Professor Cao, truly a top-notch professor from a prestigious institution, could even make content that Lin An originally had no interest in utterly fascinating.
Lin An was instantly captivated.
It was as if a whole new world had opened up.
From the relationship between life and breathing, to the linkage between breathing and exerting force, he talked all the way to the connection between the movements of life and armor.
It turned out that armor was not solely for defense; its relationship with the warrior was much more mutually supportive.
"The ancients stressed the Unity of Heaven and Man. In the sport of combat, your armor is your heaven. Every coordination with it will provide you greater assistance."
"If it was just for defense, why wouldn't people simply crawl into thicker war carts instead?"
"While on the march, the principle is 'armor never leaves your body', but if it was simply a fear-driven defense, such heavy armor would definitely drain your strength and even affect your vitality, Qi, and spirit."
"When you become one with your armor, you could even draw strength from it to support yourself."
"The first step is to master breathing, then comes the so-called stances, and as for techniques of exerting force, that is an even deeper subject."
When Lin An walked out of Professor Cao's villa, the sky had already turned completely dark.
He had stayed for the entire day.
During this day, he miraculously learned an interesting technique, diaphragmatic breathing.
Although he had no idea what use this thing had.
Holding six or seven books in his arms, Lin An silently turned back to look, and took out his phone from his pocket to call the boss.
"Yes, yes, I just left."
"Mhm, I studied seriously."
"Huh?"
On the phone, the boss actually told him that he didn't need to go to the company for an entire month; he should stay here and learn from Professor Cao.
The boss didn't seem to know where he was, the background noise was quite loud, and he was practically shouting on the phone to Lin An.
The voice came out from the receiver and traveled a great distance in the serene neighborhood streets.
Lin An hurriedly clutched the books tightly and quickly walked across the street to a spot between a small car and the trees alongside the road, carefully glancing back at Professor Cao's villa.
The boss's voice sounded particularly excited on the phone.
"Just stay there and learn from Mr. Cao, and also think carefully about how to convert the Chinese-style armor into Demon Hunter armor. Remember, the focus of this game is not the international market but domestic."
"You need to give it a Western look to match the stereotype people have of Wizards."
"Then you must also ensure it retains enough Chinese elements to feel quite in line with our national aesthetic."
"Understand?"
The corner of Lin An's mouth twitched slightly, and he really wanted to say, I understand squat.
See, this is why he didn't want to go into graphic design—these darn clients were even more unreasonable than the programming ones, not even requiring any requirement analysis document upfront, making all sorts of demands out of thin air.
You might as well ask me to create a vivid, multicolored black.
The boss kept prattling on phone, "I'll try to get Suxin Software to outsource the graphic design work to us, and I'm counting on this project for training the team."
"By the time you return proficient, we'll both be planners, we train while also contemplating our own game, get it?"
"An? An? Are you listening to me?"
Lin An swallowed hard, just mutely responding, "Okay, okay."
He was completely frozen.
Because…
The small car next to him, which appeared to have its engine off, had a huge black cat squatting on its roof. The cat's green eyes curiously stared at him, its ears perky.
The key point was, the fluffy tail of the black cat was curled up on his shoulder and scratching itself against his neck~
It was the lady boss from Suxin Software.
She was inside this car!
If not, Lin An would eat the car right there and then!
What a scene!
What on earth was this lady boss doing parking in such darkness?
Lin An didn't want to appear too abnormal, so he just quietly agreed to what the boss was saying, pretending to have seen nothing as he walked towards the other side of the neighborhood.
The black cat followed him all the way to the corner of the street and then dissipated into a puff of black smoke.
Although the house he bought was in the same neighborhood, it was located on the outermost ring next to the road.
The 32-story building seemed like a wall that kept the noise of the city outside of the neighborhood.
It was a large complex, and it took him a long time to get to his own building, and as he reached his floor, he subconsciously opened the window and looked towards the corner where Professor Cao's house was.
