Chapter 673: About to Begin

That ghost place, the Cliff of Repentance, was above the end of the Sky Plank Road, belonging to the kind of damn place that would kill a person with a fear of heights. With Bai Lang's courage in charging and killing, he also swallowed a few mouthfuls of saliva. He grabbed the iron chain and used his feet to borrow strength, crossing the plank road in a few moves and arriving at the Cliff of Repentance. He saw Linghu Chong lying on it, bored, looking at the sky.

As soon as Bai Lang appeared, Linghu Chong jumped up first, and after seeing him, he said, "Junior Brother Bai." Bai Lang curled his lips; being called "Junior Brother" by this guy really gave him goosebumps. Linghu Chong had a very good relationship with junior brothers like Lu Dayou, but his relationship with Bai Lang was quite average.

It was mainly because Bai Lang appeared more mature and usually didn't play with those children, always focusing on his own practice. Besides, Bai Lang didn't like drinking, and in fact, his temper and personality didn't really fit with Linghu Chong's—transforming Linghu Chong so he wouldn't become that person in the book? Sorry, Bai Lang didn't have that ability; he was very busy, and "rivers and mountains are easy to change, but nature is hard to alter." People like Linghu Chong generally couldn't be transformed.

Yue Buqun could still be saved—if he could pass the imperial exam, if his martial arts improved greatly, if he could teach very powerful disciples... of the above choices, only passing the exam was truly useful. Compared to entering the Ming Dynasty's bureaucratic system after passing the exam, the level of a sect leader's martial arts was completely unnecessary. For example, Bai Lang was very curious: what kind of sect could withstand the guns and cannons of the Ming border army?

"I don't think even a three-eyed gun could stop them. If I practiced the Twelve-Pass Golden Bell Shield, I could block bullets, but I'm afraid cannonballs still wouldn't work—sigh, in the movies, you have science and I have divine skills; there's no way to play." Bai Lang took off the food box from his body and placed it in front of Linghu Chong, packing up the empty food box from before, ready to take it away.

Of course, since senior and junior brothers met on the Cliff of Repentance, they still had to chat. There was a cave on the Cliff of Repentance, so living inside meant no need to worry about wind and rain. If it weren't for the fact that this place was really hard to walk and he had to trouble others to deliver food every day, Bai Lang himself would have wanted to live there for a while. For no other reason than peace and quiet. He had always been thinking about when he could have a small hut outside the Huashan Sect's base where he could focus on his practice.

Fishing out his original internal energy was a quite arduous task. He had to practice boxing and cultivation every day, grinding away the restrictions given by the world bit by bit. "Unfortunately, I still haven't transcended." After saying a few words, Linghu Chong excitedly wanted to spar with Bai Lang. There was no need to compare fist and palm techniques; Linghu Chong was doomed to lose, and he knew it himself.

Then there was only the sword. In the past, Bai Lang hadn't won against Linghu Chong many times in the small and big competitions. Linghu Chong had good aptitude for sword techniques and learned quickly. The few times he lost were because he wanted to go head-to-head with Bai Lang, only to be ground down by Bai Lang's Yangwu Sword Technique and internal energy. Bai Lang had no interest in winning against Linghu Chong; most people's sword techniques in this world were like this, and Linghu Chong's was already enough.

Could he really let him see the principle of "intent before the sword, changing with the heart" now? Bai Lang observed that Linghu Chong's Xiyi Wei Sword Technique was full of loopholes. If he were really fighting for his life, he could finish Linghu Chong with one sword. But now he could only spar with Linghu Chong using entry-level sword techniques. It wasn't easy for an expert like Bai Lang to pretend to be a low-level one; he just acted as if he didn't see so many flaws and practiced the entry-level sword technique all the way through.

He didn't even show that continuous momentum; he just practiced the moves like they did during training. Sure enough, after several bitter fights, Linghu Chong won. This guy was in a great mood and even specifically instructed Bai Lang on several "flaws" in his sword technique. Bai Lang laughed secretly, "My sword technique's flaws couldn't be broken even if Feng Qingyang came in person. The problem is, where is this old man?" Bai Lang didn't detect Feng Qingyang's tracks.

It seemed he didn't live on the Cliff of Repentance. The place where people could live on the Cliff of Repentance was just this small. If the old man didn't want to sleep in the open, he shouldn't be on the Cliff of Repentance. Perhaps he built a shed in some mountain gully below. Anyway, judging by the fact that Linghu Chong didn't see Feng Qingyang as a wild man later, the old man's living conditions should be okay.

As for the location of the Demon Cult's ten elders, Bai Lang didn't care—this so-called "flaw-breaking" sword technique that was one move after another was useless; it was just something carved to vent one's resentment. And as for the so-called Five Mountain Sword Sects' sword techniques carved on the stones, Bai Lang felt they were just so-so. Without anyone to teach, just looking at the pictures would lead to many detours.

Moreover, his own martial arts were enough. His martial arts were the top-tier techniques in this world, and he felt that fishing them out early was the right thing to do. After sparring with Linghu Chong, Bai Lang left the Cliff of Repentance. He had made up his mind to build a detached courtyard on Huashan. If there were no accidents, the next sect leader would be passed down to the first disciple, Linghu Chong, but Bai Lang was also highly valued by Sect Leader Yue Buqun for his fist and palm techniques and internal energy.

Since he proposed that he hoped to have a small courtyard where he could focus on studying martial arts, this idea was rejected; he couldn't leave the Huashan Sect's base, but he could be assigned a more remote courtyard. Later, the task of delivering food was almost all divided by Lu Dayou and the others, and Bai Lang happened not to want to climb the Cliff of Repentance anymore.

With Bai Lang's maturity, he could roughly be sure that he definitely couldn't go to the Cliff of Repentance, but there was a variable—it seemed that Junior Sister Yue Lingshan wasn't as close to Senior Brother Linghu Chong anymore? Since practicing fists and kicks with Bai Lang when she was young, this girl seemed to have become more fond of practicing fists and kicks—unfortunately, she had never practiced internal energy from the outside in.

She ultimately practiced internal energy with the orthodox Huashan entry-level mental method, but the fists and kicks and the preliminary supporting breathing methods Bai Lang taught her significantly improved Yue Lingshan's foundation, especially when practicing Huashan internal energy, it went smoothly all the way. Although it couldn't increase the speed, there would be no bottlenecks.

Moreover, she was agile, and her strength and physical fitness had also increased significantly, which was a great help for practicing sword techniques. So Yue Lingshan's martial arts were now only lower than Linghu Chong's. When meeting Bai Lang in the small competition, Bai Lang even "couldn't beat" her. Ultimately, Yue Lingshan's sword technique was agile and changeable, appearing to be very "restraining" to Bai Lang's sword technique.

Bai Lang practiced painstakingly, occasionally going down the mountain at night to perform chivalrous deeds in Huayin County. For a time, the security in Huayin County became both good and bad—good in that ordinary people had no problems, and bad in that people occasionally died on the road, and they died miserably. When the yamen looked, it seemed they were all lone thieves.

"It would actually be good for the Huashan Sect to move to Huayin County. Staying on the mountain is just... forget it, it's the foundation left by the ancestors." When Bai Lang lamented this, he had already been in this world for nine years. His internal energy was finally enough to allow him to circulate the Great Heavenly Cycle, walking through the Ren and Du meridians to truly fish out a large amount of the locked internal energy that was originally in his body.