He showed the small stone to Peter Thompson for a moment, then gently squeezed it and crushed it!

“If you want to learn, wait for me here at five o’clock tomorrow morning,” said George Grant. Then, full of energy, he turned off North Mountain Road onto a winding path. Before Peter Thompson could react, George Grant had already disappeared.

Peter Thompson followed the path and soon saw a yellow brick-and-stone archway. On either side of the archway were the words “Embracing Simplicity” and “Daoist Temple,” while the horizontal plaque read “Ge Ridge.” Behind the archway was a stone staircase leading straight up to an ancient cluster of Daoist temples, halfway up Ge Ridge.

This was the Ge Ridge Embracing Simplicity Daoist Temple, one of the three major Daoist temples in Hangzhou, named after the famous Eastern Jin Daoist Henry Grant, who practiced cultivation, gathered herbs, and healed the people here. The other two famous Daoist temples in Hangzhou are the Yellow Dragon Daoist Temple and the Jade Emperor Daoist Temple.

And so, Peter Thompson became a disciple of George Grant and began his cultivation.

Chapter Three: The Third Kind of Person

During the day, the hours of Zi, Wu, Mao, and You are the best times for cultivation. Zi hour is from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., which is unrealistic for Peter Thompson, who lives on campus. So Peter Thompson’s cultivation times are during Wu, Mao, and You hours. For Wu and You hours, Peter Thompson chose to practice in the sparsely populated Tiesha River Riverside Park, while for Mao hour, he went to Ge Ridge to practice with George Grant. Except on rainy days, Peter Thompson had persisted in his cultivation for more than three years.

The “Longevity Technique” is a very mysterious cultivation method. According to legend, if one reaches the twelfth level, one can fly, escape the earth, and achieve immortality.

Although Peter Thompson had only been cultivating for just over three and a half years, he felt as light as a swallow and as strong as an ox, and he hadn’t been sick once in all that time. What amazed Peter Thompson the most was that ever since he started practicing the “Longevity Technique,” he had clearly felt that not only had his memory improved greatly, but his thinking had also become much sharper.

Because of this, and combined with Peter Thompson’s diligence, even though Peter Thompson was both studying and working part-time, and still set aside about four hours a day for practice, he consistently ranked first in his class.

Peter Thompson’s undergraduate major was Applied Chemistry, which included several notoriously difficult courses, one of which was Structural Chemistry. This subject not only had extremely complicated formulas, but even the derivation processes were very complex—sometimes even the professors would get lost in the middle of a derivation. Yet Peter Thompson scored a perfect mark in this course, memorizing every complex formula without missing a single one, unlike other students who only remembered the few formulas the teacher emphasized for the exam. This shows just how powerful Peter Thompson’s memory and thinking were. Of course, Peter Thompson was also naturally intelligent and hardworking; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to get into Dongfang University, which consistently ranks among the top five in China.

Peter Thompson sat quietly under a willow tree for an hour, gently exhaled a breath of turbid air, then finished his practice and stood up, riding his bicycle back to campus.

Back at school, Peter Thompson returned to his dorm to get a book and went to evening self-study. Since it was summer vacation, the library was closed at night, so Peter Thompson had to go to the teaching building.

The large lecture hall was empty; during summer break, very few students studied this diligently.

Peter Thompson found a seat under a ceiling fan. Although he had practiced the “Longevity Technique” and had become much more resistant to heat and cold, the hot summer night still made him feel that a breezy spot helped him get into study mode more quickly.

Peter Thompson was reading about polymer materials, a very profound book written by an American professor. It was somewhat related to his graduate studies, but Peter Thompson didn’t actually have to study it. After all, every field has its own specialization, but Peter Thompson believed that being too specialized would limit his future research horizons and cause him to miss out on many unexpected insights. So while mastering his own field, he made a habit of spending some time reading related books.

There was a joke circulating on campus: there are three kinds of people in the world—men, women, and female PhD students.

Outstanding men would never pursue female PhD students, because they were already taken. Less outstanding men didn’t dare pursue female PhD students, because the aura surrounding them made these men feel inferior. Whether outstanding or not, men generally didn’t want to go after female PhD students for several common reasons: first, you couldn’t expect much from their looks—statistically, the odds of being both talented and beautiful are very low; second, a woman willing to endure loneliness and study all the way to a PhD makes people worry either about her mental state or that her personality is too strong to be controlled… And finally, there are very few male PhD students in the world, and even fewer single ones. So female PhD students became the third kind of person that nobody wanted.

Emily Lane was just such a female PhD student—a third kind of person with black-rimmed glasses. But she was a beautiful PhD student, with a tall figure and a delicate yet spirited face—though most people took that for a kind of coldness.

She was in the Environmental Science Department, in the same college as Peter Thompson but a different department.