CHAPTER 63: CHAPTER 63: SPEECHLESS AND BOTTLE STUMP_1

"Hello."

Lu Yuan answered the phone.

He heard faint breathing on the other end, which suddenly quickened.

Yet, no one spoke.

"Who is this?"

Lu Yuan asked again.

The breathing on the other end gradually slowed down.

Still, no one spoke.

Lu Yuan frowned. "If you’re not going to talk, I’m hanging up."

He waited for three seconds.

The caller remained silent. Lu Yuan, having no patience for this, hung up.

The breathing sounds like a woman’s, and it doesn’t seem like a wrong number...

A few figures flashed through Lu Yuan’s mind, sparking several guesses. However, he couldn’t be bothered to verify them and strode out of his bedroom.

When Lu Yuan entered the living room, he happened to see his grandfather, Lu Yueping, emerging from a room.

Lu Yuan was taken aback.

That was the room of his father, Lu Xinghua, and his mother, Zheng Qiuling.

After his grandfather was discharged from the hospital, he had been arranged to stay in his sister Lu Jing’s room.

"Grandfather."

Lu Yuan called out, stepping forward.

"Finished your homework?"

Lu Yueping gave him a kind smile, then looked around, puzzled. "Where did that TV remote go? I can’t find it anywhere..."

"It’s right here, Grandfather."

Lu Yuan glanced at the sofa and clearly spotted the TV remote on the shelf beneath the coffee table.

"Oh, oh." Lu Yueping’s eyes lit up. "So that’s where it was. To think I spent so long looking for it, I searched everywhere."

"What do you want to watch? I’ll turn it on for you."

Just as Lu Yuan started towards the coffee table, Lu Yueping told him not to bother.

"Never mind, don’t bother... It’s already four o’clock. I’ll go buy some groceries and make a few of your favorite dishes for dinner."

"Grandfather, let Mom handle that. You should just sit and rest."

"Your grandfather has been lying in a hospital bed for over a month; I’ve had more than enough rest. Moving around a bit will help my body recover faster... Don’t worry about me. Go back to your room and do your homework."

"Grandfather..."

After a few more attempts to dissuade him, Lu Yuan still couldn’t change Lu Yueping’s mind. He could only watch helplessly as his grandfather stubbornly put on his shoes and left.

After Lu Yueping left, Lu Yuan thought for a moment and then entered his parents’ room.

Five minutes later, it was just as he had guessed—he found a bankbook that Lu Yueping had secretly hidden in the pocket of one of his mother’s autumn shirts. It contained over a hundred thousand yuan.

Looking at the thin passbook, Lu Yuan couldn’t help but recall the time he had secretly placed money under his parents’ pillow.

Truly like grandfather, like grandson!

「As night fell.」

Lu Yuan stood on the rooftop of the six-story building. Thick sandbags were strapped to his wrists and ankles as he practiced basic combat footwork, stepping on chalk footprints marked on the ground.

Around every chalk footprint, he had placed a circle of empty drink bottles.

If his foot landed even slightly off, it would knock into a bottle, causing them to clatter.

Lu Yuan had drawn over a hundred such footprints in total, forming a large and complex "bottle-stake" formation.

If a bottle so much as rattled, he had to start over from the beginning. He only considered a round complete when he could traverse every footprint "silently."

Because his limbs were weighted with sandbags, he had to execute punches, kicks, and dodges while stepping within the bottle circles.

The difficulty factor multiplied.

After several hours, relying on his Lv. 3 Absolute Focus, Lu Yuan had only managed to complete three or four rounds.

"HUFF... HUFF..."

Lu Yuan panted heavily, concluding this session of his special training.

He walked over to the side of the bottle-stake formation, picked up an unopened bottle of mineral water, and guzzled it down, finally feeling some relief.

This method might be a bit crude, but it trains my footwork, fist techniques, and leg skills, and I earn Experience Points. It’s not a wasted effort.

Real combat situations were ever-changing, of course, making it impossible to respond by strictly following the footwork patterns he had drawn.

