Romance of Dragons and Snakes

Tang Zichen had long since left by traveling through the water, which had also shocked him. Countless of emotions clogged up his thinking process, leaving him melancholic.

Returning to the villa, it was deathly silent inside with only him in there. Wang Chao couldn’t help but feel nervous after realizing that he was the only one there. Without any further thought, he walked for the training room and sat down on the ground before closing his eyes as he tried to remembered what memories he had of sis Chen.

Starting from the “Horse Stance”, “Lifting Yin Palm”, “Monkey Stealing the Peach”, “Three Integrals” to the “Bagua Zhang”, “Xingyi Five Elements and 12 postures” before finally the “Assault of Dragon and Snake” Spear technique along with some other Taichi frameworks.

The smiling and happy Tang Zichen that had taught Wang Chao for more than half a year had ran through Wang Chao’s mind clearly almost as if she was still there. Wang Chao felt as if she had never really left.

Gradually, as these memories flowed into Wang Chao’s head, he began to feel how deep Chinese boxing was. Every single word from Tang Zichen, every single action, he began to think about how truly profound it was. He didn’t know if it was because he had lost this precious thing that he was beginning to mature, but when he thought back to when he was practicing martial arts, he immediately realized just how much of an impact martial arts had on him.

Jumping back up onto his feet, he leapt back onto the vat of water.

Turning his body around as he stepped on the vat, it was almost as if he was walking on normal ground.

Wang Chao’s arms raised up in an arced manner as he rotated his body. With a single extended palm, he slammed it into the sandbag.

A single ripple made its way across the body of water.

Each strike of his had an equally distributed amount of power running through his body, so the recoil from the blow had only caused a simple ripple to go through the water. While it did not reach a perfected realm, there was still a uniformed ripple that was still not yet a whirlpool like.

Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! The last few strikes had been filled with strength that had also a faint crisp sound to it.

At the faint crisp sounds, they still weren’t comparable to the strikes that Tang Zichen was capable of. It was still far away from the Pounding Fist that Tang Zichen did.

“Hssssh!” After making the strike, Wang Chao leapt down and began to practice both the Five Element Fists and 12 Postures. With each move, he tried to issue Jin while bending his body to fit the postures and forced his pores shut.

“Ha!” At the end of the practicing, he couldn’t help but try to try to fit the stance for the Assault of Dragon and Snake. Both of his hands imitated holding a spear and the legs crouched down in the same combination of the Smashing, Pounding and Drilling Fist. Then he struck at mercury ball fiercely.

His waist bent down as both arms released its strength, crash! The mercury filled ball was grabbed by Wang Chao’s arms and was violently spun before moving out from the trough.

Seeing the ball move from the trough, he immediately spun it once more while a strange sensation went through his sealed pores in his arms.

Wang Chao’s mind suddenly seemed to have the image of the inner mercury within the ball appear in his mind as he issued power to follow the direction of the swirl inside.

Involuntarily turning and twisting the ball, pata! The ball suddenly flew up from the ground and left the trough completely.

“So this must be what listening to Jin is like. No wonder Tang Zichen was able to feel someone’s center of gravity from touching their hands.”

Huuu! Dropping to the ground as if he had no energy left, Wang Chao began to think as he laid on the ground while taking in deep breaths.

The sky outside was already turning bright; Wang Chao had practiced for the entire night.

The sunshine shined brightly down on the ground with its intense light as it did yesterday, but the only difference now was that Tang Zichen was no longer here.

But now that Wang Chao’s mind was in a better state than before. When he thought about how Tang Zichen had left behind a book for him, he immediately ran up the second story to find her sleeping room.

Sure enough, there was a simple book with crisp pages and a clean cover. Each page had even a gold and silver decorative line running through them as borders, giving the book an expensive feel to it.

Even the pages had a strong feel to it as well. A strong fragrance could be smelt as if someone had sprayed a type of perfume to the pages.

