097 Unexpected Feeling

After leaving the airport, Chen Jue did not head straight to Baoshan, where his friend Biao was living. Instead, he spent the night in Kunming.

From here, a chartered car to Baoshan would take six or seven hours, so Chen Jue booked a high-speed train for the following morning. It would get him there in just three and a half hours, far quicker and more convenient.

He still remembered how, back in university, Brother Biao had suddenly announced a whirlwind marriage only a few months before graduation, shocking Chen Jue and the little bumpkins in his dorm, who had only just entered society and were still doing internships.

To attend Biao's utterly unexpected wedding, Chen Jue and the rest of his dorm mates had stubbornly spent two days and two nights riding old green trains from Wenzhou. Back then, there was no high-speed rail to the Baoshan area yet.

It should be mentioned here that Chen Jue had attended university in Wenzhou itself, and it was neither a particularly good school nor a particularly prestigious major. The only thing that brought a little color to life was the handful of like-minded roommates he met there.

Jiang Fan, mentioned earlier as someone fighting his way through Hangzhou, was the second oldest in the dorm. He was a mixed Han and Tibetan man from Tianzhu in Long Province. His father was Han, his mother Tibetan, and his ID card listed him as Han, but his daily habits leaned heavily toward Tibetan traditions. He spun prayer wheels, wore hada scarves, lit butter lamps, and would occasionally knead some tsampa with butter to share with everyone. He was bold, generous, and loyal. In the end, he bought a home with a mortgage and married a local girl from Hangzhou, settling down there to build a life.

As for the Brother Biao Chen Jue kept calling by that nickname, he was the eldest in the dorm. His real name was Wang Biao, and he too was of mixed minority heritage. His father was Han, while his mother belonged to the exceptionally rare Lisu people. His hometown lay near the Gongshan Nature Reserve, though he had since moved and settled more than a hundred kilometers away in Baoshan.

Biao had a round face, was not tall, but was broad and stout, the sort of man who looked sturdy at a glance. He truly lived up to the name Biao.

What was more, during university he had a long history of romantic escapades. Though he seemed honest and harmless, he had a sweet tongue and a warm heart, and when he acted, he did so with enthusiasm.

He even once climbed out of the dormitory wall in the middle of the night just to meet an online girlfriend, then waded across a shallow ornamental stream on campus to get outside. In the whole school, he was one of those spectacularly outrageous figures, the sort with bragging rights to the next level.

Yet before graduation, the story took a sharp turn. The once carefree and dashing Brother Biao, after only two blind dates, went straight into a whirlwind marriage.

By the time Chen Jue and the others received their diplomas, Sister Biao was already three months pregnant with their first child. It had truly been a great turning point in life: a prodigal son coming home, pulling back from the edge of the cliff, setting aside his wandering heart, and returning to family life.

Still, despite appearances, Brother Biao remained a kind and warmhearted man at heart. Throughout his four university years, he often took part in volunteer teaching programs, tutoring some local children from left-behind and bereaved families in Wenzhou. He persisted through wind and rain for four full years, which was genuinely admirable.

It should also be noted that Chen Jue was the third in the dorm. He too was a mixed Han and minority descendant. His father was Han, while his mother, who had passed away from cancer, belonged to the She people, a relatively common minority in Wen County under Wenzhou.

And because his temperament could be still one moment and lively the next, unpredictable and hard to read, and because he loved petting and feeding the stray cats around campus, his roommates gave him the nickname Old Cat.

After four years at university, Chen Jue had become less and less boyish. He grew fatter, lazier, and Old Cat gradually turned into Old Tomcat, sometimes even being called Fat Cat.

For three such fellows to gather in one dormitory was, one could say, quite a coincidence of fate.

Aside from them, the remaining three roommates were all Han as well, and they came from every corner of the country. Each had his own customs and a distinct personality. Yet to have lived under the same roof in harmony for four years, and even kept in touch and met from time to time so many years after graduation, was something truly precious.

...

After leaving Kunming Airport, Chen Jue took a taxi to the hotel he had booked.

The room was a little over two hundred yuan a night, not expensive. He had specifically chosen one that had opened within the past year, and the decor and environment were decent. It could not compare to the seaside guesthouse he had stayed in before, but it was clean.

After checking in and putting away his luggage, Chen Jue went out to a busy commercial street nearby and tried some of Kunming's local snacks.

A large bowl of rice noodles in a small hot pot, paired with chicken cooked in a steam pot, then while wandering the night market he bought some split-open roasted potatoes and grilled tofu, and even packed up some flower cakes to take back to the hotel and taste later.

Having grown used to the light seafood flavors of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, he found the occasionally sour, salty, and mildly spicy taste of Yunnan to be excellent as well.

After eating his fill and satisfying his stomach, Chen Jue lay on the hotel bed and started reading.

Before leaving, he had brought along several newly bought books on medical knowledge, covering the identification and preparation of Chinese herbs, as well as human anatomy, acupuncture points, and related subjects.

