Chapter 90: The Rich List

When he practiced the extreme yoga sequence, he tried using the breathing method taught by the old man. After a few movements, it seemed to work a little, but not nearly as well as he had hoped. He was puzzled.

At that moment, the old man cursed again, “Are you stupid? Don’t you know how to apply one thing in many ways? The breathing method I taught you goes with the Ghost-Step Lotus, but what you are practicing now is yoga, not the Ghost-Step Lotus. You use the Ghost-Step Lotus breathing method for yoga and expect it to fit? Just like can a cow pair with a sheep, can a donkey pair with a horse? Stupid, truly hopelessly stupid. Don’t ever say I taught you if you go out there.”

Chen Meng stared at the furious old man, a little dumbfounded.

Putting aside cows and sheep, why exactly couldn’t a donkey pair with a horse? Otherwise, where would a mule come from?

But why was the old man so angry? He had never been like this before. Maybe it was because this time Chen Meng had not paid.

He stood up, walked to the door, looked at the QR code there, now already covered in dust, wiped it clean, and directly transferred two thousand yuan to the old man.

"Payment received: 2000 yuan."

The moment the old man heard the notification, his expression changed at once. He had been full of rage a moment ago, but now he was smiling like a chrysanthemum.

Yan Ruoxi was also left speechless by the scene. What sort of people were these two, anyway?

“Old man, now what do you think of my practice?” Chen Meng asked with a smile.

“Well done, very well done, full of talent. If you can be a little more flexible, that would be even better,” the old man said kindly. “When you practice, you must learn to adjust your breathing rhythm according to your own breathing and circulation of blood and vitality, relying on your own sensations. As for how to adjust your breathing, try it a few more times. I haven’t practiced this yoga thing myself, so you’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

“Oh, then I’ll try again,” Chen Meng said, and he began to alter his breathing rhythm according to his feelings.

“Good, very good. I can feel your blood and vitality are much calmer than before. You’re really too clever, practically a little genius,” the old man said solemnly, as though Chen Meng truly were a genius, and no one knew who had just been calling him stupid.

Yan Ruoxi stopped practicing as well. She began watching Chen Meng train.

The breathing method the old man mentioned had also piqued her curiosity, though judging from the old man’s attitude, it was uncertain whether he would teach it to her.

“Mm, that’s enough. I didn’t expect that after only a hundred-plus attempts, you’d already found the most suitable breathing method for this yoga posture. As expected of my disciple,” the old man praised.

By then Chen Meng had also stopped. He could feel that when he performed the movement at the end, he no longer had that same sense of blocked breathing and surging blood and vitality as before. More importantly, his digestion progress had increased by another 0.002 percent this time, more than any of the other movements had improved before.

Sure enough, there really was a trick to this.

“I want to learn that breathing method too,” Yan Ruoxi said at last, looking at Chen Meng.

“Sure, I’ll teach you later,” Chen Meng said after thinking it over. The old man did not say anything either; after all, this was something Chen Meng had figured out himself.

…

Before long, Saturday arrived.

After three days of research, Chen Meng and Yan Ruoxi still had not tried every single movement. They had only tested a hundred and nineteen of them, with ten left.

Among those one hundred and nineteen movements, Chen Meng had confirmed that fifty-four were useful. As for the others, it was not necessarily true that they were useless; perhaps he simply had not held out long enough. But Chen Meng had no intention of wasting time on these slow-acting movements.

Because he had things to do these two days. Today he had to go tutor Tang Wenjing in rune studies, and tomorrow he had to work at the shooting range. For him, both were ways of making money, so naturally he could not skip either. More importantly, he had no money left on him now. The last bit had all been transferred to the old man yesterday, and the wages from his last day at the shooting range still had not been paid. As for Tang Wenjing’s tutoring, that was paid daily too—he would only get money after the tutoring session. He wondered if they were guarding against him, like someone who takes a free meal and then refuses to work after taking the money.

Money was tied to knowledge points, and of course the more the better.

It was seven in the morning now, and the tutoring time he had agreed on with Tang Wenjing was from eight to twelve in the morning and two to six in the afternoon, with a two-hour break in between. Of course, it was not he who needed the break, but Tang Wenjing.

Tang Wenjing lived in a very remote area. Or rather, not exactly remote—there were just so many rich people there that very few would ever take a bus, so there wasn’t a bus stop within a kilometer of the place.

Helpless, Chen Meng could only take a taxi there himself.

He had always been quite fond of taxi drivers, but the one he met today was not very talkative. After Chen Meng got in, the driver basically said nothing and just drove in silence.

Chen Meng found it a little boring, and the driver apparently noticed, so he turned on the radio.

After turning through several stations, the driver found one broadcasting the news, and it was currently reporting on Han Hao’s previous arrest of the Huang family.

At the end, the reporter once again condemned the atrocities of the Crescent Moon Cult, while warning citizens to cherish life and stay away from the cult.

Chen Meng only gave a faint scoff at that. If not for the Crescent Moon Cult’s resources, who would be willing to join it and become a street rat?

He listened to a few more news items, then suddenly heard one that caught his interest.

“The latest rich list has been released. The top ten richest people in Jiangzhou all have fortunes exceeding one hundred billion yuan. Among them, Madam Shen Man of Thousand Spirit Pharmaceuticals, as the only woman in Jiangzhou’s top ten, ranks seventh on the Jiangzhou rich list with a net worth of 126.3 billion yuan, and 768th nationwide. As the Earth continues to expand, resources on Earth continue to increase, and as we continually extract resources from the primordial wilderness, companies with market values in the hundreds of billions and trillions are becoming more and more common. Globally, the number of companies valued at over one trillion yuan has now surpassed one hundred. However, according to statistics, although wealth continues to grow, more than ninety percent of it is in the hands of divine-body beings. This has left sociologists deeply worried, as more and more signs suggest that divine-body beings will become a new class, and the living space of ordinary people will be further compressed…”

Hearing this, Chen Meng also felt it deeply.

It seemed that people in this world had become richer, but the wealth was all concentrated in the hands of those at the very top. Ordinary people like his parents were still living a very tight life.

The driver also seemed to empathize, sighing. “It’s too easy for divine-body beings to make money. Some powerful divine-body experts can just go to the primordial wilderness once and easily earn several million. Sure, they’re earning with their lives, but they earn too much. People like us ordinary folks couldn’t make that much in a lifetime. Damn this society, does it even want people to live?”

Chen Meng wanted to comfort the driver, but now that he himself had become a divine-body being, any comfort he offered would only sound ironic.

He could only sigh helplessly. Take himself, for instance: how much did his parents earn from a month of work, and yet he made more in a single day of part-time work at the shooting range than they did in a whole month. Who could one even reason with about that?

Wealth gathering around divine-body beings was already an unstoppable trend, unless everyone could be turned into a divine-body being.

Of course, that was not what Chen Meng cared about right now. He was drawn in by the name Shen Man. Seventh on the Jiangzhou rich list, worth 126.3 billion yuan—what kind of money was that? If he had that much, would he still need to worry about knowledge points? He wondered whether she was lacking a son. But from what Tang Wenjing had said, her mother seemed to have only one daughter, so she probably was.