The night they learned of the family heirloom, Sun Yixie shared all these "secrets" with Huang Donglai, secrets he had only just discovered himself.
Huang Donglai couldn't help but feel envious of Brother Sun's luck, remarking that he had stumbled upon an extraordinary adventure.
At the same time, the two slick veterans quickly realized... if Shen Youran truly harbored designs on the Sun family, his target would undoubtedly be those three treasures.
From then on, in their imaginations, they had painted Shen Youran as an outright villain and developed 120% vigilance towards him.
Looking across the entire Martial Arts world, only the two of them had been on guard against the organizers of the Youth Hero Conference from the very beginning...
Despite their sole basis being their own "measure others by one's own yardstick" sinister thoughts, and despite their ignorance of Shen Youran's real ambition, which was far more than coveting the Sun family's treasures... it had to be said, they were indeed doing the right thing.
In the days that followed, both Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai became recluses, earnestly practicing martial arts, eager to use the less than two months remaining to prepare for the upcoming Youth Hero Conference.
Needless to say, Huang Donglai already had a solid foundation in martial arts, and training was part of his daily routine.
But for Sun Yixie to seriously practice was indeed quite rare.
For the first seven days, Sun Yixie went to that secret chamber every day, as instructed by his father, opened the stone sarcophagus, took out the first stone slab, and sat in meditation according to the content (his father had translated the characters for him and he recognized them based on his knowledge of simplified characters), before practicing and then returning the stone slab to its original place and resealing the sarcophagus.
This method of training was also passed down by the ancestors because moving the stone slab in and out every day was a form of exercise; as martial arts improved day by day, the number of stone slabs needed would increase, all carefully calculated.
However, after seven days, Sun Yixie found a way to be lazy— he secretly copied the content from the first stone slab onto paper in simplified characters, and from the eighth day onward, he no longer went to the secret chamber, practicing directly in his own room instead.
Father Sun thought his son had memorized the content of the stone slab after seven days, so he didn't suspect anything.
By the fifteenth day, Sun Yixie felt it strange that he had practiced for two weeks without becoming "invincible" and showed Huang Donglai his handwritten copy of the family's secret martial arts techniques in simplified characters, asking if he was practicing incorrectly?
Huang Donglai studied it and found that this "Reversing Heaven and Earth" was indeed a very sophisticated Inner Strength method. The breathing techniques recorded here were logically the complete opposite of most traditional Internal Cultivation Methods as he understood them.
In other words, for someone like Huang Donglai who already had a foundation in Inner Strength, even if he obtained "Reversing Heaven and Earth," he couldn't practice it, as forced practice would cause his meridians to burst and lead to deviating into madness; only someone like Sun Yixie, who knew no martial arts, could start from scratch.
Of course, the reason Brother Sun hadn't made much progress after fifteen days wasn't that he was doing anything wrong, but because he simply wasn't ready yet.
Even the most superior Internal Cultivation Methods couldn't open up one's meridians and develop Inner Strength in just a few days; it was Sun Yixie's ignorance that led him to ask such a question.
Huang Donglai, feeling helpless, explained the basic concepts of martial arts to him again and encouraged him to continue his arduous training, although it was unclear how much Sun Yixie really took in.
And so the days passed by, one by one.
Before long, it was the end of summer and the beginning of fall.
In these fifty days, Sun Yixie naturally hadn't completed practicing "Reversing Heaven and Earth," but because he was impatient, on the twenty-fifth day, he secretly took Huang Donglai into the secret chamber and had him copy all the content from the twenty or so stone slabs in simplified characters.
After that, Sun Yixie practiced the basic Inner Strength while directly looking at the various moves that came later.
As the day to depart for Luoyang drew near, Sun Yixie simply bound all the pages Huang Donglai had helped him copy into a book, intending to make a "manual" to carry with him; since no one else in this world, except for him and Huang Donglai, could understand it, plus the paper and ink of this "manual" were brand new, even if it fell into the hands of someone else, no one would ever think it was a martial arts technique from an ancient era, so he wasn't afraid of losing it.
Meanwhile, during these days, Huang Donglai, while teaching Brother Sun various martial arts fundamentals, also revisited these basics himself. True enough... it was quite effective. His current level of cultivation had improved since he first arrived in Hangzhou, breaking through a bottleneck.
Additionally, the reply from the letter he had sent back to the Huang family via the Flying Pigeon Gang. The Huang family Head had also enclosed the invitation to the Youth Hero Conference from the Justice Sect in Shu Territory and instructed Huang Donglai to take good care of the Sun family's nephew and to make the Huang Sect proud at the conference.
With their preparations apparently adequate, they were ready to set off on that very day.
Unexpectedly... on the day of departure, an unforeseen event occurred— Huang Donglai could not have imagined that Sun Yixie would buy the wrong tickets to Luoyang.
At this point, a brief introduction to the transportation and communication status of Great Ming is necessary.
Firstly, for communication and logistics, people generally use official channels, also known as "postal relay." In Great Ming, any slightly larger county town would have a postal station, covering the whole country; commoners wishing to send letters and parcels could do so at these stations. Of course, there were limits on the weight and size of the goods. If you wanted to transport a large cargo, you'd still have to figure out your transport, as the government would not allocate resources for that, and even if they did, the price would be much higher than hiring your own transport and labor.