Lanke Chess Edge
Chapter 21: Chess Piece In Hand, Imbued With Vitality and Qi

[T/n note on title]¹

Even though Lu Chengfeng was a martial artist, he felt a chill down his spine at those words. He turned his head and glared fiercely at the broker. Since this guy was a local expert in this trade,² how could he not have known about this matter?

“Uh, this, I forgot about this… I…”

“Humph!”

The chief secretary glanced at him and commented:

“Actually, our Yamen³ also investigated this house specifically to track down the murderer, but found nothing. We even invited monks and Taoists to come to do dharma rituals. As for what the house is really like, everyone in town has their own opinions. As a reminder, I am merely the chief secretary, I don’t know much about these things!”

After saying this, the chief secretary stroked his beard and looked back at Lu Chengfeng.

“Lu Shaoxia, do you still wish to buy this house?”

Lu Chengfeng hesitated. Since this house was suspected of being haunted, it was naturally impossible for him to consider buying it. Even the official government records had this written down. If the rumors were true, then wouldn’t buying it be harmful to Mr. Ji?

Wait!

Lu Chengfeng was paused mid-sentence. He suddenly remembered who he was buying a house for.

It was for Mr. Ji, the master who made the tiger demon on Niu Kui Mountain kneel and ask for advice like a disciple! A great man! Someone strong!

Then he suddenly recalled what Mr. Ji had said when he decided to buy the house: ‘Why wouldn’t I buy such a cheap and elegant house? It’s just a little dirty, I can clean it up!’

A little dirty? Clean it up?

If it truly was a so-called haunted house, wouldn’t Mr. Ji have noticed? If wasn’t haunted, then there would be no problem!

“Chief Secretary, I will still be buying this house, but I will not be the one living in it. Instead, it is for my teacher.”⁴

The chief secretary looked at him in surprise. The other official in the room couldn’t hide his surprise, but the broker was secretly delighted.

“Lu Shaoxia, please take your time to think about this. Since it is for your teacher, you should consider this decision carefully! You… Are you sure you want to buy it?”

“Please rest assured, Chief Secretary, I understand and I am certain!”

The master clerk shook his head and did not persuade him further. He had done his duty, and there was no further evidence that the house was haunted. He pointed to the brush on its stand and the inkstone beside it.

“Okay then, Lu Shaoxia, please sign the household registration on behalf of your teacher, and pay the 36 taels of silver!”

Lu Chengfeng didn’t say more. He directly took the brush, dipped it slightly in ink, then signed two characters on the book. He returned the pen to the chief secretary and handed over three stacks of 10 silver taels that he had withdrawn from the local bank, along with a note for 5 more taels, and a 5 tael note from a local bank, then took out a couple of ingots.

The chief secretary received the money and, after weighing the silver and carefully inspecting the banknotes, put the money in a drawer. Then, he turned the book back around to look at the signature. The characters “Ji Yuan” were written on the page. He tried to recall the name, but realized that it seemed like there was no such person among the nine warriors who had fought the tiger.

“Okay, Lu Shaoxia, please wait a moment, I’ll go get the deed to the house.”

The chief secretary stood up and searched according to the labels on the large bookshelves behind him. He took out a dozen paper documents from a wooden box, found the deed to the proper house, and turned back to Lu Chengfeng.

“Here, please take it!”

“Thank you, Chief Secretary!”

Lu Chengfeng thanked him and took a look at the paper deed. The official seals, annotations, and details were clearly stamped on the page.

“Here, this is your commission! 1 tael of silver and 18 zhu.”⁵

The clerk pushed the silver and a small pile of copper coins to the corner of the table, where there was also a small scale.

“Oh, okay, okay!”

The broker couldn’t hold back his smile, and hurriedly took his commission from the chief secretary and put it into his purse.

When a sale was completed, the commission would be paid by the seller. The more expensive the house, the more he was given. The maximum he could make was up to 10 taels. If the sale was not completed, then he, the broker, could only take the money offered by the buyer for serving as their property guide.

Afterwards, Lu Chengfeng and the broker walked out of the chief secretary’s office. The latter ran away as soon as they exited, out of fear that Lu Chengfeng would come to him to settle the score.

“Hmph, you scoundrel!”

