Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Super Burner

The next morning, after breakfast, Feng Ke’er hurried to the lecture hall to start her work.

To the east of the lecture hall was a small courtyard. Master Chen lived there, his main duty being to safeguard the thousands of jade slips in the courtyard. The monthly lectures were merely a side task for him. Before coming, Feng Ke’er had already gleaned the necessary information from the six residents of New Courtyard Four: reading jade slips required both spiritual sense and spiritual power. New disciples lacked spiritual power and were thus unable to read the slips. For this reason, the small courtyard was only open to disciples who had reached the Qi Refining stage or higher. The courtyard opened only three mornings a month—on the third, thirteenth, and twenty-third. Outer disciples in the Qi Refining stage could visit once a month for free. Additionally, slips could be copied—provided one brought their own blank jade slip and paid a lower-grade spirit stone for each copy. As for borrowing them? Sorry, that service wasn’t available yet.

However, the chores of cleaning the courtyard and sunning the jade slips usually fell to the newest disciples. The reason was simple: Qi Refining disciples could not resist the lure of knowledge. Once they saw the jade slips, they became as ravenous as mice discovering rice, devouring book after book, utterly neglecting their tasks. It was hard to blame them. First, the courtyard’s open hours were too brief to satisfy their curiosity; second, most outer disciples had no backing and were so poor they could scarcely afford the copying fee of one spirit stone per session.

Feng Ke’er quickly pieced together all this information: if the Azure Cloud Sect was a school, then the inner sect was the honors class, the outer sect was the remedial class, and the small courtyard was a highly commercialized little library.

Ugh, the outer sect was so stingy—never distributing even half a spirit stone all year—yet still charged for copying reference materials. How unscrupulous!

She couldn’t help but ache at the thought of the five lower-grade spirit stones the “meat bird” had “borrowed” from her. Those were spirit stones, enough to copy five jade slips, and she hadn’t even had a chance to touch them.

But then, thinking it over, she realized she’d struck it rich this time: under the guise of Qin Heng, no one knew she could read jade slips. She was like a mouse who’d fallen into a vat of rice—free to read thousands of slips without spending a single coin!

Buoyant with anticipation, Feng Ke’er and eight other new disciples were led into the small courtyard by Master Chen through a side door. Due to her changed appearance, Master Chen didn’t recognize her.

“Careful... handle with care... keep everything in order... wait, wait...” Master Chen spent a good quarter of an hour reiterating the rules, over and over. At last, he waved his sleeve, and a series of creaks echoed as the wooden doors on the east, south, and west sides of the courtyard swung open.

Rows of man-high wooden shelves stood revealed. They strongly resembled modern library bookshelves, all unfinished wood, over a meter wide and three-tiered. Though dusty and riddled with cobwebs, Feng Ke’er immediately recognized that these shelves were made of fine rosewood. She secretly clicked her tongue in awe—such obvious wealth!

And Master Chen, she thought, you’re really too lazy.

The shelves stood in pairs, each tier neatly lined with a dozen or so white jade strips, each half a foot long and about an inch wide.

There they were—the jade slips! Feng Ke’er quickly lowered her head to hide the stars in her eyes.

Sunning the jade slips was notoriously grueling. Especially since the caretaker, Master Chen, treated the slips like his own life and was extremely hard to please. One careless move, one heavy hand or foot, and a torrent of scolding would surely follow. As a result, the other new disciples showed little enthusiasm, treating the jade slips as if they were invisible, standing listlessly in front of Master Chen like wooden posts.

This irked Master Chen to no end. Nothing annoyed him more than people who failed to respect knowledge.

“Be careful, very careful! If you so much as nick a jade slip, I’ll have your hides!” he roared, finally waving them off to work.

The lion’s roar had its effect. The new disciples’ faces changed, and in groups of three, they tiptoed into the east, south, and west rooms.

Jade slips, here I come! Feng Ke’er suppressed her excitement and followed her two teammates into the east room.

The team leader was surnamed Wang—a girl of fifteen or sixteen, with fair skin and a delicate, oval face. She and the other teammate, a male disciple named Chen, were on their third stint sunning the jade slips, and thus were seasoned hands. The Qin Heng whom Feng Ke’er was impersonating, on the other hand, was well-known as a connected insider: fourteen years old, a direct descendant of the Qin family, who had joined the outer sect half a year ago.

Normally, someone like that would be destined to become an inner-sect elite. So Team Leader Wang and Brother Chen were baffled: sunning the jade slips was always a job for disciples with over two years in the sect, a thankless and exhausting task that invariably fell to poor, unconnected disciples like themselves. Why had the higher-ups assigned this one here?

But hierarchy was hierarchy, and the decisions of the higher-ups weren’t theirs to question.

Stuck with such a teammate, all they could do was resign themselves to their bad luck.

“Brother Chen and I will take care of sunning the jade slips. Brother Qin, you clean the shelves. The slips are precious—don’t touch them,” Team Leader Wang said, without hesitation, slapping a “danger” label on Feng Ke’er and resolutely keeping her away from the jade slips.

Feng Ke’er nodded, inwardly amused. Jade wasn’t glass, let alone Japanese tofu—it had a Mohs hardness of over six, could take a knife without a scratch. It was sturdy enough.

