Chapter 6: Mysterious New Instructor (II)
Puff — *swish* ——, Ping–
Three successive sounds directly resound but they are completely different. The first one comes from the chop, the second one from the sword, snapping with the impact. It was exactly the wooden sword that couldn’t withstand the power of Long Hao Chen’s attack and snapped from the middle. Fortunately, it wasn’t completely divided into two parts, else the upper part may have flown towards him and hurt him.
And the last sound is the sound of the collision with the stone bead. As he is still in the middle of his motion, Long Hao Chen sees clearly in front of him that it impressively bounced up to the 25th division, the highest one.
Is it for real? It is, the fact the wooden sword snapped like this proved it. Balza said once to him that the wooden sword they used could bear at most the twentieth spiritual energy level.
Long Hao Chen hasn’t a lot of knowledge in regard to knights, but the fact that, in an evening, he promoted from a first stage knight to a second stage knight makes him very shocked and pleasantly surprised.
“*Um?*” as Long Hao Chen comes back to his senses. Uttering a quiet noise, he turns his head subconsciously and discovers shockingly that, without notice, a middle-aged was right behind him.
Long Hao Chen is surprised, but not scared at all, curiously looking at him.
This middle aged man has a tall and thin stature, black hair, black pupils, handsome looks, and bright eyes. He cannot say that he looks eminently talented but he looks quite dignified.
After showing a moment of surprise, the middle aged man quickly comes back to his senses, wrinkling and looking back at Long Hao Chen.
“Who are you?” Long Hao Chen asks full of curiosity.
The middle aged man answers with a faint voice: “You just passed yesterday, the Knight Squire test, so starting today I am your new Instructor. You can call me Teacher[1] Xing Yu (Xīng yǔ).”
Long Hao Chen hesitatingly says: “But it is the first time I met you.”
Xing Yu faintly says: “You are called Long Hao Chen, you are nine years old this year, and your mother is called Bai Yue, am I right?”
Long Hao Chen nods.
Xing Yu’s stare suddenly sinks down: “Then wait for Balza and we will see”, as he says this, he suddenly stops speaking, only staring at a direction, his lips slightly sulking.
After a little time, rapid footsteps could be heard and Long Hao Chen saw Balza running towards them at a fast pace, but his face looked strongly shocked and respectful.
“Hello Instructor.” Long Hao Chen immediately presents to Balza his Knight’s salute as he sees him arrive.
But strangely, Balza didn’t return the salute as usual. Instead, he hurriedly goes in front of Xing Yu and respectfully says: “Elder.”
Xing Yu nods, “Tell him that I am his new Instructor.”
“Right.” Balza hurries to turn towards Long Hao Chen and says: “Senior Xing Yu comes from Yue Hao City’s Knight Hall and from today onwards, he will be your Knight Instructor for the next three years. You will have to listen to all the directions he will give to you. Senior Xing Yu is a Genuine Knight.”
“Yes sir.” Long Hao Chen politely answered. In fact, he has no idea about what the difference between a quasi-knight and a Genuine Knight is. He simply knows that since he’s his new Instructor, he has to practice with him.
“Teacher Xing Yu.” As he thinks about this, he kindly salutes Xing Yu. He is truly far more mature than the others of same age and more steady as well.
“*Em* (groaning sound), we have to go.” Xing Yu says this as he naturally drags Long Hao Chen out, grabbing him by the hand and heading to the outdoor. Before he stepped forward, his obscure gaze stayed fixed on Long Hao Chen’s beautiful face, showing an upset face.
“Teacher Xing Yu, shouldn’t we stay here to practice?” Exiting Odin Hall, Long Hao Chen cannot help but ask this question.
Xing Yu says: “This place isn’t suitable.”
Affected by Xing Yu’s cold expression, Long Hao Chen doesn’t dare ask him further.
Balza’s gaze is directed towards their figure as they leave; he is shocked and thinks aloud: “Doesn’t this Senior know his own status? For him to send greetings to someone like me… To be so powerful, he must be at least an Earth Knight[2] . No, maybe he is a Radiant Knight? Heavens!”
As Xing Yu was taking Long Hao Chen away from Odin town, Long Hao Chen suddenly feels a surge of warmth. A simple and honest feeling comes from Long Xing Yu’s hand[3] , and, in the next moment, a strange scene occurred.
