49: Chapter 49 Trying Breathing Techniques

Over the next few hours, Cheng Jian completed the relocation and resettlement of two families.

Moving furniture, carrying grain, and settling the elderly into vehicles.

His movements remained standard, and his commands remained crisp, but the team members around him could all feel that their captain was unusually quiet today; he would occasionally zone out and only return to his senses after being called twice.

Only Cheng Jian himself knew what he was thinking about.

He wanted to open that notebook, but he was holding back.

At seven in the evening, the relocation task came to a temporary pause.

The team returned to the base, and Cheng Jian ate in the cafeteria and gave a mission briefing as usual.

Everything was exactly the same as usual. He had been in this team for over a decade and knew how to maintain an outward appearance of calm under any circumstances.

But he also knew that some things could not be done in the base cafeteria or in front of his team members.

He needed to be alone.

Nine-thirty PM.

Cheng Jian returned to his dormitory, closed the door, and locked it.

He also closed the window and drew the curtains tight.

Then, he took the sealed bag out from his inner pocket, placed it on the table, and took a deep breath.

He opened the notebook first.

The first page was the table of contents.

Part One: Basic Standing Post training.

Part Two: Mental Perception cultivation.

Part Three: Core of the Human Breathing Method.

Part Four: Precautions and Effects.

The handwriting was neat but stiff, as if it had been traced one character at a time from a dictionary.

It had no personal characteristics.

He flipped to the last page, where a few lines of text were written.

"The efficiency of absorbing Spiritual Qi using the Human Breathing Method is about ten times that of passive reception. Everyone's breathing rhythm is unique; your breathing method belongs only to you."

At the very bottom, there was an addendum regarding Spiritual Qi: Spiritual Qi in all areas is uniform, with consistent concentration, and the concentration is slowly increasing.

Spiritual Qi exists in the form of particles, and the Human Breathing Method absorbs the Spiritual Qi emitted by these particles.

Cheng Jian read these passages over and over again.

Each time made his breathing a little deeper.

The state had only officially announced the Spiritual Energy Revival this morning, yet the notebook in his hand had already explained all of this thoroughly.

He put down the notebook and picked up the memory card.

He inserted it into his old, non-networked tablet and opened the only video file.

The screen lit up.

Deep in a dense forest, in a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides, a man with a massive physique and a completely unfamiliar face stood in the center of the frame.

He was over two meters tall, his shoulders were abnormally broad, and his voice was as raspy as sandpaper rubbing against rock.

"Hello, Cheng Jian. I have been observing you for a long time."

Cheng Jian's pupils constricted. A chill ran down his spine.

It was not a random delivery; it was indeed targeted at him.

The person in the video continued to speak.

"By the time you see this video, the Xia Kingdom should have already announced the changes of the Spiritual Energy Revival. Yes, I call the source of the current changes Spiritual Qi. It will bring about the evolution of the entire planet. What I want to tell you is a method that leads the world, and it should also be the only Cultivation Technique capable of actively absorbing Spiritual Qi. I call it — the Human Breathing Method."

"Once you successfully Cultivate through this method, you can allow the human body to actively absorb Spiritual Qi and initiate true evolution. The speed of absorbing Spiritual Qi is more than ten times that of passive reception. This can allow humanity, and the Xia Kingdom, to stand at the forefront of evolution."

Then, Cheng Jian saw those trees.

He saw the man in the video turn and walk toward the fir trees in the center of the valley.

He saw him raise his arm, twist his waist, and rotate his hips.

He saw his fist strike the tree trunk, and the fir tree, as thick as a man could embrace, shattered and snapped as if hit by a cannonball.

Then came the second tree, the third tree. In less than ten seconds, a grove of trees was cleared.

Then came the speed.

The figure in the video blurred into an afterimage, and he could even make right-angle turns while moving at high speed.

The water mist in the air was stirred into thin white lines.

Seeing this, Cheng Jian instinctively wanted to look for traces of editing. He had previously received relevant training and was very sensitive to stitching marks at the edges of the frame.

But he looked again and again; there was no editing.

There were no special effects.

There was only the display of real destruction and crushing speed.

Then, the stranger returned to the front of the camera and said something that completely quieted him down.

"After you feel the effects, you will know how important this thing is. Then, find someone you trust and hand it over to the state."

"I trust you."