There was a well in the courtyard. Feng Ke’er drew water with a wooden basin, soaked both cloths she’d been given, wrung them out, and started wiping the innermost row of shelves.

Each shelf had a palm-sized copper plaque in the center, bearing ancient script for things like “Law,” “Alchemy,” “Tool,” and “Talisman.” Only the two innermost shelves, standing side by side, bore no inscription at all. These, too, were the dustiest and most cobwebbed, clearly a neglected corner.

Curious, Feng Ke’er picked a slip at random, covered it with her spiritual sense, and peeked inside—her heart leaped with joy. It contained basic knowledge about spiritual energy. She tried another—it had foundational information on the dantian.

Ah, this was what it meant for dreams to come true!

It turned out this row of slips all contained the most fundamental knowledge of cultivation. Disciples at the Qi Refining stage already had a solid theoretical foundation—they certainly wouldn’t waste precious time on these. That explained why no one cared for them.

But for Feng Ke’er, these slips were priceless treasures.

On one hand, she wasn’t truly Qin Heng, but an imposter who’d taken up cultivation midway and couldn’t even grasp the basic terminology. On the other, with the title of “direct descendant from a cultivation aristocrat,” she couldn’t just go around asking people the most elementary questions, lest she invite ridicule or even suspicion.

That meat bird might have made a decent teacher—if only he weren’t so foul-tempered and ruthless. Feng Ke’er had thoroughly revised her opinion of him and now had him firmly marked as dangerous, blacklisted in her mind.

Like a wanderer in the desert who’d found an oasis, Feng Ke’er squatted to wipe the bottom shelf, all the while covering the first jade slip with her spiritual sense and reading voraciously.

Just then, a familiar female voice chimed in her mind: “Master, would you like to copy?”

Almost simultaneously, two golden selection boxes appeared in her mind—one “Yes,” one “No.”

No way—did her beloved Compendium come with a built-in recorder, like a personal USB drive? The piracy function was insanely powerful!

It was like having a golden pillow fall into her lap while she was dozing! Overjoyed by this sudden windfall, Feng Ke’er hurriedly selected “Yes” with her mind.

The unassuming pendant hanging at her neck flashed faintly.

Feng Ke’er seemed to see the ancient script within the jade slip suddenly come to life, turning into golden strings of characters that shot into the pendant at lightning speed and vanished.

Then, another chime sounded: “Master, copying complete.”

So this was copying? The whole process took less than a second! Now this was real speed—fiber optics were nothing in comparison!

Guiltily, Feng Ke’er quickly looked around, covering her pendant. Fortunately, Team Leader Wang and Brother Chen were busy with the first row near the door and hadn’t noticed a thing.

Relieved, she used her spiritual sense to check the pendant and view the result.

She could still only open the first page, but this time a bookmark-like page had popped up, crammed with tiny, densely packed ancient script.

Feng Ke’er examined it carefully—it was exactly the content of the jade slip.

Having tasted the sweetness, she grew bolder, copying each slip one after another without hesitation.

Soon, her mind was filled with the constant chime of “ding”s.

“Ding—”
“Master, would you like to copy?”
“Ding—”
“Master, copying complete.”

Because the copying was so fast, the sounds repeated endlessly. After copying some twenty slips, Feng Ke’er’s ears were buzzing and her head felt a size larger.

And that was only one shelf! Gazing at the dozen shelves with their thousands of slips, she pressed her forehead. If only she could copy everything silently and automatically!

No sooner had the thought arisen than a golden interface appeared in her mind.

Feng Ke’er looked closely and clapped her hands in delight.

Hahaha, her dear Compendium was just that considerate!

The golden interface offered several checkboxes: Temporarily mute notification sounds; Permanently mute notification sounds; Copy; Automatic batch copying.

After some thought, Feng Ke’er selected “Temporarily mute notification sounds” and “Automatic batch copying.”

But what exactly did “automatic batch copying” mean? Why wasn’t there a user manual?

This time, the Compendium ignored her, silent as stone.

Thank goodness she hadn’t chosen “Permanently mute notification sounds!” Feng Ke’er wiped a cold sweat and began experimenting.

From her understanding, “batch processing” meant copying multiple slips at once. As for “automatic,” she couldn’t quite grasp it, so she put it aside for now.

So, she decided to try covering two adjacent slips with her spiritual sense at once.

The moment she glanced at the second tier of slips, the pendant flashed.

What just happened?

Feng Ke’er quickly scanned the pendant with her spiritual sense and was stunned—she was petrified. The bookmark page in the pendant had doubled in size, with twice as much content!

Just a glance, and all the slips’ contents were copied—this was “automatic batch copying”?

Oh my heavens, dearest Compendium, you’re a monster! I love you to death!

But just to be safe, Feng Ke’er held her pounding heart and checked each slip with her spiritual sense, verifying the content.

Not a single word was missing!

Feng Ke’er stood up, looked around the east room, and, cradling her dusty pendant, planted a big kiss on it and grinned.

Ha! Without spending a single coin or using an ounce of spiritual power, she’d packed up all the knowledge in those jade slips and taken it for herself!

Tongtian Compendium, Chapter 37: Super Recorder, complete!