Regrettably, he couldn't see anything.
Compared with their 32-story buildings along the street, and between them and the villa area by the river, there were two rows of twenty-something-story high-rise buildings and some townhouses, plus all sorts of greenery, which at night appeared as nothing more than a dark mass.
The view from Lin An's mortgaged small apartment was not very good; looking out of the window, let alone the villa area, he couldn't even see the big river next to the villas, only the city streets on the opposite side of the river.
The night was waning, and the lights from the street lamps and cars blended into an orange river of light, turning into the city's dark orange artery.
Watching such a river of lights didn't have the leisurely pleasure of looking out from Professor Cao's yard, only the endless noise.
It was the glow of every weary soul in this bustling commercial city.
All through the night, without rest.
Lin An placed his books on the table, took a bath, and lazily sat on the bed. After a moment's thought, he got up again and found a sturdy blank notebook and began to record the content of what Professor Cao had discussed today.
His memory was only average, and he worried he would forget the key points of Professor Cao's lecture.
He had no intention of practicing any nebulous Health Cultivation Skill. Perhaps when he was older, he might practice it in the park, but not now.
These also had no relevance to the planning required by the small business owner.
But still, he took care to jot down the key points.
Merely because he found it interesting.
Everyone online said that all Health Cultivation Skills were scams, serving only to get the elderly to move their limbs, and that was all.
Yet Lin An had discovered that what Professor Cao described, quoting classics and detailing every single aspect, seemed to be not as simple as just moving limbs.
Of course, it couldn't possibly be some kind of miraculous secret technique.
Because Professor Cao had pointed out almost everything he mentioned could be found in a book, and they all were published by reputable publishers.
They were available for purchase in both physical and online bookstores.
The most crucial point was – breathing, something Lin An was also practicing; he followed the posts of a yoga blogger, and it genuinely helped relax his tense spirit.
And the breathing methods described by Professor Cao seemed much more remarkable than those the yoga blogger had mentioned.
Since he had learned it, why not review and gain new insights? Who knew, it might be useful!
After meticulously taking notes, Lin An placed the notebook on a small bookshelf beside the bed, which held a large number of programming books and printed materials from theses he had asked someone to obtain from abroad.
Almost every day before going to sleep after work, he had half an hour of reading time.
When faced with a particularly complex and dry paper, it was more effective than a sleeping pill.
The moon outside the window had at some point hidden itself inside the clouds, like snuggling into a bed. Lin An yawned, lazily tossed himself onto the bed, tugged at the sheets, and his eyelids slowly closed.
He didn't know how long he had slept when he was awakened by a strange clicking sound.
He rubbed his eyes tiredly, and suddenly a wildly hideous face appeared next to his pillow.
The eye sockets were a blur of blood and flesh, the skin was an extreme pallor, hair was disheveled, and from the cracked lips was nothing but darkness...
"!!!"
It was that head!
Oh, more accurately, that basketball. Although he didn't know how it ended up on the bed, Lin An was absolutely certain it was the basketball.
The head looked terrified, as if it had encountered something horrendous, with its dark teeth chattering a dense clicking sound.
"Stop it!"
Lin An rolled his eyes and pulled the sheets over his head, continuing to sleep soundly.
Vaguely, he heard the head saying next to his ear, "Wuu wuu wuu, I have no eyes, I can't see anything, but I feel there's something very scary, very scary..."
"..."
Lin An took a deep breath, forcefully pulling the sheets off and glaring at the head, "Can you not make noise!"
The head just twisted its face as if it had encountered something terrifying, "I'm so glad you're finally paying attention to me, you have to look, is there something strange that suddenly appeared? Wuu wuu, I'm so scared!"
"Could there be anythi..." Lin An sighed, looking around the room. Truthfully, he was no longer afraid that some new figure would appear in the room.
But his eyes suddenly widened in disbelief as he gazed outside the window.
There, the entire sky had been dyed a shade of gold.