't stop to puzzle over the history between the Yellow Fox Maiden and the dead woman, and turned to walk out of the kitchen.
The moment he stepped through the front door of the inn, the first pale thread of morning light appeared at the horizon.
[You have cleared the First-Grade Illusory Realm: Yellow Fox Maiden]
[Remaining Composure: 99]
[Illusory Realm Exploration: 90]
[Overall Rating: First Class, Mid]
[Identity verified. This trial result has been recorded in the Northern Frontier Human Boards.]
[Current Cohort Ranking: 2,345,749]
[Based on your overall rating, please select any three rewards from the following.]
[Available rewards are as follows:]
[1. One copy volume from Li Dongping's book collection]
[2. Soul-Summoning Lantern]
[3. Qi-Gathering Pill formula]
[4. One copper wayfaring coin]
Holy hell, the lanterns hanging at the inn's entrance were actually treasures?
Seeing the reward options after clearing the trial, Li Qiuchen was mildly caught off guard.
This genuinely surprised him.
There had likely been hidden side content inside the inn that he hadn't explored, but he had decided the reading was more important and left it alone.
Yet somehow, even with that degree of negligence, his exploration had still reached ninety percent and earned him a First Class Mid rating.
So all those books filling the shelves had counted toward the exploration score?
Without a photographic memory, who could have read through all of them in a single night?
As for the other rewards...
Li Dongping was presumably the owner's name. Li Qiuchen thought back carefully and recalled that the books on the top shelf had each carried a small seal stamp on their cover, which he hadn't paid much attention to at the time.
Thinking about it now, it had almost certainly read "Seal of Li Dongping."
His book collection in copied form still held real value, essentially a free set of study materials. Even if he had no use for it himself, he could pass it along to someone else.
Rewards given after clearing a trial fell outside the scope of the rule prohibiting disclosure of illusory realm contents.
Of the remaining rewards, Li Qiuchen already had the Qi-Gathering Pill formula. It was in the Jingyunzi that his ancestor had written.
When he had first obtained the formula he hadn't had the means to use it, and now he had outgrown it entirely.
When your big brother was already taking Spirit-Gathering Pills, who needed that sort of thing anymore.
Li Qiuchen passed over that option and looked at the fourth.
A wayfaring copper coin.
Identical to the coin Senior Sister Yanzhi had given him that time. What exactly were these things used for?
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