The day the Qi family broke his legs and threw him out the gates, Qi Zhao knelt in the mud, counting his last half of a flatbread.
Who would have thought that this homeless illegitimate son, who traded copies of old books for food, would activate the Top Student System the moment he opened a tattered boxing manual?
Skin and muscle cultivation?
From a torn page, he gleaned the true meaning of “Marrow Sea Spirit Infusion.” Stuck while opening his meridians?
From a few scattered words in a ruined temple’s miscellany, he deduced the wondrous art “Hundred Meridians, Boiling Snow.”
When his legitimate elder brother planted a foot on his shoulder and sneered, “A good-for-nothing like you thinks you can learn martial arts?” the knowledge map in Qi Zhao’s sea of consciousness suddenly lit up. The instant his Star-Shattering Fist struck, the bluestone slabs of the training ground split into a spiderweb of cracks. In this high-martial-arts world, could the damaged pages from a roadside bookstall really be worth more than the techniques in the scripture pavilion? It turned out the most ruthless scheme in this high-martial-arts world was hidden in the books nobody bothered to read. And Qi Zhao was going to be the first madman to “become a sage through reading.”
Cast-out illegitimate son Qi Zhao refuses to believe otherwise. Squatting before a bookstall to read half of Miscellaneous Notes on Wild Martial Arts, he deduces the “Three Forms of Spirit Qi Refinement.” Copying Records of Wasted Meridians in a ruined temple, he fuses seven schools’ boxing manuals and forges the “Nine-Turn Essence Condensation Art.”
The elders of a reclusive sect sneer, “You have no school or master, and you dare discuss the Dao?”
Qi Zhao taps the page with his fingertip. The new technique he deduces on the spot makes three elders of the Origin Core Realm kneel before him: “Please accept us as your disciples!” But when he opens the final volume, Records of Immortality, he realizes that the “Immortality Scheme,” which no one has managed to break through in a hundred years, is hidden in the very thing everyone scorns most: the written word
