“Hmph…”
“Hah…”
Veins bulged on Ergouzi’s arms. He lifted a large stone high above his head and walked several laps around his three mu of land.
Finally letting out a breath, he smashed the heavy stone onto the ground, stirring up a cloud of dust.
The stone weighed at least three to four hundred jin, and now he could lift it with ease.
Because he ate the grain from the gourd every day, his strength and cultivation were both improving rapidly. That previous wisp of True Qi had already grown several times stronger.
Yet he still couldn’t crush a stone into powder. He couldn’t even break a stone the size of a pigeon egg.
Whenever he remembered his master crushing a stone with such a relaxed and effortless demeanor, a wave of longing rose in his heart.
He didn’t know how many more years he would have to cultivate before he could be just like his master.
After throwing down the stone, Ergouzi picked up a wooden sword and began practicing the Basic Sword Forms.
He had already learned several of these moves, such as thrusting, chopping, lifting, hanging, and dotting…
According to the sword manual copied by his master, one could use a heavy sword during practice, gradually increasing the weight from ten jin to five hundred jin.
Then, when facing an enemy in actual combat, using a light sword would naturally result in a massive increase in power.
When Ergouzi read this, he thought he had misread the words.
Although he could lift a giant stone weighing hundreds of jin with both hands, wielding a sword required only one hand. Forget about a hundred jin—even a heavy sword of a dozen jin would be impossible to swing smoothly.
To use a hundred-jin heavy sword, a person would need at least a thousand jin of immense strength.
Ergouzi didn’t have a suitable heavy sword on hand, so he could only tie a few stones to his wooden sword, bringing its weight to about five or six jin.
At this moment, a straw dummy roughly the size of a normal person stood in front of him, covered in many tied-on copper coins.
He held the sword with one hand and slowly thrust it toward the straw dummy.
Swish!
The wooden blade struck precisely through the center of a copper coin!
Then he withdrew the sword and thrust again…
Thrusting was the most common and fundamental movement in sword arts. It required the strike to be steady, accurate, fast, and forceful, with the power reaching the very tip of the sword. He spent the most effort each day practicing this single move.
As the sun gradually set, Ergouzi remained in the fading light, thrusting his sword out again and again…
Time passed quickly. It was soon the season of heavy snowfall nearing the New Year, and the entire world turned into a vast expanse of white.
Only on Snake Mouth Mountain, in places unseen by outsiders, did the land remain lush, green, and brimming with life.
The New Year was fast approaching, and Ergouzi still owed Old Moneybags Huang forty taels of silver. They had agreed the debt would be repaid at the end of each year.
He had earned fourteen taels of silver from selling the Great Strength Pills, but he had spent quite a bit recently. Aside from occasionally eating meat himself, he frequently had to buy wine and meat to show respect to his master.
Now he only had six taels of silver left.
The ginseng he planted earlier had finally flowered and produced seeds. He used these seeds to plant another two mu of ginseng.
In total, he had now cleared ten mu of farmland: three mu of paddy fields, four mu of Solomon’s Seal, one mu of Cistanche, and two mu of ginseng.
The stone house, goose pen, and the open space for martial arts practice took up another mu.
Ginseng had a long growth cycle, easily taking ten or twenty years, and there were even stalks of fifty- or hundred-year ginseng.
Therefore, he intended to save up more ginseng seeds to further expand his planting area.
He planned to convert the three mu of paddy fields into ginseng as well, since the stored grain in his gourd was enough to feed him for twenty years.
Even if he mashed it all up to sell as Great Strength Pills, he shouldn’t be able to use that much grain.
Over this recent period, he had been rolling Great Strength Pills whenever he had free time.
The gourd now held over a shi of Great Strength Pills. He planned to go to the county town in a few days to sell them.
Before going, however, he had another idea he wanted to try out.
He had originally planted medicinal herbs like ginseng and Solomon’s Seal with the intention of adding them to the Great Strength Pills.
Giving the Great Strength Pills a bit of a medicinal scent would make them seem more like real medicine, and perhaps they would sell even better.
Now that he had found a place to sell them, he wanted to try adding some herbs into the mix.
