Sect Teaching and Research Group

As his younger male cousin, the only thing Lin Xiao could do to help his eldest cousin was give him these few dozen carefully selected books.

Of course, Lin Xiao had secretly given the books to his cousin and explained their uses in detail. His cousin’s wife knew nothing about them.

At the Lin family’s formal family dinner that morning, Lin Xiao was not the only younger member of the family who had prepared a meeting gift.

Lin Yun, Lin Ying, and Lin Yan had prepared gifts as well.

They were all practical little formations, talismans, and similar items that the three of them had made themselves—things that even mortals could use.

The Lin family’s newlywed eldest daughter-in-law clearly had not expected to receive so many gifts. She was pleasantly surprised, and even more delighted.

It showed that although everyone in the Lin family had now become a member of an immortal sect, they still fully accepted her, an ordinary mortal, as their daughter-in-law.

That way, when she returned to her parents’ home in a few days and told them about it—relieving the worries she had always harbored—they could finally rest easy as well.

After the Lin family’s new bride had completed the formal introductions and Lin Xiao had officially established their relationship and forms of address, he returned to the sect. There, he summoned Liao Pantu, Yang Jinshu, Sun Yigao, and Mo Yuanjiao to the seventh floor of the library pavilion.

Since Lin Xiao had never bothered with the sect’s divine-sense inheritance, the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors—specially designed for that purpose—had effectively been built for the blind to admire.

Those three floors had no bookshelves. Before the divine-sense inheritance had been established, they had been nothing more than empty levels.

The seventh floor, however, offered a good view, so Lin Xiao had brought up tables, chairs, writing brushes, ink, and other supplies and turned it into a meeting room for the sect’s teaching and research group.

Lin Xiao had previously explained that the teaching and research group existed specifically to study and formulate the sect’s overall cultivation curriculum and handle similar matters. It was therefore one of the sect’s highest priorities.

As a result, the four men had dropped whatever they were doing and hurried to the library the moment they received Lin Xiao’s summons.

What they had not expected was that the instant they arrived, their sect master would feed them stacks upon stacks of cultivation manuals. Without saying anything else, he simply told them to learn them as quickly as possible.

The four of them were utterly bewildered.

Of course, Lin Xiao was not asking them to finish all of them in one sitting.

The manuals had been neatly sorted into categories and piled across the large conference table. Each category contained more than a hundred books, with a label posted at the front so they could get a general idea of what each group contained.

“Everyone, an arduous task awaits us.” Lin Xiao sat at the head of the table, his expression solemn.

It was rare to see him like this, and Liao Pantu and the others unconsciously straightened their expressions as well.

Then Lin Xiao pointed at the piles of manuals on the table and said, “These cultivation methods are all ones I plan to incorporate into the disciples’ regular curriculum. But before we can officially add them to the lessons, one thing is still missing.”

In truth, the number of manuals Lin Xiao had gathered was far greater than what lay before them. However, if there were too many, they would never be able to study them all at once, so he had brought out only this selection for the time being.

There were seven or eight times as many types of manuals as there were people in the sect, which should give everyone a reasonable amount of choice.

Liao Pantu followed up on his words. “What’s missing?”

“Teachers,” Lin Xiao replied.

“So I need you to master these cultivation methods as quickly as possible. Ideally, within a month.”

The four men looked at the thousand or more manuals before them, then turned to Lin Xiao with indescribably complicated expressions.

Did their sect master even know what he was asking?

Apparently aware that his request was somewhat unreasonable, Lin Xiao cleared his throat tactically.

“Ahem. Of course, I’m not asking you to master all of them at once. You only need to learn the first level of each method within a month. Once you’ve done that, we can officially launch the cultivation-method classes as soon as possible.”

Even after hearing that, the four men did not feel the pressure ease much.

This was not one or two manuals. There were more than a thousand!

Even if they divided the work among themselves, each person would still have to handle two or three hundred.

Two or three hundred cultivation methods, just the first level of each, in a month.

Seeing their troubled expressions, Lin Xiao—who had hardly ever cultivated a method himself and therefore did not understand how difficult it was—scratched his ear.

“Then… how about two months?”

Yang Jinshu could not help asking, “Is learning these cultivation methods really so urgent?”

Lin Xiao repeated to them what he had previously told Qin Jianghe.

When they heard that Lin Xiao was so eager for everyone to learn more cultivation methods because he wanted them to have more abilities to rely on when they went out to gain experience—and to prevent cultivation bottlenecks from hindering their progress—the four men no longer felt that his request was too urgent.

Compared with Lin Xiao, the four of them cultivated alongside the disciples more often and understood much more clearly why this was necessary.

Lin Xiao often went into seclusion and did not know the details of many disciples’ cultivation. They did.

They were especially aware that Qin Jianghe was not the only person who had encountered a bottleneck and found it difficult to make further progress.

As the disciples cultivated for longer periods and their cultivation levels rose, each of them gradually encountered difficulties of varying degrees, depending on their individual aptitude.

There were certain areas that they simply could not understand, no matter how hard they buried themselves in study and cultivation, and no matter how the more advanced disciples tried to answer their questions.

It was as though an invisible threshold stood in certain places—something they could neither see through nor cross.

Sun Yigao and the others could only do their best to explain, but to those trapped at a bottleneck, their efforts were like scratching an itch through a boot. They brought almost no improvement.

Liao Pantu knew that this was what a bottleneck was. It was something one could only overcome personally. No matter how others taught them, that knowledge still belonged to someone else. If they could not turn it into their own understanding, then they could go no further.

Thus, the four men did not ask for any more time. They silently accepted the arduous task.

Only Sun Yigao offered a suggestion.

“We can first learn the first level, then continue studying the later levels while teaching. If anyone manages to thoroughly grasp the first level they’ve learned in a short time, we can promote them to instructor and have them teach alongside us. That should help speed up everyone’s progress.”

Hearing this, Lin Xiao and the others all nodded in agreement.

Since they had not yet studied the cultivation methods themselves, the teaching and research group’s meeting ended there.

The specific details of the curriculum would have to wait until they had gone through the manuals first.

As for the four men studying them, Lin Xiao—who was the only person who knew them all—naturally became their teacher.

However, all four of them held several positions and were busy from dawn to dusk. It was impossible for them to gather regularly at a fixed time and place for lessons, so they mostly relied on the lock rings to stay in contact.

Lin Xiao thus became a walking question-and-answer service.

After returning to the nearly windowless little room in the Formation Hall that had practically become his private workshop, Lin Xiao spent most of the following month continuing his research while occasionally answering the various questions posed by the other four.