Looking at the fleeing figure, Lu Chengfeng snorted coldly. He really wanted to kick him just now, but in the end this guy ran away faster than a loach kick just now, but this guy slipped faster than a loach,⁶ making even him, a martial artist, miss the opportunity to catch up to him. Sadly, if he gave chase, he would probably lose his status.

. . .

Yunlai Inn was a very good inn in Ning’an County. It was situated close to both the Town God’s Temple and the market, and was lively during the day but quiet at night. The nine young heroes and Ji Yuan shared one suite of rooms.

Ji Yuan currently sat in their room with the window open, listening blankly to the hustle and bustle outside.

After having been in this world for several days, Ji Yuan felt quite lonely.

Although Lu Chengfeng, Yan Fei, and the other warriors weren’t bad people, he didn’t want to constantly follow them around, nor would he be able to. Ji Yuan had quietly asked around at some doctors in town, but they couldn’t do anything about his vision problem. As for embarking on his journey to become an immortal, he currently had no clue where to even begin.

However, he could solve the martial arts problem. After all, Lu Chengfeng and his companions did have martial arts skills. Unlike those fake costumed dramas that he had seen on TV in his previous life, these people really did have powerful moves, and were capable of flying over walls.

However, in the eyes of the rest of the world, except for a couple people who had the impression of him as an expert, he was just a blind man. How could he ask for a cultivation secrets? How could he look for advice?

It seemed a little inappropriate.

In a daze, Ji Yuan once again recalled the original Lanke chess game. Why did I bump into it? If I hadn’t gone into the clearing at that time, and hadn’t impulsively placed that one stone in the “Tian Yuan” position, would it have been…

“Zizi…”

Inside his body, he heard an almost inaudible sound, and his arm went numb as if experiencing an electric shock, or as if someone had accidentally bumped the nerve in his elbow, making his fingertips go numb.⁷ However, he only felt it in his index and middle fingers.

The shadow of a chess piece appeared between his fingertips, along with a trace of electric current.

“F**k!”⁸

Ji Yuan swore excitedly. The miraculous phenomenon that had appeared with Lu Shan Jun before the latter had left was still fresh in his memory.

In the past couple days after he had left the mountain, Ji Yuan had tried to recreate it in private countless times. He even tried all kinds of funny poses, even things like imitating Spider-Man’s web-shooting pose, but nothing worked. He didn’t expect it to appear again now.

But the question was, what could this do? Open up his Ren and Du meridians?⁹

Unfortunately, he did not possess the ability to magically command things to happen. Ji Yuan didn’t feel any changes in the body, his meridians hadn’t opened up either.

However, a breeze gradually picked up inside the room, as if a faint airflow was being introduced from the window.

Ji Yuan suddenly ignored the pain and half-opened his eyes. Around the illusory chess piece in between the tips of his fingers, he could make out appearing and disappearing lines of green spiritual energy.¹⁰

Coupled with the slight breeze in the room, Ji Yuan, who seemed to have thought of something, turned his head and looked out the window, occasionally spotting a trace of green energy floating towards him.

Turning his eyes to his fingertips, the green spiritual energy formed a subtle vortex around the illusory chess piece. The wind in the room also changed from a nearly non-existent breeze to a slightly stronger wind, making the curtains billow and other light objects sway from side to side.

Ji Yuan focused all of his attention on the changes that were happening inside of his body. At the moment when he realized his good fortune,¹¹ a thought came into his mind, and all the green energy rushed into the chess piece.

“Knock, knock, knock…”

“Mr. Ji, it’s me, Chengfeng. I’m back from the county government office!”

Startled by the knock on the door, Ji Yuan lost his focus, and the chess piece in his hand disappeared back into his fingertips.

Ji Yuan stared blankly at his fingers, still immersed in the magic that had happened just now, but he wasn’t too angry at being disturbed. If it could happen once, it would naturally happen a second time.

“Mr. Ji, are you inside?”

Lu Chengfeng asked again at the door, and Ji Yuan finally came to his senses.

“Come in!”

Outside, Lu Chengfeng pushed open the door of the room, but he was stunned before he could walk inside.

There was a feeling of being swept by a special aura, he felt a brief electric tingling sensation on his body.

