Ye Mo stepped inside the library and was immediately amazed. Innumerable bookshelfs stood inside the building as far as his eyes could see.
They mounted on each other until they reached the roof, and several ladders of dozens of meters tall could be seen here and there in each section.
Beside the entrance was a counter and behind it was a middle-aged man sitting on a chair reading a book. He didn't even glance at Ye Mo, seemingly absorbed by his read.
Ye Mo passed by and saluted him but the man only raised his eyes for an instant before returning to his book, ignoring him.
Above his head was an iron plate fixed on the wall with rules inscribed. From what it said, you could read as much as you wished inside the library, but you could borrow only two books at a time and they must be returned in two weeks.
Ye Mo walked beside each section until he reached the one pertaining to talent and entered right away.
He strolled inside looking at the books' titles on the shelves until he picked one entitled "Basic Introduction to Cultivation Talent".
Ye Mo sat down on the ground and started reading. After two hours he closed the book and returned it to its place. Most of the book explained what Wang Fei told him, but he also learned of the rank 0 of talent.
It was what was called the talent of mortals. Heavens was fair and every human in the world had the talent to cultivate, but it didn't mean they stood on equal footing. It stated if you picked 10 mortals from the streets and tested them, 9 of them would have the rank 0.
With this kind of talent, even if you obtained a decent cultivation technique and cultivated your whole life diligently, you would only reach the third or fourth layer of the Qi Gathering realm before dying of old age.
But these kinds of people would never be given the chance by anyone in the first place. Their treatment was even worse in big clans and great families where they were shunned and rejected by everyone, sometimes going as far as keeping their talent a secret or erasing their existence to uphold the image of a powerful lineage.
Of course most mortals would live a simple life far from cultivation and die without knowing what talent they had, like Ye Mo's parents.
Ye Mo quickly picked another book. The more he read, the more he craved to learn, quickly filling the gap with his peers. He stayed at the talent section for hours, taking one book after another. Only after he read the 8th one did he snap out of it and left the library.
Outside, a bright round moon was hanging high in the sky, and the colorful lights of some buildings illuminated the Tiger Martial Institute.
"Time sure flies when reading, it's like I was cultivating." Ye Mo raised his head and looked at the stars. Unknowingly, he has been in the library the whole day and half the night.
Now that he stopped, he felt a void in his stomach and quickly took something from his pouch to eat on the way to his house.
When he finally reached his small stone house he jumped on his bed and lay down.
"Wang Fei disdained me for my talent but now that I think about it, I am pretty lucky to be rank 2 already. Not that it would change much for me." From what he reads, there were five ranks of talent plus the rank 0 of mortals.
He also learned that the more powerful the cultivation of an individual was, the higher the chances for his descendants to have good talents at cultivation. The bloodline of a cultivator would be reinforced with his cultivation and the same way a strong cultivator would have better chances to give birth to children with good aptitudes, the blood would be diluted with time, so if none of them appear in the family in a long time, the rank of talents would lower with each generation as well.
That was why clans and families had more cultivators and talented individuals than what could be found on the streets.
Ye Mo didn't really feel anything about it. Even if he was a rank 0 talent, he wouldn't give up. In a land where people could fly in the sky like celestial beings and shatter the earth with their fists, what was impossible? It was Ye Mo's own perspective and resolution, as someone who aims for the top, to be unordinary.
"Mom and dad both had no cultivation. My paternal grandfather died of sickness before I was born so he can't be a cultivator either. As for the others, I'm not sure, but if they were cultivators my parents wouldn't have met this kind of fate. Yet, I'm still rank 2, not too shabby, hehe..." After a round of cultivation, Ye Mo fell asleep with a smile on his face.
The next day, Ye Mo stood in a small green area behind his house. Flowers and grasses were covered in dew as the sun showed itself on the horizon. Suddenly, wind seemed to envelope his body as it disappeared, replaced by a gust of wind. In an instant it traveled through half a mile before Ye Mo's body took form again.
His body kept flashing here and there, traveling between trees and grasses, before his fleshy body reappeared beside his house.
"So quick! With this speed, Ha jun wouldn't have been able to touch me of the fight..." Ye Mo contemplated his newfound power as he felt his dantian devoid of any Qi.
What he displayed was the complete mastery of the Wind Flow battle skill. Now that he became a qi cultivator, Ye Mo could finally use the technique to its full potential, but he still lacked the qi to sustain it for a long time.
When he was testing his new abilities, he left in the direction of the library. This time he chose the blood beast section. There he learned about all kinds of creatures, their habits, their capacities and their weaknesses.
One of them was the Qi Condensing Carp. They were of all kinds of color and could only live in environments rich in qi. They are also a valuable resource, sought out by many experts as they are beneficial to a martial artist's cultivation when consumed.
Ye Mo immediately thought about the carps he saw in the fountain at the center of the Tiger Martial Institute when reading this. They were very hard to find outside, and it would be considered someone's great luck to obtain one, but here they swam leisurely on the plaza in everyone's sight.
The other days looked the same, after a small round of cultivation, he would go to the library and spend his day inside. From the talent section to the blood beast section to the cultivation section and geography section, then the pill section. He kept learning at a great pace, and at the same time he absorbed the information, he felt there was much more to discover that could not be found in these books.
However, on the fifth day an incident occurred...