As his cultivation deepened, Chen Jue had become increasingly attentive to the study of his own body, afraid of making mistakes in his boxing practice or in the cultivation of inner alchemy.

He also worried that if he misjudged the nature of medicinal herbs and supplemented recklessly, he might end up making his body worse and leaving hidden problems that even the panel could not detect.

With that unknown seal-like condition still present, Chen Jue had already guessed that the panel was not omnipotent. At critical moments, he still had to rely on himself.

...

That night he did not cultivate. He only read until ten o'clock, then lay down and went to sleep.

The next morning he got up early, took a taxi to Kunming's high-speed rail station, and by the time he arrived in Baoshan it was already noon.

On the train, Chen Jue spent the time reading and chatting intermittently with Wang Biao on WeChat.

When he stepped out of Baoshan Station, he saw that Wang Biao, who had taken a half-day off from work, was already waiting outside the exit gates, waving enthusiastically at him.

"Damn, Old Cat, have you turned into some kind of living magic trick?"

"You've gotten taller, sturdier, and even fairer! I almost couldn't recognize you just now after all these years!" Wang Biao was also a little stunned by Chen Jue's transformation.

Ever since Chen Jue began cultivating, his body and appearance had changed tremendously. The most obvious differences were that he had grown taller, his skin had improved, his frame had become more robust, and he had even taken off the glasses he had worn for more than ten years. He now radiated an indescribable air of health from head to toe.

Standing among the crowd leaving the station, he was extraordinarily eye-catching, like a crane among chickens, with an extremely high rate of people turning to look back.

"Haha, just think of it as me going through a second puberty," Chen Jue said without ceremony as he met his roommate, throwing an arm around his shoulders at once.

As for the two large bags of luggage he was carrying, Chen Jue put them into the rear trunk of the SUV Wang Biao had driven over.

Along the way, the two of them laughed and talked, catching up on each other's lives and sighing over how quickly time had passed since graduation.

The little fools from their dorm back then were now one by one like winded-up toys: working, getting married, buying houses, and the more ambitious ones had even begun starting businesses. Or else, like Wang Biao, they had children and were carrying on the next generation. In short, everyone seemed to be straining forward under the weight of a fixed track.

As for Chen Jue, he was like the Monkey King, leaping free of the three realms and five elements. An unexpected awakened attribute panel had suddenly shattered his bitter, ordinary life.

One could even say it had directly changed his destiny.

...

On the way, he chatted a great deal with Brother Biao, and the two of them felt many things. In the course of conversation, Chen Jue also learned that their dorm's fourth roommate, Zhou Anping, was about to get married as well, which left him mildly surprised.

Counting it that way, only two of the six men in the dorm were still unmarried now. One was the fifth roommate, Cheng Wei, whom the earlier text had mentioned as Old Dog. He was sharp-tongued, cheeky, and loved to tease people, the dorm's chief source of laughter and atmosphere. The other was Chen Jue himself, who had unexpectedly stepped onto the path of cultivation.

"If I didn't have this panel, and if my family were as happy and complete as any ordinary person's, perhaps I would be just like them too," Chen Jue thought.

"Chasing money, finding love, building a family, striving hard in a career, having children, supporting the elders..."

By the time he came to himself, the car had already arrived at a new residential complex in Baoshan.

After parking, he took two boxes of health supplements from the things he had brought. You could not go to someone else's home as a guest empty-handed.

Inside, a full table of steaming dishes had already been laid out, and a place had been set for Chen Jue along with bowls and chopsticks. Everything had been prepared in advance by Brother Biao's parents.

As for Brother Biao's wife, pregnant with their second child, she came over with her belly prominent, smiling as she greeted Chen Jue.

She was a gentle and virtuous young woman. Though her looks were ordinary and her style somewhat old-fashioned and mature, she was completely devoted to Biao and kept the household in excellent order.

Chen Jue had seen her before at the wedding Biao held before graduation, so they already knew each other. They were also in the same roommates' chat group and occasionally shared bits of life with one another. As soon as he saw her, Chen Jue called her Sister Biao.

But just as he approached the pregnant Sister Biao, Chen Jue suddenly twitched an ear. He heard a faint heartbeat.

It was not one of the heartbeats of the adults in the room, but should have been the one inside Sister Biao's belly.

Besides that, the pores on Chen Jue's body suddenly rose slightly, and the fine hairs all over him swayed softly, as though affected by some wave of energy.

How should one describe that feeling?

When he had once been aboard a plane high in the sky, Chen Jue had used his keen senses to detect the faint radiation coming from outer space. Yet that sort of cosmic radiation made him feel unwell, like a CT scan in an emergency department, something with negative effects on the human body.

But the sensation he felt now was a minute, almost imperceptible fluctuation, like radiation, coming from Sister Biao's belly.

It gave him an incomparably comfortable and gentle sense of acceptance and closeness, as if he were returning to the womb.

The feeling was extraordinarily mysterious, like Chen Jue, after mastering the circulation of the small and large heavenly cycles, had unexpectedly entered a state of fetal breathing.