220: Chapter 220 Digitalization of Cultivation Techniques

Sun Liang stayed at the Fourth World Forward Base for three whole days.

On the first day, he squatted in the medical station without moving, turning the military doctor's medicine cabinet completely upside down. He took out every item to sniff and touch it, and even insisted on tasting a bite of some.

The military doctor tried to stop him at first, but later couldn't be bothered anymore; anyway, this old man couldn't be stopped.

Starting on the second day, Sun Liang's interest shifted.

He no longer stared at medicine bottles, but instead pestered Tao Zhe.

The cause was that Tao Zhe brought the handwritten manuscripts of those two sets of Cultivation Techniques to him to verify the terminology.

There was a sentence in "Rock-Shattering Strength": "Qi travels through the three yangs, qi energy sinks into the Dantian, passing through the Shanzhong acupoint without stopping." Tao Zhe asked him whether "passing through the Shanzhong acupoint without stopping" meant that the qi energy passed through the Shanzhong acupoint but did not stay there, or whether one could not stop circulating qi when passing through the Shanzhong acupoint.

Sun Liang was stunned for a moment.

Although his main profession was Alchemy, he was still a First-Order Martial Artist after all. He had practiced "Rock-Shattering Strength" from his youth until now, and he had silently recited this formula at least several thousand times.

But as for how exactly "passing through the Shanzhong acupoint without stopping" worked, he truly had never thought about it in detail—the qi would just rush past once it arrived there, his body remembered it, but his brain had never broken it down to ponder over it.

That was how Master taught it when he was instructed, and he just practiced accordingly. As long as he mastered it, that was enough, and no one pursued what every single word actually meant.

"Do not stop." Sun Liang paused again after finishing, as if weighing the weight of these three words seriously for the first time, "It should be... when the qi energy reaches Shanzhong, it must rush past in one breath and cannot accumulate there. If it accumulates, it blocks. That was the feeling when I practiced it myself, but whether Master actually meant that back then, I cannot say for sure."

Tao Zhe made a note in his notebook, putting parentheses behind the three words "Do not stop" and writing "Pending Verification".

He turned to the next page: "Here, 'True intent of the Iron Wall, resisting stones with the skin', does this 'skin' refer to the skin or the qi energy layer on the surface of the body?"

"The qi energy layer," Sun Liang said, "When practiced to a later stage, the qi energy can form a shell on the outside of the body, which is hard. When a blade hacks onto it, it is just like hacking onto a stone."

"What about the thickness of the shell? Is it even or is there thick and thin?"

"It depends on the depth of cultivation. Those with shallow cultivation are thin, and those with deep cultivation are thick. The distribution..." Sun Liang frowned, "It should be even. Master said that the Iron Wall Skill emphasizes a body without any leaks."

Tao Zhe also wrote down this sentence, and put parentheses behind "even", writing "Pending Verification".

Conversations like this lasted for two days.

Tao Zhe asked extremely meticulously, down to every single word, every action, and the rhythm of every breath.

At first, Sun Liang could answer fluently, but later on, as the questions went deeper, there were some questions he couldn't answer—it wasn't that he didn't know, but rather that no one had ever asked like this before.

"What on earth are you guys trying to do?" On the evening of the second day, Sun Liang finally couldn't help asking.

Tao Zhe closed the handwritten manuscript and flipped to the cover to show him.

A piece of printer paper was pasted on the cover, which read:

"Rock-Shattering Strength" "Iron Wall Skill" — Working Draft for Digitization and Terminology Standardization

Sun Liang looked at those words. He recognized every single word, but put together they were completely baffling.

"Digitization?"

When Tao Zhe explained, he tried his best to use words that he could understand.

The general idea was like this:

The textual descriptions of Cultivation Techniques were too vague. Ten people might have ten different understandings of the same sentence. Masters teaching disciples entirely relied on oral instruction and heart-to-heart transmission, and after three generations, it would become distorted. What they needed to do was to translate every action, every qi energy route, and every key acupoint in the Cultivation Technique into precise data, and then feed it into a machine.

"What machine?"

"A very, very big... abacus." Tao Zhe thought for a long time and found a metaphor that Sun Liang could understand, "It calculates faster than one million people added together."

"Calculate what?"

"Calculate how the qi energy in this set of Cultivation Technique of yours should travel most reasonably. Which acupoint should stop, which acupoint should not stop, how fast the qi energy travels—all calculated into numbers, accurate to the slightest fraction."

Sun Liang's eyeballs moved slightly.

Accurate to the slightest fraction.

He had practiced Alchemy for thirty years, and the most important thing in blending medicine was "not being off by even a fraction" — if a single ingredient had half a cent more, the pill would be ruined. He understood this principle better than anyone.

But as for something like a Cultivation Technique, he had never thought that it could also be calculated this way.

When Master taught, he said "qi sinks into the Dantian". How deep did it sink? No one said.

He said "qi energy travels through the three yangs". How fast did it travel? No one had ever measured it.

It all relied on physical sensations. If it was mastered, it was mastered; if it wasn't mastered, they would have another person try.

Now this young man was telling him that all of these could be calculated.

"Alright, you ask." Sun Liang put his medicine box on the ground, sat down cross-legged, "I will tell you everything I know."

The digitization work of the two sets of Cultivation Techniques took a full three days.

Tao Zhe's team of six people worked in shifts, while Sun Liang carried it through the whole process alone.

The old man had even more spirit than the young people, chatting every day from morning until midnight. When his throat became hoarse, he chugged water, and after chugging, he continued talking.

The document finally compiled was as thick as two bricks.

Every qi energy route was marked with a starting point, ending point, passing Acupoints, running speed, and breathing coordination rhythm.

Every terminology was followed by Sun Liang's personal explanation and somatosensory descriptions in actual cultivation.

Even subjective feelings like "Dantian warming up" and "Meridians aching and swelling" were quantified by Tao Zhe as much as possible using temperature, pressure, and duration.

On the afternoon the document was completed, the data was transmitted back to the Main World through an encrypted channel.

The receiving party was the National Defense Science and Technology Research Institute located at Tianmen Base, code-named "Deep Blue Group".

The core equipment of the Deep Blue Group was the supercomputer "Tianheng" — this machine had made great contributions in the zombie crystal core energy model and zerg biological structure analysis, its computing power ranked in the top three globally, and the military AI System it carried had iterated to the seventh generation.

When the data was being fed in, Zhou Peide, the head of the Deep Blue Group, was drinking coffee.

Zhou Peide was fifty-eight years old this year, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a background in particle physics, and was seconded to the Otherworld development project team three years ago.

The team he led had analyzed the energy decay curve of zombie crystal cores and built stress models for zerg exoskeletons, but when he received this Cultivation Technique data, his coffee cup paused near his mouth for a long time.

"Meridians, Acupoints, qi energy..." He flipped through a few pages of the document and pushed up his glasses, "The last time I saw these words was when my mother forced me to see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor."

The assistant beside him let out a chuckle.

Zhou Peide didn't laugh.

It took him forty minutes to flip through the document from beginning to end.

Then he put down the document and drank the coffee in one gulp.

"Assign a task to Tianheng, highest priority."

The assistant was stunned for a moment: "Professor Zhou, ahead of the skyfall steel material analysis? The mecha R&D team is waiting for the results over there."

"Let them wait a bit longer."

Zhou Peide stood up from his chair, "What can be done after studying skyfall steel thoroughly? Build harder armor, build sturdier mechas. At the end of the day, it's still making tools for people."

He patted that stack of documents, "This thing is different; it is to turn the people who use the tools into supermen."

"These are two different things."