Early in the morning, a young girl in a log cabin woke up. She was rather ordinary other than her piercing golden eyes that seemed to perceive even the tiniest details. This woman's name is Xu Lihua, and she is about to train her first disciple.
---
As Lihua rose from her bed, still groggy, she begrudgingly made her way to Junjie's room. As she plopped herself in front of his door, she seriously began thinking about how to wake him up.
She was still bitter over her mother's favouritism towards him yesterday, but she couldn't really hate the guy; he was just a pitiful young man with amnesia. Would knocking suffice? She wasn't too sure, but she didn't have many other choices. If she entered his room without knocking, that was also quite rude.
Knocking on his door seemed like the way to go.
She laid three gentle knocks upon his door, trying to see if he would hopefully already be awake and respond; however, she was quickly left disappointed. It seemed knocking wouldn't suffice.
Preparing herself, she gently opened his door... and as soon as she took one peek inside, immediately closed it and walked away but not before saying,
"Training starts now! and also... where is your shirt, you indecent bastard!?"
They say you learn something new every single day, and it seemed Lihua learned her first lesson of the day. Apparently, like some other men, Junjie didn't have a shirt on whilst he slept. Although he wasn't to blame, as it had gotten quite stuffy the night before as it was the height of summer.
Lihua decided that just knocking loud enough next time would suffice.
---
Junjie had a frown on his face. He was disturbed by that girl again, and from his sleep no less. This time he didn't even do anything! How can he be blamed for anything when all he did was sleep in the privacy of his own quarters?
It's not dissimilar to inviting yourself to a family member's house and then complaining that their general cleanliness wasn't up to your standards.
How preposterous!
After clearing his mind, Junjie got changed into a fresh set of black robes and headed out the front of the cabin, where he found Xu Lihua. The sight of her sitting on the stump of a tree with the morning dew surrounding her was actually rather fascinating. She was silently inspecting her jian, looking for any blemishes or scratches. After deciding she hadn't found any, she silently looked up at Jia Junjie and said one thing,
"Are you ready?"
Sealing his fate, he replied,
"Always." Before he could even smirk, Lihua dropped the blade and instantaneously dashed to his position, landing a heavy blow right to his chest.
"Shit—what?" Receiving the heavy blow and being sent backwards, Junjie's body immediately went into fight or flight and decided on the former.
Lihua dashed at him once again, ready to deliver another strike. Junjie tried to counter but was immediately intercepted and thrown into a suplex. This opponent was simply too strong to overcome. He had known it from that very point, which was why he put up little resistance to the beati- sparring she subjected him to for the next twenty minutes. Only at that time did something finally change. Xu Xingjuan walked out of the cabin and saw the scene unfolding before her eyes with an amused smile.
"Lihua, dear, we haven't given him the training manual yet! How is he supposed to temper anything?" She shouted in a half chuckle. Lihua hit him one last time before shrugging and replying,
"Eh, he kind of deserved it anyway. But I wasn't even beating him; it was just a friendly spar, Mother. Don't even worry." Xingjuan hadn't said she was beating him so Lihua had just inadvertently admitted to it. She pointed to Junjie as she said this, but unfortunately, it was at that moment that Junjie fell face-first into the floor, knocked out cold. Both mother and daughter went silent.
"..."
"Anyway, how about you wake him up and give him this manual?" She said as she retrieved a very old, worn-looking scroll from underneath her robes.
---
It was about 15 minutes before Junjie finally rejoined the land of the living after the unholy beating he had received.
'I swear to the heavens I shall enact my revenge one day!' He silently vowed to himself. Though at this rate she would just keep putting him down like a dog, so he absolutely needed to get stronger.
"Ah, you finally woke up, lazybones." She said as she tossed the old scroll square in his face. Startled but then overcome with a pang of pain, he inwardly sighed.
'Am I just going to have to live like this, like some peasant of a young master?'
Finally remembering that she had actually thrown something onto his face, he recovered it from the floor. It appeared to be a scroll of some kind. Unfurling it, the first thing that caught his attention was its name.
'The Xu Family's Basic Body Tempering Technique'
It was a very creative name and it came as a surprise that the Xu family had their very own technique, or perhaps anyone could just make a technique? Thinking that through again, logically this time, he figured it had to have been quite difficult to make a technique in the first place, so perhaps having your own one was quite rare for some random family that lives in the forest.
He then read further down to see if he could decipher any more, but strangely enough, when he tried to read the words, it was as if they danced around the page, like they were protesting against him comprehending them, something that baffled him greatly. He knew he could read and write, so what was this then?
"Why do these letters seem to not stay still? It's going to be hard to read it when it is like this." He probed to see if she would answer his question.
"Ah, you are more stupid than I thought; you can't even read. Training you is going to be a lot more difficult than I originally bargained for." She replied wittily. It almost sounded like something he would say.
It was then that Xingjuan's voice reached his ear once again but from inside the cabin.
"Don't worry, dear; if you were able to comprehend a technique, no matter how simple, at a mere glance, you would have to be a heaven-defying genius or some kind of reincarnated immortal. The technique is difficult to understand because you must align yourself to the world and endeavour to truly understand it before it allows you to peek at its contents. Oh! It isn't sentient or anything; it's actually kind of an unexplained phenomenon in the cultivation world." She was a much better teacher than Lihua, who just beat the living daylights out of him.
"I must... endeavour to understand it?" He muttered, digesting the newly learned information.
It seemed establishing a foundation would prove to be quite the tall task.