"There is no need to come looking for me. Just pretend I never existed. I don't want to expose myself either. However — we will meet eventually."

The video ended there.

Only a dark, frozen image remained on the screen.

Cheng Jian stared intently at the video.

He did not believe in monsters, nor did he believe in gods.

But he believed in evidence.

If this notebook were fake, the destruction of the forest in that video could not exist.

If that person's strength were not real, how could these things have been prepared and delivered to his hands within just a few hours of the Spiritual Energy Revival being announced this morning?

Furthermore, that figure from the morning had been so fast.

There was only one explanation.

This person had known about the arrival of the Spiritual Energy Revival a long time ago and had already forged a path.

And this person chose to hand that path over to him.

He picked up the notebook again and flipped through it page by page from the beginning.

He read the Basic Standing Post training section twice, repeatedly comparing it in his mind with his own training experience from over a decade.

Every movement had an anatomical basis, and the pairing logic of the antagonistic muscle groups was highly consistent with the experience he had explored during his own training.

He flipped the notebook to the basic section and began to read. Opposing force, antagonistic muscle group pairing, breathing coordination—every movement was accompanied by a description of the force application route.

He tried to simulate it in his mind; just the imagination made his back muscles tighten slightly.

This training system was completely different from all the training methods he had learned in the army for over a decade; it felt like a completely different dimension.

Cheng Jian backed into the open space of the dormitory, took off his shirt, and tried the movements on the first page directly.

After finishing the first movement, he paused for a long time.

Because he had felt it.

The distribution of that soreness was completely different from when he did standard push-ups.

It was not "this muscle is tired," but rather "this muscle and its opposing muscle are working at the same time." The feeling of the antagonistic muscle groups being activated simultaneously was unprecedented.

He continued to try the next ones. The second movement, the third movement. With each one he completed, something in his heart loosened a little.

It was too ingenious.

The designer of these movements understood the human muscle chain far better than any physical fitness instructor he had ever met.

After finishing one set of basic movements, Cheng Jian's muscles began to twitch slightly all over his body.

He leaned against the wall, panting, looking down at his hands, his palms red, his fingers trembling unconsciously.

Cheng Jian's physical fitness was among the best in the Armed Police Detachment; he could endure conventional high-intensity training for an entire morning without collapsing, yet now, just doing it once, he was close to exhaustion.

He closed his eyes.

A thought surfaced, clearer than ever.

What if he continued to practice tomorrow?

What if he practiced for a month?

He put the notebook, memory card, and data cable into the safe, scrambled the combination lock, and then turned off all the lights.

The dormitory darkened, with only the white light of the street lamp outside casting a thin line on the floor through the gap in the curtains.

Cheng Jian lay on the bed, staring at the blurry ceiling.

In his mind, three images kept flashing back and forth: the moment the leader bowed this morning, the grove of trees that had been cleared in the afternoon video crashing to the ground, and that voice — raspy, calm, leaving behind the words "we will meet eventually."

How could he possibly fall asleep at a time like this?

It was not until after four in the morning that he forcibly ordered himself to close his eyes and slept for less than two hours.

At six in the morning, Chen Mo stood at the second-floor window of that abandoned small building one kilometer away from the Armed Police Detachment base.

He saw the curtains of that dormitory at the end of the corridor pull shut, saw the lights go out, saw the lights come on in the morning, and saw Cheng Jian do the movements again in the open space at the end of the corridor.

This time, Cheng Jian's movements were slower than last night, but he added a pause at the end of each posture.

He was actively looking for the positions of force application.

Chen Mo withdrew his gaze and turned to go downstairs.

When he walked downstairs, his pace was the same as when he arrived, neither fast nor slow, without any extra sound of footsteps.

The morning light had not yet fully spread, and the wild grass near the abandoned building had grown wildly to chest height; his figure was soon swallowed by the dense green.

Chen Mo did not look back.

He no longer needed to look.

When Cheng Jian encountered an inexplicable phenomenon, he did not panic or avoid it; instead, he calmly verified its authenticity.

From the moment he opened the first page of the notebook last night, he had already begun to move forward in the same way Chen Mo had once traveled.

That was enough.

Chen Mo lowered the brim of his hat, exited the outskirts of the city via a dirt road without streetlights, and walked back in the direction of his hometown.

He trusted Cheng Jian.

And he also trusted his own judgment.