He dug up five stalks of Solomon’s Seal, each over half a chi long.
These stalks of Solomon’s Seal were golden and robust with three or four nodes each, equivalent to an herbal age of around three or four years.
In reality, it had only been a mere three or four months since he first planted them.
He boiled the Solomon’s Seal, added it to the rice, pounded everything into a fine paste, and then rolled the mixture into pills to dry.
Using the same method, he also made another batch of Great Strength Pills with added Cistanche.
Once finished, he stored them all inside the gourd to raise their concentration of Spiritual Qi.
Through his long period of trial and error, he had figured out that anything placed inside the gourd would have its quality enhanced, gaining somewhat miraculous effects.
However, these items couldn’t be enhanced infinitely within the gourd.
The improvement was fastest on the first day, and there was still a slight increase on the second day. But after three days, the effect reached its limit and could no longer improve.
Likely because his cultivation had advanced, he could now make the gourd change its size seven or eight times in a row.
At its largest, the gourd grew two or three zhang tall, large enough to stuff most things inside.
At its smallest, he shrank the gourd until it was finer than a hair, like a microscopic needle that embedded into his skin where no one could ever find it.
Three days later, Ergouzi slung a sack over his back and carefully climbed down the mountain along a rope.
Heavy snow now sealed the mountain. A layer of ice coated the rocks and trees. It was so slippery that one could easily fall on flat ground, to say nothing of this extremely treacherous terrain where the slightest misstep would send him tumbling off a cliff. The source of this chapter is g.com.
By the time he reached the foot of the mountain, the straw sandals on his feet had long since worn through.
He simply tossed the ruined sandals aside and walked barefoot through the snow, planning to buy a pair of cotton shoes in the county town this time.
During his last visit to the county town, he had seen those wealthy masters all wearing cotton shoes. They walked with their chests puffed out and their feet turned slightly outward, looking incredibly imposing.
He had heard that the county magistrate wore a kind of tall shoe called a boot, made from cowhide and inlaid with gold and silver threads.
Ergouzi had been used to going barefoot or wearing straw sandals since he was a child, and his soles had developed a thick layer of calluses.
But now that he had earned some money, he wanted to buy a pair of cotton shoes just to feel what it was like to wear them.
While he was busy fantasizing about buying new cotton shoes, he spotted a small figure curled up by the side of the official road ahead, seemingly dead.
Every winter, there were many such roadside corpses.
He frequently saw bodies dumped by the road, dead from either starvation or the cold. Ergouzi was already used to it.
They all had cheap lives anyway. They weren’t noble officials. When they were too exhausted to keep living, they simply collapsed by the road and died.
Everyone had long since developed hearts colder than this ice and snow.
When his uncle kicked him out of the house last year, he probably would have died by the side of the road exactly like this if not for the gourd.
Today, looking at this small figure—likely only six or seven years old—Ergouzi felt an unprecedented surge of empathy.
It reminded him of how he and Dagou had become orphans at five or six years old, working themselves to the bone at their uncle’s house just to scrape by.
He gently pulled back the tattered clothes covering the child’s face. The small face was deathly pale. Messy, matted hair covered most of it, and a few fleas were crawling through the strands.
He was still breathing. Not dead!
Ergouzi picked the child up, fed him some water, and then took out a Great Strength Pill to stuff into his mouth.
The child must have been starved half to death. Even in a daze, he greedily swallowed anything put into his mouth.
After eating over a dozen pills in a row, the child slowly opened his eyes and struggled to look at Ergouzi.
“Kid! It’s good that you’re awake!”
“Keep this bundle of food and eat it slowly. Whether you survive or not will depend on your own luck.”
As he spoke, Ergouzi rummaged through his sack and pulled out a large bundle filled with his hand-rolled Great Strength Pills.
If the child ate sparingly, it might be enough to let him survive until spring.
Or perhaps he would freeze to death in the snow tonight.
After leaving the bundle of food, Ergouzi walked away.
The child stuffed the food into his embrace and clutched it tightly. He pushed aside the hair on his forehead and watched Ergouzi’s retreating back.
The child’s gaze was complicated. Even the dark red mole on his forehead seemed to brighten slightly.