“It’s like these pages were made from sheepskin before being sprayed with some sort of perfume. And these gold and silver decorative lines, I’ve read about this in history class! This is from the middle east and is used in the Quran!”

While Wang Chao never studied, he wasn’t an idiot where everything seemed Greek to him. Seeing this gold and silver decoration, even he could remember just what he had learned briefly in history class.

This page was about three or four inches thick with several hundred pages. Written on top of the cover was the five words, “The True Record of Guoshu” in a mysterious font with Tang Zichen’s name inscribed underneath.

Opening the book, Wang Chao realized that it was written with a tiny brush. He flipped through the book briefly only to see that a good majority of the pages talked about the ways of fighting, killing techniques, and then several accurate pictures of the human body. One page had the human body with the nervous system, bones, muscles and organs all illustrated. There was even a description on the best way to strike and kill someone using Hidden Jin.

These paintings were far too accurate and required a good amount of knowledge with the human body. Wang Chao had no idea how she could draw this out with dissecting open a body.

The final hundred pages was about the “Blows” of Taichi as well as the Eight Extreme Fists’ elbow strikes, Tongbei’s Overturning Arm Jin, and several other martial art that weren’t even given proper introductions. As long as they had a practical use, they were added in there.

Afterwards, the calligraphy grew bigger as Tang Zichen’s brush reached the end with a copy of the Sage of Calligraphy Wang Xizhi’s Preface to the Poems Collected at the Orchid Pavilion.

TL Note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantingji_Xu

Each one of the strokes twisted and turned with so much ink it penetrated the back of the paper so that even a calligraphy illiterate person like Wang Chao could realize just how powerful the meaning was supposed to be.

But there was no ending. After the Preface to the Poems Collected at the Orchid Pavilion, there had only been the words “Future readers”, and then another line, “If educated could please“. There was nothing else written as if waiting for someone else to pick it up.

After finishing flipping through the book, Wang Chao cleaned up the book for later studying. Laying back on the bed, he fell asleep until the morning of the next day. Collecting the keys and house card, he took one last meaningful look at the house before returning home.

While Tang Zichen had gifted the house to him, he had no desire to live in the house since he had no idea just how much the monthly house payments would be like. It was best to leave now before he could be torn apart by the management. He wouldn’t even touch the cars inside the garage and would naturally let it remain inside.

Plus, all of these things were left behind by Tang Zichen. No matter what, Wang Chao wanted to preserve it for her.

In a flash, the summer break had came to an end. School resumed with Wang Chao entering his third year of high school with college exams looming almost overhead, causing the atmosphere within the school to grow tense. However, Wang Chao hadn’t put that on his mind at all. Up to now, there were only two things that interested him.

The first was to have a contest with the class monitor Cao Jingjing’s father, Offier Cao for revenge. The second was how to earn money, otherwise, he would have no money to preserve Tang Zichen’s house as well as for his own living expenses. His house was still in need of money as well.

Regarding his thoughts on making money, Wang Chao had poured a lot of thought into it. However, he could not find a single suitable way since learning martial arts seemed as if it was only good for robbing people with.

But Wang Chao had no desire to rob people. The first time when he had beaten those gangsters was because of revenge, taking the money was merely another perk in the moment of crisis.

“I should first take revenge on officer Cao first.” After many days, Wang Chao had decided on taking care of one problem first

That night after finishing school, Wang Chao silently followed behind Cao Jingjing. He was prepared to find Cao Jingjing’s house and then block officer Cao’s path when the time was right for a match.

The streets were well lit at night, but the weather was quite hot still. Nonetheless, Wang Chao persisted in following Cao Jingjing from behind while also dodging her detection.

After turning around several streets, just as Cao Jingjing was about to enter an alley, a van suddenly came in from an intersection and stopped right in front of her in an instant. Three men came out: one shut her mouth, another grabbed at her arms, and the third at her legs.

Before she could even yell, Cao Jingjing was snatched away.

“A kidnapping?” Wang Chao couldn’t believe his eyes.