Confucian and Taoist Cultivation Starting from the Equipment Slot

For the next period of time, Chen Zhuo stayed at home reading various scriptures and preparing for the imperial examination for the lowest degree.

Now that I've studied this much, I don't need to go to the Faculty of Arts every day anymore.

The School of Arts is more like a platform for exchanging ideas and resolving doubts, where everyone discusses the principles of literature and explores future development directions.

The Faculty of Arts only provides direction in the initial stages.

However, this does not mean that the function of the Faculty of Arts has changed.

It's just different for him; he's exposed to different things, so his level is different too.

There are still instructors teaching the students who are still in school and those who were not yet students.

Especially the classes before the elementary level, their level of diligence was several times stronger than that of the senior high school classes in the four provinces of the previous life.

Their daily routine consisted of burning the midnight oil and raising the rooster at dawn.

Chen Zhuo was also fortunate enough to teach them a few classes, of course, the content of which were his famous poems.

As for other things, he is only a student in the first year of high school and is not yet qualified to lead a class.

……

That day, Chen Zhuo and Gu Qing'e arrived at the foot of the city gate.

"Junior Sister, is this the Righteous Qi Stance?" Chen Zhuo asked uncertainly, pointing to a strangely shaped object.

"Of course!"

Gu Qing'e raised the square object in her hand.

"This is the cornerstone of the Great Wall of Righteousness. With this, we won't be constantly troubled by the long night. After all, Qingshan County has already become a superior county. If we continue to fight against the demons of the long night every day, it will hinder our development too much."

Chen Zhuo reached out and took a righteous spirit stake, placing it in a location according to the manual issued by the College of Arts.

He had heard of the Righteous Qi Pile before, just like his junior sister said, the cornerstone of the Righteous Qi Great Wall, low power, high strength.

It takes very little energy to build a barrier that can block out the long night.

However, due to various reasons such as the availability of materials, it is impossible to produce them in large quantities.

Moreover, even if such resources were available, priority would be given to supplying the two already well-developed domains, Zhengjing Domain and Zhongtian Domain.

Their Eastern Stone Domain is a newly opened domain, and can only supply a limited amount.

Previously, Qingshan County was not qualified, but now, due to its historical sites, it is barely qualified to apply for a batch of applications.

With this, they no longer need to worry about the disturbance of the long night.

With the sun high in the sky, May has arrived in the blink of an eye.

About a month has passed, and Chen Zhuo still hasn't received the exact date for the Xiucai examination.

He also asked his master, and the answer he received was both laughable and exasperating.

Upgrading a county town was merely a matter of issuing an imperial edict, while becoming a scholar required upgrading one's literary lineage as well.

The local cultural resources are insufficient, so we need to transfer cultural and artistic items from the capital region.

Qingshan County is just a remote county in the Eastern Stone Region, a hundred and eight thousand miles away from the capital region. Moreover, the official road has not yet been built, so the speed of their arrival is indeed a bit slow.

"Junior brother, don't worry. According to reliable sources, the official road to Wendao has been built to the area of ​​Qingshan County and will reach the county seat soon."

"With the blessing of literary energy, the journey from here to Shengtian Prefecture will be shortened from one month to about five days."

At this point, Gu Qing'e said with some eagerness:

"Junior brother, how about we go and investigate in person?"

Hearing Gu Qing'e's suggestion, Chen Zhuo was somewhat tempted. He had never seen what the official career path of a scholar was like.

Fortunately, I have nothing else to do right now.

"Reading ten thousand books is not as good as traveling ten thousand miles," Chen Zhuo readily agreed to the suggestion.

The two walked out of the city gate side by side.

The May sun shone on the rammed earth road, releasing a thin layer of earthy smell.

Many people left the city, including peddlers carrying loads and students carrying books.

Several soldiers from the Qingshan Army, dressed in short tunics, were carrying measuring tapes toward the construction site.

Chen Zhuo followed behind Gu Qing'e, observing the changes around him as they walked.

In the month or so since the end of the Long Night, the changes in the outer city have been greater than the entire month or so he spent during the Long Night.

Most of the shacks have been demolished and replaced by brick and wood shops under construction. The drainage ditches along the street have been dredged again, and the air no longer carries the damp, musty smell of the long nights.

"Junior brother, hurry up!"

Gu Qing'e turned around and urged him on, a palm-leaf fan suddenly appearing in her hand.

While fanning himself, he pointed ahead, "It's right there, do you see that patch of blue light?"

Chen Zhuo looked in the direction she pointed.

At the end of the official road, a very faint blue mist was rising from the horizon.

This was the same pillar of light he had seen before when he was guarding the city wall, but it was pointing straight up into the sky.

The luminous mist before us was close to the ground, spreading out along the official road and stretching to the horizon.

Upon closer inspection, it became clear that the luminous mist did not fall from the sky, but rather seeped from the ground.

A long trench was dug into the rammed earth roadbed of the official road.

Freshly turned yellow soil was piled up on both sides of the ditch, and more than a dozen workers dressed in matching short-sleeved tunics were working in the ditch.

They held specially made carving knives in their hands, carving something piece by piece along the bottom of the groove.

Chen Zhuo walked to the edge of the ditch and squatted down to look, and found that they were carving a set of complex and regular runes.

These symbols were much larger than the patterns he drew on the official documents; each mark was as wide as a thumb, and the lines extended seamlessly along the direction of the official road.

After the runes were carved, someone carried a bucket of viscous liquid that shimmered with a bluish light and carefully applied it along the carved lines with a brush.

As the liquid seeped into the engravings, the runes glowed slightly before settling down and emitting a very faint cyan halo.

"This is the foundation of the official path of civil service."

A voice came from the side.

Chen Zhuo turned his head and saw a middle-aged man dressed in a scholar's robe, holding a roll of blueprints, directing workers to lay out the runes at the fork in the road on the other side.

His scholar's robe was covered in yellow dust, and the cuffs were rolled up to his elbows, making him look more like a construction foreman than a professor at the Academy of Arts.

"My surname is He, and I am the construction team leader dispatched by the Shengtian Prefecture Official Road Office to Qingshan County."

The middle-aged man cupped his hands in greeting. "This official road has been laid all the way from Shengtian Prefecture, taking four months. Only this last section outside Qingshan County remains. We'll finish up tomorrow, and it will be officially completed in a week at the latest."

"Once completed, it will only take five days to get from here to Shengtian Mansion?"

Suddenly, a bystander asked a question.

Team leader He said with a smile, "To be precise, it's four and a half days."

He unfolded the blueprints, pointed to the glowing blue band of light in the middle of the official road, and said to the onlookers:

"The principle of the official road is actually not complicated. The symbols on the roadbed form a complete circulation of literary energy."

When the carriage travels on the official road, the wheels roll over the layer of spiritual energy on the road surface, and the talismanic loops will automatically inject spiritual energy into the horses' bodies, reducing the horses' burden.

The same journey takes a month on the ordinary official road and five days on the scholar's official road.

But the consumption is also high.

Every year, the cost of maintaining the runes along this official road is over a hundred pieces of jade, not including the wages of the rune-carving craftsmen and the construction costs of the Qi replenishment stations.

Qingshan County benefited from the historical site; the imperial court allocated special funds for its construction. Otherwise, the county's finances alone wouldn't have been enough to repair such a road.