Gu Xiqiao ordered three cups of milk tea from the milk tea shop as she replied nonchalantly, "Perhaps… He was sympathetic to my plights?"
"Can you be more serious?" As soon as she heard this, Xiao Yun rolled her eyes at Gu Xiqiao.
Accepting the cups of milk tea from the girl at the counter, Gu Xiqiao handed them out, before sipping a mouthful of milk tea and patting Xiao Yun on the shoulder. "Fine, fine, I won't tease anymore. I met him on coincidence a while ago and helped him out a little. He's quite a good person to have remembered that until now."
"You helped him out?" Wu Hongwen's interest was piqued. "I feel like that robot plans every second of his day and even drinks water at a set time every day, what could you have helped him with?"
"I helped him the same way I helped you." Gu Xiqiao glanced over at him.
Wu Hongwen rubbed his nose sheepishly, it was quite embarrassing once he thought about how two men needed the help of a girl to save them. Looking at Gu Xiqiao's thin figure, he decided to himself that he would train and work out during the holidays!
The trio split up at the crossroads.
When Gu Xiqiao entered the virtual space to do her daily missions that night, she used some time to arrange and compile some formulas that would be useful. She didn't quite remember what the national finals this year were about, but after analyzing the questions from the past years, she had found a certain pattern in the questions asked, and she prepared to give these notes to her classmates the next day.
She had felt the protectiveness of her classmates towards her for the past few days, and it felt like she wasn't fighting all by her lonesome anymore…
There were only twenty days left until the national finals came around, and she was prepared to help them out as much as she could. Who made it the law that the Parallel Class had to stay at the bottom, that they had to be forgotten by all of their teachers?
After doing all this, she took out the old book and read through it again.
"Spirit not leave the chi, and the chi not leave the spirit. Mixed within inhale and exhale, and neutralized with each other."
[First breath of Xiantian comes from the void, the second mixes naturally, the spirit surrounding the chi…Inhale chi, exhale spirit, spirit is inhaled and chi is exhaled, in and out, up and down, and returns to the origin, converged at one point…]
Suddenly, the system spirit that was playing games in the void jumped in surprise. [Congratulations Beauty Qiao, you have successfully entered Beginner level! 10 points are rewarded!]
Beginner level was the lowest level, so not a lot of points were rewarded, but Gu Xiqiao still smiled happily at finally making a breakthrough. She stood back up from her meditative position and calculated the time which she had spent to get to this point. Three months had passed in the virtual space and added with the time she used earlier she got to Beginner level using five months.
According to the standards of the system when she asked, it was considered average.
Gu Xiqiao knew that only now that she stepped into the Beginner level could she finally call herself a true ancient martial artist.
[Beauty Qiao, you have a genius right next to you! Jiang Shuxuan is definitely above Fleet Foot, and even I can't detect which level he's exactly at because his ability is too strong. You can ask any questions you have on cultivating with him, and he can help you better than I can!] The system spirit created a solid avatar that looked like an extremely cute young child in the virtual space.
Gu Xiqiao pinched its cheeks gently as she was shocked by this information, She knew that Jiang Shuxuan was strong, but not that strong! According to the way the system said it, Fleet Foot was only the minimum guess?
In this era, there were fewer and fewer people that practiced ancient martial arts, and it was extremely hard to become stronger with each level. Even though she only used five months to reach Beginner, she would probably have a hard time even reaching Chi Induction even after five years! Jiang Shuxuan was only a young man, and he was already greater than Fleet Foot?
It was only nine o'clock, and it wasn't time to sleep yet. Jiang Shuxuan was looking at the item in his hands dazedly, not even noticing when Gu Xiqiao came close to him.
Upon closer inspection, Gu Xiqiao realized that it was her own painting.
"Ah, have you finished your homework?" Jiang Shuxuan looked at Gu Xiqiao upon realizing that she was there.
Gu Xiqiao replied with a soft hum, before pouring herself a cup of water and stealing back the painting. "How did this painting end up in your hands?"
"This is yours in the first place, no one would dare steal it." Jiang Shuxuan suddenly remembered something. "Those people from the art academy want to take this painting to join the national art exhibition, what do you think about it?"
"There's no need to do that…" Gu Xiqiao looked down at the pair of warm and loving eyes on the painting, caressing it carefully. "I'll use another painting to join next time."
The painting techniques used when she painted this wasn't all that refined and was only outstanding because of the sheer emotion she put into it. Even if she got a prize with this, it wouldn't mean all that much. But now that the topic was brought up, she wouldn't mind holding an art exhibition by herself one day once she had the time.
Upon seeing Gu Xiqiao some downstairs, Mrs. Zhang immediately took out a bowl of medicinal soup for her.
"Mrs. Zhang, you can try changing the flavor of this." Gu Xiqiao downed the bowl of soup with a somewhat disgusted expression and smacked her lips as she tried to decipher what it was that made this soup taste the way it did. "Maybe if you don't put in the codonopis root, it'll taste better."
"How did you know there was that ingredient?" Mrs. Zhang was quite surprised, but then she remembered Gu Xiqiao's ability in medicine. "Alright, I'll try it tomorrow."
"Alright, goodnight then." Gu Xiqiao turned around and walked upstairs, the edge of her lips twitching at the weird aftertaste of the medicinal soup.
Seeing her antics, Jiang Shuxuan smiled with his chin propped up by his fist, and upon seeing the document on the table, his smile receded as quickly as it came.
The Gu family…He reached out and rubbed the documents thoughtfully, before taking out his phone and calling a number after a while. "Just strike off their name from the name list of the national base, hold off everything else first."
"Huh…Bro Jiang?" Yin Shaoyuan was confused as he heard the commands from Jiang Shuxuan, blinking at the copy of the same documents he had on his hands. "I already collected all the evidence, I had no idea that there was so much dirt on the Gu family, they don't think about the consequences of their actions! If I clicked a button right now, they will suffer greatly!"
"I know." Jiang Shuxuan stood up and walked towards his study, documents in hand. "But I think it's best for her to deal with her own family for the moment."
"Her? Gu Xiqiao? Are you kidding me, Bro Jiang?"
"Didn't your manager tell you? The videos that were released this afternoon weren't the ones I found." Jiang Shuxuan placed the documents on his study table, before taking out an ancient book from his shelves.
There was a long silence. "You're saying…"
Jiang Shuxuan flipped a few pages and continued: "What I'm saying, is that those videos were found by her. Not only did she find the videos, and she even hacked into the system of your company and uploaded them to your manager's computer, without any of you noticing. Do you think that the Gu family can continue being this stable if she had the intention to make them fall?"
Yin Shaoyuan immediately didn't have anything to say. The security systems in all of his companies were imported from America and were even ones that even the greatest hackers couldn't bypass. If these couldn't cause Gu Xiqiao any trouble, then wouldn't it have been a piece of cake for Gu Xiqiao to hack into the databases of the Gu family and obtain top secret information?
"F*ck, she's scary!" Yin Shaoyuan closed the documents and started thinking if he had gotten on her bad side from earlier. "Hey, where do you think she learned all this?"
Jiang Shuxuan flipped another page and hung up.
Yin Shaoyuan: "…"