The second time was in a taxi, where he casually chatted with the driver about things like education, stocks, and so on. After getting out, he didn’t notice any increase in his causality points from the newspaper fragment, not until he was about to return home and “accidentally” dropped a one-hundred-yuan bill on the ground. This time, his causality points increased by one… That ratio was rather alarming. If one causality point equaled one hundred yuan, then this Dao De Jing had cost him seven hundred thousand yuan—and that’s assuming every hundred yuan could definitely buy one causality point; otherwise, the cost might be even higher.

Therefore, causality points are extremely important and also very hard to obtain. This was the conclusion Eric Turner reached, and at the same time, he came to another conclusion… that little girl was unusual! Otherwise, how could he have gained over ten thousand causality points just for saving one person? Even with all kinds of news reports, it shouldn’t be possible. There was only one explanation… that little girl was of great significance, at least influencing the futures of many people, so by saving her, he had indirectly changed the futures of many others.

But let’s set that aside for now. Precisely because he realized the importance and rarity of causality points, he had already decided to set a standard: only use causality points if the situation exceeded that threshold; otherwise, he would try to save up as many as possible. Who knows, maybe in the future they could save his life. For problems like searching for hidden images or text in books, he planned to try a bit more on his own first.

(Since there was no hidden layer or code, the most likely possibility was that some special liquid had been used to write secret text on the pages. There are also methods that reveal writing with water or heat, or perhaps other liquids. Judging by how old and worn this Dao De Jing was, he decided to try heating it first. If nothing appeared, then he’d use causality points. As for soaking it in water and such, he’d rather not risk destroying it and regretting it later.)

With his mind made up, Eric Turner quickly took a candle from the drawer, lit it, then untied the white string in the middle of the Dao De Jing and took out the pages one by one. He began carefully heating each page over the flame, testing them one after another. This time, he wasn’t disappointed—on about a dozen pages, the original text gradually faded, revealing a different set of words.

These secret writings were by two people. One called himself Wanderer, and wrote descriptions about internal energy, mostly using alchemy and scripture terminology. It all sounded extremely mysterious; aside from a few illustrations that were quite vivid, the descriptions only made Eric Turner even more doubtful, even to the point of thinking that internal energy was simply impossible.

The second person’s writing was much simpler. Although still in classical Chinese, it included some modern grammar. This person called himself Overseas Wanderer, one of the very few overseas returnee students in modern times. In his writing, he marveled at his own luck in accidentally inheriting the teachings of an ancient master. Especially in his descriptions of internal energy, he incorporated modern scientific understanding, making it much more comprehensive than Wanderer’s account. At the end of his essay, he even referenced other articles by Wanderer. According to those, martial arts did indeed exist in ancient China, but as the methods for cultivating internal energy were gradually lost, people became extremely skeptical of the increasingly mysterious internal energy, until it eventually disappeared completely and people finally denied its existence altogether.

“According to what’s written here, the so-called ‘qi’ is actually a manifestation of blood circulation, because blood contains energy—or rather, the human body contains energy, most of which circulates via the blood. The first step is to train the body until you can control the flow of blood, then combine breathing, blood flow, and physical training to generate a sense of qi within the body, and thus control the internal energy to condense internal force… That actually sounds plausible, and it fits human physiology much better than all that mysterious alchemy stuff.”

Eric Turner nodded to himself. He memorized the illustrations deeply, then committed to memory all the training precautions, breathing rhythms, blood flow patterns, the methods for training after generating a sense of qi, and the details of how to control internal energy. Strangely enough, he had been exceptionally intelligent since birth, with a photographic memory—anything he remembered, he would never forget, no matter how much time passed. This was his innate talent.

After memorizing everything, Eric Turner suddenly remembered to check the name of this internal energy technique. When he saw it, he almost burst out laughing—the name was “The Supreme Art of the Eight Desolations and Six Harmonies, I Alone Am Sovereign”… The name was certainly imposing, but he distinctly remembered it appearing in a martial arts novel before. Could it be that the author had actually practiced this internal energy technique?