Chapter 634: The Crowded Bed
Song Qingshu was utterly confused about why Wu Yunzhu was sneaking around. Shaking his head, he lamented that he was too old to keep up with the whims of young girls, and walked over to open the door.
“It’s you?” Seeing the young girl in purple at the doorway, Song Qingshu was a bit surprised. He had been debating whether to lie to Suo Etu about his daughter’s whereabouts or lie some more.
“Who else could it be?” Ah Zi’s eyes sparkled as she poked her head in and glanced around. “Master, are you perhaps waiting for another girl?”
“Ridiculous,” Song Qingshu’s face grew hot as he subtly blocked her view, coughing lightly. “What brings you here so late?”
Ah Zi closed the door stealthily and approached him, pulling out a booklet from her bosom with great care. She offered it up like a treasure. “Master, this is the Marrow Cleansing Scripture that I swapped out earlier.”
Casually flipping through the thin manual, Song Qingshu’s expression shifted.
In his past life, there were frequent discussions online about how to reverse the Mongolian domination in the Southern Song Dynasty if one were transmigrated as Guo Jing. He had thought about distributing manuals like the ‘Nine Yin Scripture’ and ‘Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms’ as training materials for soldiers. Leading an army of masters proficient in supreme martial arts would surely crush the Mongols effortlessly.
However, now that he had actually transmigrated into a wuxia world, he realized the plan had significant issues. First was secrecy—if so many people learned these skills, it was inevitable some would leak the techniques to the Mongols. Then, the enemy would also possess these powers, negating the advantage. Second was discipline—an army’s effectiveness lies in obedience. Regular soldiers could be drilled, but if every soldier mastered martial arts, they’d become unruly. An undisciplined battlefield of rogue masters would fare worse than well-trained ordinary troops.
These problems, while vexing, weren’t the root issue. The core problem was that even if the manuals were handed out, the soldiers couldn’t learn them. Literacy was rare in this era, limited mostly to scholars pursuing civil service through imperial exams. Soldiers were mostly uneducated brutes, and asking them to learn top-tier martial arts was akin to asking a modern farmer to solve differential equations—it was impossible. Thus, while Song Qingshu had long considered distributing martial arts techniques, he never found a feasible solution.