The breeze that filled the room had not completely dissipated. Ji Yuan’s right elbow rested on the table, and his hand was held loosely in a sword fingers position.¹² The curtains in the room were slightly floating and the brushes swung gently from where they hung on their stand on the desk. All was calm inside.

As he collected himself after being stunned, Lu Chengfeng found that even his mind gradually calmed down, and his body felt relaxed and comfortable as he breathed. He stayed at the door in that state for a long time without any movement.

Ji Yuan was still reminiscing about the feeling just now. After the chess pieces re-enetered his body, he felt comfortable in all of his limbs, like a tired person who had just been given a scraping massage. He finally noticed that the stunned Lu Chengfeng had not come in yet.

“Lu Shaoxia, why are you standing at the door?”

“Uh, sir, is it convenient for me to come in now?”

“Why wouldn’t it be convenient?”

Ji Yuan was convinced that the biggest changes from the chess piece had dissipated when he knocked on the door, so Lu Chengfeng would at most have seen a little wind, which was not a big deal; the window was open, after all.

“Alright, Mr. Ji. I bought that house for you. Here is the title deed and key.”

Lu Chengfeng entered the room and took out the paper document and contract, as well as the copper lock key.

However, Ji Yuan was a little distracted. As he carefully recalled the feeling he had just experienced in his body, he looked over at the dense text of the title deed, the official clauses, the big red seal, and Ji Yuan’s name on the document.

From the previous life to the present, this was the first house he had ever bought by himself.

1. 执子在手气灌青灵 Took WAY TOO MUCH TIME to break this one down… TT_TT *cries*

   执: to grasp, 子: abbreviation for a Go (chess) piece – white Go pieces are 黑子 (hēizǐ) and black Go pieces are 白子 (báizǐ), both of which share that last character, 在: located at, 手: hand, 气: vital energy/qi, 灌: to infuse/to pour, 青: youth, 灵: spirit — Chess piece in hand, imbuing it with the a/ura of vitality. HaHAH, MTL! You can’t fool me with your paltry “Hold the child,” or wherever the heck “jade flute” came from. Muahahaha! (If any readers have a better translation by all means please drop a comment) ↩︎

2. Lit: “a local snake” someone really doesn’t like real estate brokers 😀 ↩︎
3. The Yamen was the office/residence of a public official. It’s using the name of the government building to stand in for the name of the governing body, similar to saying “the courthouse decided” when you really mean the “members of the court decided” ↩︎
4. Not literal teacher, more of an honorific-type respectful reference for JY ↩︎
5. More monetary conversions!!! 😀 1 tael is roughly equivalent to 24 zhu. So now we have: 1 tael = 24 zhu = 1000 wen/yuan/coins. 1 zhu = ~2g of silver = ~42 wen/yuan/coins. Three or so coins can buy a bowl of noodles, so the broker just got enough money (~1764 coins) to eat out every lunch and dinner for the next year, which is why he’s so happy. The math also checks out with the previous chapter (yes I went and checked). ↩︎
6. Freshwater fish. They’re kind of cute and rather tubular. ↩︎
7. The ulnar nerve, if you’re curious. People might also call it the “funny bone,” despite it not being a bone, because if you accidentally hit it at the right angle it can make your forearm and fingers tingle and go numb for a minute or so. ↩︎
8. T/n: amusingly, somehow this one made it through without being censored in the original Chinese, and only an asterisk in the English. ↩︎
9. Both meridians go down the midline of the body all the way to the head. The Ren meridian goes down the front, and the Du down the back. Apparently (if anyone knows TCM and wants to comment feel free), the Ren meridian is associated with the yin, and the Du with the yang. When JY says he wants to open these meridians, he’s basically saying he wants to have yin and yang energy flowing in his body — cultivating, essentially. ↩︎
10. 青灵气 (qīng líng qì), which can be translated as: “green spirit qi” or “young spirit vital energy,” aka vitality/vital force. It is simultaneously both a descriptor of the color green (which was accurately drawn in the manga!), and a comment on its nature as life force — Chinese is awesome! I chose “energy” because JY only realizes it is Qi in the next chapter. ↩︎
11. 到了福至心灵的某一刻 difficult translation, but did well enough ↩︎
12. Index and middle finger extended together, the rest of the fingers curled inwards. ↩︎