Gu Yue lowered her head, a fresh scent of perfume wafting from her as she nuzzled into Lin Yu like a little fragrant pig, acting coquettishly.
Lin Yu looked disgusted, pushing her head away with one hand while saying repeatedly,
“Alright, alright.”
“Cut it out.”
“Let’s go eat.”
“I’m starving.”
Hearing this, Gu Yue stopped messing around. After discussing it for a bit, they finally decided to go eat lamb hotpot.
There was nothing better than lamb hotpot on a cold winter day!
They arrived at a local hotpot restaurant with a good reputation. Under the waitress’s guidance, Lin Yu and Gu Yue sat across from each other at an empty table.
Taking off their bulky winter coats, they chatted casually while waiting for the food to be served.
One great thing about copper-pot lamb hotpot was that the food came out super fast.
They had barely sat down, hung up their coats, and exchanged a few words before most of the dishes arrived.
Under the high heat of the charcoal, the copper pot—made of thin material—quickly heated the water inside until it boiled.
Watching the growing steam in front of him, Lin Yu glanced sideways at the window, which was just as pale but chilled to the bone. For a moment, he felt a tingling numbness all over his skin.
A unique sense of winter stillness felt so vivid in this otherwise noisy hotpot restaurant.
“Long Ge,”
“Do you have time during the break?”
Gu Yue sat across from him, holding chopsticks in one hand and a small bowl in the other as she stirred the dipping sauce. She looked up at Lin Yu and asked.
Lin Yu snapped back to reality and looked at Gu Yue.
For some reason, this little one always seemed to have an endless supply of energy.
Her dark, perfectly even eyes always held a glimmer of lively brightness, and it was oddly infectious.
“Yeah, I do,”
Lin Yu said honestly.
This exam was already the midterm for the year.
Next came a month-long break.
During this vacation, he pretty much had nothing to do.
Tang Manman and Xia Muzhu were already taken care of.
The only one left was Qing Mo, and she was easy enough to handle.
All in all, besides studying and occasionally dealing with Qing Mo, he didn’t have much on his plate this holiday.
“Then, Long Ge, do you want to go out and have fun with me?”
As Gu Yue spoke, she leaned forward excitedly, the lively gleam in her black eyes growing brighter.
“Mom saw how hard I’ve been studying lately,”
“so she promised I could go on a trip after the break.”
“This time, the two of us can go together, and my mom will pay for it!”
“You really are a dutiful daughter, huh,”
Lin Yu teased while dumping half a plate of freshly sliced lamb into the boiling copper pot.
“Not really,”
Gu Yue caught the sarcasm in Lin Yu’s words and explained,
“I already talked to Mom about it. She agreed to let me bring you along.”
“Besides, she’s planning to give you a big red envelope this New Year.”
“As a thank-you for helping me study.”
Gu Yue said this with a satisfied smile, using her chopsticks to stir the lamb pieces in the pot.
Lin Yu looked at Gu Yue through the rising steam from the copper pot and felt a moment of hesitation.
Earlier, Gu Yue’s mom had wanted to pay him a “tutoring fee,”
but he had refused.
This time, she was trying to slip him money in the form of a red envelope, and it seemed harder to decline.
After thinking it over, Lin Yu set the matter aside for now and looked at Gu Yue, asking,
“I do have the time,”
“but isn’t it the middle of winter?”
“Where would we even go?”
“Let’s go mountain climbing!”
Gu Yue said excitedly, as if she had already picked the destination.
“I know a snowy mountain with amazing views up top!”
“If we’re lucky on a winter day,”
“we can see frozen clouds at the summit.”
“There are hiking trails to go up, plus cable cars and buses for tourists.”
“If you don’t want to hike, or if you get tired halfway up, we can just take a ride.”
“Oh, and there are hot springs on the mountaintop!”
“All natural~”
When Gu Yue first suggested mountain climbing, Lin Yu nearly rolled his eyes into the back of his head.
Who climbs a mountain in winter? Was she crazy?
But after hearing the rest of her description, it actually didn’t sound like a bad getaway.
Natural hot springs? He’d never tried those before.
“Alright then,”
“Let’s do it.”
Lin Yu nodded.
In the short time they’d been talking, the water in the copper pot had boiled again.
He scooped up a chopstickful of lamb, dipped it in sesame sauce, and happily stuffed it into his mouth.
“So it’s settled?”
Gu Yue’s eyes seemed to hold stars.
“Yeah,”
Lin Yu, busy chewing the salty, fragrant lamb, just nodded and grunted in response.
“Then when are we going?”
Gu Yue pressed further.
“Next Wednesday,”
Lin Yu said wearily after swallowing the lamb.
“The break just started. I want to rest for a couple of days first.”
“Okay, okay!”
Gu Yue flashed an OK sign.
After Lin Yu agreed to go out and play, Gu Yue became even more excited.
She was like a lively little bird, chirping endlessly with a stream of chatter.
From that towering snowy mountain and the warm hot springs, to some tales about the mountain—true or false, no one really knew.
Then on to the little troubles that had been bothering her lately, and some amusing stories among friends.
Lin Yu sat across from her, focused on his meal.
As for Gu Yue, who was as cheerful as a oriole, Lin Yu didn't find her annoying at all.
In fact, her chatter made his meal more enjoyable.
Listening to her prattle on while eating,
Lin Yu felt it was far more entertaining than scrolling through short videos during a meal...
...
Vacation flew by just like that.
In the blink of an eye, a whole week had passed.
On Wednesday, as agreed, Lin Yu arrived at the high-speed rail station to meet up with Gu Yue.
That's right.
That snowy mountain was in a province a bit farther north than H City.
If they took a bus, it would take an entire day.
By high-speed rail, it would still take three to four hours.
When choosing between the bus and the train,
Lin Yu and Gu Yue both opted for the slightly more expensive but far more comfortable high-speed rail option.
Anyway, neither of them had to pay for it!
transmigrates into the world as the sect master of the Heavenly Yan Sect, which is on the verge of being wiped out. He binds a system that grants him cultivation power based on the number of disciples he has: for each disciple, he automatically gains a year's worth of cultivation every single day! Take one disciple: every day he gains 1 year of cultivation power. While others struggle through a year of bitter training, he gets the same just by sleeping through a single night. Take ten disciples: every day he gains 10 years of cultivation power. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul—he breezes through all bottlenecks without lifting a finger. Take one hundred disciples: every day he gains 100 years of cultivation power. Even a Soul Transformation Venerable before him can’t survive a single blow. Take ten thousand disciples: every day he gains 10,000 years of cultivation power! With a wave of his hand, he topples empires. With a single step, he crushes the sacred grounds of the universe. ... While others fight tooth and nail for secret techniques, Lin Yan casually hands out Nascent Soul-level cultivation manuals as beginner textbooks. While others strain to find talented recruits, Lin Yan opens his doors to anyone—so long as they’re human. In just three short years, the Heavenly Yan Sect went from a backwater sect made up of three crumbling huts to a sacred land that every cultivator under heaven would kill to enter. ... One day, otherworldly demon gods invade, with a million demon soldiers pressing down upon the realm. Lin Yan, yawning, rises from his lounge chair and glances at the system panel: [Current Disciples: 1.28 million] [Daily Cultivation Increase: 1.28 million years] He waves his hand casually, and the countless demon soldiers are reduced to ashes in an instant. “So noisy… interrupting my fishing.”
lanned to earn money steadily and take life at a slower pace. But he never expected... his father's remarriage, and the stepmother bringing along a dependent, would completely disrupt his life's plans...
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