Everytime Xing Yu’s tiptoes touched the ground surface, they crossed at least 33m (10 Zhang of 3.3 m each) and after a few breathes, Odin town was already far from sight.
For Long Hao Chen, this traveling speed was incredible. It could be described as something “as swift as the wind and as quick as lightning”; all he could do was to strongly grip Xing Yu’s hand, by fear of falling otherwise.
They passed through the place where Long Hao Chen picked the edible wild herbs in the forest, climbing a mountain peak in the same direction. Long Hao Chen is familiar with this place, it is where he grew up after all. This mountain is called by people from Odin town Odin Mountain. But before this mountain, there is a forest where wild beast often appear, and even magical beast sometimes. Therefore, few people go there. He went also half a year ago by curiosity at the foot of Odin Mountain. There, he discovered a famous wild beastkin, but he ran away frightened upon seeing it, and from this day onwards, Long Hao Chen never penetrated deeply in the forest again, not to mention Odin Mountain.
“Teacher, there are wild beasts here and maybe even magical beasts.” Long Hao Chen reminded him with good intentions.
Xing Yu looks like he heard him, but went even faster, directly taking him to ascend Odin Mountain. Even during the process of climbing the mountain, his speed never decreased. The scenery quickly passed as he was brushed by strong winds and his hair dispersed.
Odin Mountain is not very high, just 666 odds meters (200 Zhang). Only after a little while did they arrived to the summit.
Three log cabins appeared before Xing Yu’s line of vision. They didn’t have courtyards: it was three solitary log cabins but they looked completely new, they were clearly built recently.
As they arrived at the log cabins, Xing Yu stopped moving, leading Long Hao Chen to enter the biggest one in the middle.
They pushed the door and entered, the log cabin had a thin timber section and emitted a kind of smell, but not an unpleasant one. On the contrary, it emitted a sweet smell. The log cabin of the center was the biggest but the inner rooms have only the simplest layout. There was only a wooden bed, a wooden desk, and two wooden chairs. As simple as that, but still more than Long Hao Chen’s home.
“Sit.” Xing Yu pointed a chair and pulled out the other one to sit on.
Long Hao Chen sits down. Although he’s young, he can feel his teacher is quite formidable. He’s quite nervous, but somewhat excited at the same time.
“Tell me what happened to you yesterday? Why did your Spiritual Energy level increase so much?” Xing Yu calmly asks. His face is expressionless but his words are filled with an invisible pressure from Long Hao Chen’s point of view.
“Yesterday was like this… …” Long Hao Chen didn’t feel like he had something to hide, so he told everything that happened at once.
During the whole time he was listening, Xing Yu only wrinkled once, slightly, but his expression didn’t change at all except that time.
1. 老师 (lǎoshī), basic chinese word. It has exactly the same meaning as “sensei”, but sensei sounds really much better than laoshi, that sound a little lame in an english text imo, but since I can’t use Japanese to translate a Chinese novel (it would be really impolite and insulting towards Chinese people), I had regretfully to use the word teacher.
2. This expression was used by the white-clad man with Cai Er when saying LHC would become an awesome knight; the exact expression he used was something like “he will become a Da Di Knight (大地骑士)”, literally meaning something like an “earth scale knight”. It may be a level for Genuine Knights, maybe after Spiritual Energy level 50? 100? Well, we’ll know later about this, I guess. I translated it for you for it to become clearer to you, the term, “awesome knight” (because earth scale/level sounded a bit lame), but now that this expression has been used for the second time, my guess is that earth scale may have another meaning other than “awesome” so I modified the translation. I’ll also put a footnote on the chapter where “Da Di Qi Shi” was used first. My guess: it means there may be a “sky scale”, “space scale”? *Ohoh, right after I wrote all this stuff, we learned about the next level in the next sentence: Radiant Knight. Ahah so my guess was right, I’m so proud.
3. Yeah it’s the same Long (meaning dragon) as in Hao Chen’s name. Yeah, you are not the only ones to feel a Darth Vader pattern, plus he knows his mum’s name. But for the same reason (it would be strange to be spoiling like this his own reader), I feel like it was just a mistake by the author who may have mixed up LHC’s and XY’s family names (maybe).