Lanke Chess Edge
Chapter NaN

After the old dragon Ying Hong had already ascended to the sky and left for some time, and the sound of rolling thunder was no longer audible, the rain clouds seemed to dissipate. Only then did Ji Yuan sit down on the ground, his body limp.

“Hooh…”

Halfway to lying down and rubbing his left chest, he let out a long breath. Ji Yuan was very sure that his nerves would definitely become stronger and stronger in the future.

It wasn’t until he had laid down for a while that that Ji Yuan finally recovered.

He stood up, dusted off his butt, and brushed the front and back of his clothes. Suddenly, a large cloud of dust was shot out.

“Cough-cough-cough…cough… I must have been covered in dust!”¹

His scalp felt a little itchy. When he scratched his head, he could feel the dandruff quickly accumulating between his nails.

“Pah-“

With a flick of his fingernail, the dirt underneath it was blown away.

“Haha! I really do have the appearance of a shabby, skilled master!”²

He picked up the bag and placed it on his back, then picked up the oil-paper umbrella in the corner and tucked it under his arm. He kicked off the stone wall and seemed to float and slide away, his sleeves fluttering behind him in the wind.

Because it had just rained heavily, the ground was extremely muddy. Ji Yuan’s stride was long, and a lot of muddy water splashed on his body, but he didn’t care at all.

Even if he could just use a small water control technique to prevent this, he wasn’t going to waste his spiritual energy. Anyway, he was in a good mood, and it didn’t matter if he got splashed with a little muddy water. Instead, he could just control his strength while jumping, like a child playing around, and compete with himself to see if he could splash himself less next time, listening to the sound of the mud splashing.

Well, he also enjoyed it.

The last time he had done this was when Ji Yuan had gotten a new pair of rain boots in the first grade of elementary school. At that time, he had been competing with his friends to see who could make the biggest splash.

Actually, Ji Yuan now only had the Qi Guiding Art, a righteous and basic cultivation method, and did not possess any Qi training methods. What he circulated in his body was more of a refined spiritual aura than spiritual power, which he used to nourish his body and perform minor spells. However, in terns of his state of mind and spirit, although Ji Yuan was a novice, he felt that he understood everything at his moment, with a childlike heart.³

As he ran fast, Ji Yuan headed straight to the northeast based on his sense of direction. When the sky had completely cleared, he saw the outline of a city in the distance.

. . .

The scale of Deyuan County was much smaller than that of Ning’an County. After Ji Yuan entered the county, he clearly felt that both the flow of people and the buildings were lesser than that of Ning’an County.

But it made sense. Although Ning’an County was not very big, its population was close to 20,000. There were more than 10,000 people living in the county capital alone. In addition, the county had been thriving in recent years due to the good governance of the local officials.

In comparison, Deyuan County was a lot worse.

However, it was still a county capital. Shouts could be heard along the streets in the city one after another, and there were many pedestrians and merchants coming and going.

Ji Yuan tightened his grip on the bag behind his back, and followed the fragrance in his sense of smell to a restaurant about a hundred meters⁴ away. He no longer needed to rely on his excellent hearing and poor eyesight to avoid pedestrians, because most of the people around him took the initiative to avoid him.

Suddenly, Ji Yuan was reminded of his current state, and he subconsciously raised his hand and sniffed his sleeve.

‘Um, the smell shouldn’t be that strong! ’

Because it was almost noon at the moment, the closer one got to the area where lots of restaurants and hotels were located, the noisier the surrounding voices became, and the crowd became much more dense in comparison to the area not a hundred steps away.

“Come one, come all! Dear guests, today our Huike House⁵ has freshly slaughtered lamb, stewed chicken soup, and home-brewed rice wine! If you want to eat or drink, please come in!”

This restaurant, named Huike House, only had two floors. Its footprint and scale could not be compared with the famous nd its floor space and building scale cannot be compared with the famous Outer Temple Building in Ning’an County. But the water at the door of this restaurant shouted very hard, and had a very loud voice. Ji Yuan thought to himself that this was also a kind of talent: ordinary people would become hoarse shouting for such a long time. This person must have been doing this every day.

