2 The Library

OK, man. Calm down. What can you do.

"Hello. I'm Jiang Chen. Nice to meet you."

Was Shen Yue sneering at me? First day here and I already have to deal with this nobility crap.

"Hello. I'm Xiao Ning'er of the Winged Dragon family."

Oh? I'm sitting next to Xiao Ning'er? Interesting. Interesting indeed.

Where was I? Right, what to do.

There are two main timelines, both very different and will require very different plans moving forward.

1) This is the timeline where Glory City gets destroyed and Nie Li becomes a vagabond. In this timeline, I'll have more time to develop, but I won't have any access to powerful cultivation techniques due to my status as an orphan commoner. I'd become just another casualty when Glory City falls.

2) This is the timeline where Nie Li reincarnated into his child self what was said to be a few days into the beginning of the year. The obvious thing to do here is to hug Nie Li's leg and get a powerful technique, mooch off of his abundant pills and cash and live a carefree life.

While I want the second to be true, I cannot discount the possibility of this being the first timeline instead.

I looked up and saw the teacher passing out books to all of the students in the class.

"Right now you will receive the basic Blossoming Orchid cultivation technique. I know some of you have your own cultivation techniques from your families and if you want to, you don't have to take this. For the rest of you, you will take this and cultivate with it. At the end of the week, we will measure yyour strength and soul force, as well asexamine your soul attribute, so cultivate well."

I see. So they give out a basic cultivation technique, probably so that the commoners who have no cultivators in their family can also cultivate, breeding more rank and file troops for the city.

What was it that made Nie Li so OP? His knowledge. His wisdom was so vast that to the inhabitants of Glory City, he may as well have been plucking the answer to all their questions out of thin air. He knew cultivation techniques, inscriptions, alchemical formulas, martial arts; you name it, he knew it.

While I could never match up to that level of knowledge, I could do whatever I could to boost the knowledge I already had. That meant spending a lot of time in the library.

But the knowledge I gained would be useless if I had no resources to supplement it. As a poor orphan, I had no demon spirit coins to my name, so I would have to think of something that could help.

"Hmm, maybe something from Earth..."

For all their pride and strength, the civilisation here was very barbaric. There was no electricity or equivalent, most of the buildings were made out of wood, they didn't know what existed one or two hundred miles out from the city walls, food was still relatively plain, there was no soap, they had no-that's it!

Soap!

Purple Haze Grass became very popular among the women because of it's beautifying properties. I reckon scented soap could do the same. Not to mention it could clean pretty much everything else if tweaked properly.

I bring the recipe to the Alchemist Association, take a cut of the profit, and the money will never stop coming in!

What else could I introduce? Ethanol? Vodka?

Come to think of it, why can I remember how to produce these items? The soap and vodka were one thing since my dad decided to teach me those recently, but pure ethanol? I didn't particularly hate chemistry class, but I sure as hell shouldn't be able to remember how to produce ethanol from the fermentation of sugar.

Come to think of it, I remember a lot of things. With far too much clarity. As if it were a file in a computer.

Did my memory improve? This warranted investigation.

I knew of a plant eerily familiar to sugarcane in this world commonly call Green Root Shoot that was dried and used as feed for animals. I can acquire them for cheap, make sugar and ethanol, provide my findings and recipes to the Alchemy Association and make bank.

Vodka will prove an issue, though. As far as I know, there were no potatoes in Glory City. Not to mention that the Alchemy Association didn't sell booze, so it would have to be a personal business. Needing territory, start up capital and employees.

Guess it's gonna have to wait.

The gong signalling the end of lessons rang out in the background and everyone began filing out of the classroom.

I immediately made my way to the library building. Walking in, I couldn't help but respect the school's efforts. Collecting a library of a hundred thousand books could not have been easy, even if 90% of them were in ancient languages from previous eras that were almost impossible to translate.

Picking up a random book from one of the shelves, he saw that it was a book on inscriptions from the Snow Wind Empire era. Only the first 3 chapters were translated into the common tongue that everyone spoke, but it was the remaining portion that left him gobsmacked.

"It's Chinese! It's fucking Chinese!"

He ran back to the shelf and pulled out another book from this time period, a book detailing the structure of the human body and the purposes of various organs.

"It's really fucking Chinese!"

What did it mean for these books to be in Chinese? Around 70% of the books in the library are from the Snow Wind Empire era. With the 10% written in the common tongue, he had access to 80% of the literature in the library.

Who knows how many techniques and pills were deemed 'lost' because the source material couldn't be translated? This was a cash cow just begging to be milked by me.

"Well then, don't mind if I do."

I leafed through the book, annoyed at all the inconsistencies and mistakes I found inside. A Level biology was more accurate than this drivel in my hands.

Then I noticed that, even if I just skimmed the page, that I remembered absolutely everything inside. As if my eyes had taken a photo of the page.

"Oh my god, I have eidetic memory."

For so long have I wished to have such broken mental faculties. You could skim through a book in 2 minutes and remember its contents for life. Oh, how easy studies would have been if I had this sooner.

But this does explain why I can suddenly remember everything from my past life with such epic clarity and accuracy. But where did it come from? And how?

I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If my brain suddenly decided to become an overpowered hard drive, then I will milk it for all it's worth.

I leafed through as many books as I could until sunset. Inscriptions, alchemist recipes, historical journals, cultivation techniques; I absorbed all the knowledge I could. It was absolutely thrilling to have such a boosted mind. There was a simple joy in learning something you didn't know before and being able to learn it instantaneously.

This also meant that I found better cultivation techniques than the one given in class. It still wasn't any good, and should Reincarnated!Nie Li start marking any waves in class, I'd immediately get in with him and receive an epic cultivation technique.

But this will have to do for now. Beggars can't be chooses after all.

Among the books I read, there was a reference to the Daoyin Technique, which in that era was a basic requirement for all healers and doctors, sort of like the Mystical Palm Technique in Naruto.

"I could definitely use this. I treat Xiao Ning'er, and then I would have an in with a noble family. I could gain access to their resources. If things go south, I could go to them for protection (as long as it wasn't an entity too powerful for them to hand, like a major family). The downsides were that Xiao Ning'er may or may not latch on to me for saving her life, which would bring me into conflict with Shen Fei and the Sacred family.

"Would that really be such a bad thing? The Scared family are all a bunch of useless traitors who leave everyone here to die when their patriarch cant become the City Lord. I probably died in the demon riot in the first timeline as well.

"And about Xiao Ning'er, if she looks like she does now, she'll be a stunning beauty when she grows into her majority. Would it be such a bad thing to have the admiration of such a person at that point?

"Ah, fuck it. Let's do it."

Groooowl~

But first I'll need to get some food in me. I did end up skipping lunch, after all.

I walked to the cafeteria and got in line to receive my dinner for the day. I took my food and sat alone as I ate in silence. I hadn't managed to make any friends today, so I had no one to sit next to. But that didn't bother me.

I had bigger fish to fry.