Lu Yuan’s primary goal was to accumulate footwork experience and, at the same time, hone his Martial Arts Instinct.

After finishing his water, Lu Yuan took a short break.

Then, he checked his Profession Panel.

[You have focused on professional training for ten minutes, Experience Points +4]

[Your Basic Step Skill has gained experience, +4 Experience Points]

[Your Advanced Fist Skills have gained experience, +2 Experience Points]

[...]

[Congratulations, your Skill: Basic Stepping level has improved!]

Seeing this notification, Lu Yuan’s eyes flickered slightly, but he wasn’t too surprised.

His Basic Step Skill had already been on the verge of leveling up. After a night of special training focused on footwork, the advancement was only natural.

He glanced at the skills on his panel. Indeed, his original Lv. 4 Basic Step Skill had become Lv. 5 (max level). In its place, an Lv. 1 "Advanced Footwork" had appeared in his Junior Professional Skills column.

Lu Yuan didn’t feel much of a difference from this type of evaluative skill upgrade; the effects would only become apparent in actual combat.

"Evaluative" was Lu Yuan’s own term for categorizing the different effects of skill upgrades on his Profession Panel.

He called the other type "Transformative."

For "Transformative" skills, breaking through a level brought a clear and significant qualitative leap, with immense improvements and obvious benefits.

For example, Crane-shaped Pile, Absolute Focus, Imaginary Enemy, and so on.

Of course, mastering evaluative skills also came with additional rewards.

As expected, when his Basic Step Skill reached max level, Lu Yuan obtained 1 free attribute point.

Without hesitation, he immediately allocated this attribute point to Intelligence.

His Intelligence, originally 11 points, quietly changed to 12.

The familiar sharp pain in his brain arrived as expected.

In an instant, Lu Yuan felt countless pieces of information and images flash through his mind like a movie playing at ten times speed.

"AGH—"

This time, the pain lasted longer, like a severe migraine attack, forcing Lu Yuan to clutch his head and squat down.

CLINK!

It was the clear sound of something falling to the floor.

"What’s wrong?! What happened?!"

Lu Yuan heard someone rushing anxiously toward him.

The sharp pain receded as quickly as it had come, like a receding tide. Lu Yuan looked up and saw an attractive woman standing before him, her face etched with worry and inquiry.

"Yuan, right? What happened to you?"

"Wang."

Lu Yuan recognized her. She was the woman who lived upstairs; he had bumped into her and chatted briefly in the hallway just a couple of days ago.

"It’s nothing. I just accidentally bumped my head."

Lu Yuan shook his head and took several deep breaths, trying to calm the lingering throb in his head.

He saw she was wearing a white nightdress. A washbasin lay nearby, a few items of clothing spilled out of it.

She had probably come to the rooftop to hang her laundry after a bath.

"It’s good you’re alright! I got such a fright when I heard you yell just as I came up!"

The woman sighed in relief, patting her chest.

Seeing Lu Yuan was alright, she went to pick up her fallen washbasin. Her eyes then landed on the bottle-stake formation Lu Yuan had arranged on the ground, and she couldn’t help but ask curiously, "Yuan, what are you doing up here? There are bottles all over the place. They’re arranged quite nicely, actually. Is it some kind of avant-garde art?"

As Lu Yuan watched her movements, a letter and a number, precise to one decimal place, suddenly popped into his mind.

He was instantly stunned.

With this 1-point increase to Intelligence, his brain’s organizational and computational abilities seem to have bloody well strengthened again!

A single glance, and he could estimate her bust size. Seriously, where did he get all this bizarre knowledge from?!

"Ah, no, I was just bored and messing around. I’ll clean them up later..."

Lu Yuan felt a bit too embarrassed to look at her anymore, so he just laughed and brushed off her question.

He only breathed a huge sigh of relief after the woman finished hanging her laundry and left.

Now that my Intelligence is higher, it should be easier to execute the Crane Cry Punch...

Lu Yuan unwrapped the sandbags from his wrists and threw a couple of casual punches.

With 13 points in Strength, his punches produced distinct, sharp whistling sounds as they cut through the air.