There was no need to butt into other people’s affairs,⁶ so Ji Yuan didn’t ask for a warm reception and followed the other customers into Huike House.

The waiter obviously saw Ji Yuan. He stretched out his hand and opened his mouth, but in the end he couldn’t say anything to drive this customer away.

Entering the store, the aroma of the surrounding food continued to flow into Ji Yuan’s nose. The sounds of chewing were dense and crisp, making his mouth water.

No matter how delicious fresh jujubes were, their taste was still monotonous. Besides, he had already eaten all of them. It had been a long time since Ji Yuan had eaten a hot and delicious meal, so he was very greedy. He spotted an empty table in his blurred vision and quickly went over to occupy it.

He put the bag and his umbrella on the corner of the table and waited for the waiter to come by and take his order.

At the other end of the counter, the shopkeeper, a chubby middle-aged man with a mustache, frowned at Ji Yuan’s muddy and unkempt appearance. however, as the saying went, everyone who entered a store was a customer, and he couldn’t just kick them out if they looked like they were waiting to order. Otherwise, the reputation of Huike House would be ruined.

Just looking the diners around him, they all had disgusted looks on their face, and some even turned around and left as soon as they saw Ji Yuan sitting in a prominent position in the lobby.

After thinking about it for a while, the shopkeeper beckoned a waiter over, who immediately approached the counter when he noticed.

“Go and ask that guest if he can sit in a different seat. We’ll make a table for him in the corner and give him a small dish. Speak kindly, understand?”

The turbaned waiter looked in the direction the shopkeeper was pointing and saw the extremely conspicuous Ji Yuan. He nodded in response.

“Oh, I understand!”

After replying, the waiter ran to the table next to the supporting column a few feet away, and kept wiping his hands with the towel. Before he could speak, Ji Yuan opened his mouth.

“Do you want me to move to another seat? Even a corner will do. Let’s go over there quickly, and I’ll order food while we’re at it. Let’s hurry!”

Ji Yuan had already stood up by himself as he spoke, picked up his bag and umbrella, and also grabbed a pair of chopsticks that he had just taken out of the chopstick holder.

“Uh… Okay, sir, please come this way, come this way!”

The waiter looked at Ji Yuan’s blank eyes and hurriedly led the way. In response to Ji Yuan’s questions, he introduced some of the restaurant’s specialties.

A moment later, at a table in the corner behind the main entrance on the front wall, the waiter was a little stunned after hearing the names of the dishes requested by Ji Yuan.

“Braised pork elbow, stewed hen, steamed rice cake, stewed three treasures,⁷ boiled cabbage, pickled radish, stir-fried turnips, er, sir… We can only give you a plate of stir-fried turnips… This, you…”

The waiter spoke in a low voice, and his eyes frequently swept across Ji Yuan’s body and the wrinkled gray cloth. Perhaps only the oil-paper umbrella was of good condition.

“Haha, don’t worry, I still have money to pay the bill, just tell the kitchen to cook.”

Ji Yuan smiled and comforted him, while taking out two pieces of silver from his pocket. He was not angry at being looked down upon. If he put himself in the other person’s shoes, he would also make the same assumptions, as was human nature.

When the waiter left, Ji Yuan was left alone at the table. He hadn’t felt it outside of the city, but now that his appetite was stirred, he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He held the chopsticks in his mouth and sucked at the tips, taking a deep breath from time to time to smell the aroma of the food. Oh, did waiting have to be so annoying?

1. Lit: something like “look how much gray is on me” ↩︎
2. Think of the stereotypical kind of cultivation masters that pretend to be beggars ↩︎
3. i.e. not bogged down by banal worries or distractions, classic cultivator mindset ↩︎
4. T/n: yep, it’s actually meters. The author has now used ancient Chinese measurements, the Imperial system, and the Metric system. Wooo internationality! ↩︎
5. 汇客楼 (huì kè lóu): the translation is literally “building where a lot of guests converge” ↩︎
6. 自家人知道自家事: “Only the family knows its own affairs,” i.e. outsiders never know the full context of a situation, translated here as “there’s no need to butt into other people’s routine” ↩︎
7. Most likely this eggplant, potato, and pepper dish ↩︎