Chapter 1618: Chapter 71: Hiring a Tutor

“It’s not going very smoothly.”

Tang Luo said with a troubled expression, “Originally, I thought the first batch of students would be at most a hundred or eighty, but the number of children who stayed reached several thousands, which expanded the anticipated scale by dozens of times.”

“Isn’t having more students a good thing if you’re running a school?”

Yun Xiu asked in surprise, “Moreover, with your martial arts cultivation, it’s not just young children you can teach; even if they come from the Mortal Realm or Fierce Realm, you can still teach them, can’t you?”

In her opinion, Tang Luo’s martial arts accomplishments were not much inferior to Sacred Land Sect Masters or Human Kings, who often preached to three or eight thousand martial practitioners from the Fierce Realm. Her husband was merely teaching a group of youths, so how difficult could that be?

“If they really were students from the Mortal Realm or Fierce Realm, that would be good; let alone thousands, I could teach tens of thousands.”

Tang Luo smiled bitterly, “In that case, I’d just have to speak grandly and elucidate the principles clearly, each listener would gain insight on their own accord, the difference would only be a matter of more or less. But it’s different with young children. Most of them are from poor backgrounds, with no foundation in martial arts or any understanding of it, to the point that they can’t even recognize characters. Moreover, due to long periods of insufficient clothing and food, their growth has been delayed, and their bodies are weak; an eight or nine-year-old child often has the stature of a five or six-year-old from a noble family. But these aren’t even the most difficult issues.”

“There are more difficulties?”

Yun Xiu expressed her astonishment.

“Learning varies from person to person; some are faster, some are slower. Among thousands of pupils starting together, it won’t take three months to see them divided into tiers.”

Tang Luo worried, “And you know, with this group of students, I was thinking of trying new Foundation Building techniques. When the time comes, and their progress differs, we naturally need to divide them into classes and grades, and then finding the right teachers becomes a big problem.”

“This… I don’t know much about martial arts matters, but I believe that if it’s you, my dear husband, there won’t be a problem!”

The woman looked up at the man beside her, her eyes glittering like stars without cease.

…

There are no ditches in front of a fierce tiger, but for the timid, every step holds a pitfall.

An explosive increase in students could be a big or a small matter, and could be easy to deal with if the scarcity of instructors was resolved.

But the question is where to find so many qualified teachers.

Martial arts schools are naturally the most obvious choice, and since the Lingjiang Seven Cities have just experienced turmoil, most martial arts schools are in a state of seclusion. At this time, extending an olive branch might attract a large number of idle martial arts instructors.

From nourishing these young children with nutrients to teaching them literacy, there’s roughly half a year’s window, which is enough time for Tang Luo to implement his plan.

So, the next day, Tang Luo had the three elders of the Du Family organize people to specifically look for closed martial arts schools in the Lingjiang Seven Cities and to issue recruitment offers.

Meanwhile, he himself began focusing on the research of Foundation Building techniques.

His trip to the Nanshan Legal Realm gave him many new ideas about Foundation Building techniques, especially ‘Meditation and Subtlety’ and ‘Diamond Entering Wisdom’ – two pure meditative and breathing techniques for Foundation Building, which made his thoughts gush forth like a spring.

In fact, from a practical perspective, commoners are more suited for these non-body strengthening Foundation Building techniques because pure breathing exercises and meditation can save a considerable amount of costs at the Foundation Building stage.

“The children half-grown, the father’s wallet blown.”

The reason tuition fees are so high in martial arts schools is precisely that these children, who are laying the foundation, eat extraordinarily much.

Don’t take for granted that the thirty-six Innate Dao Map diagrams are basic, but those standard beast-like postures can nearly exercise all muscles and meridians throughout the body.

After correction and modification, ordinary disciples will be drenched in sweat after practicing for just half an hour, and after seven or eight cycles a day, come mealtime, they’re all as hungry as a starved ghost reincarnate. If the tuition fees weren’t raised, how could martial arts schools afford to feed these youngsters?

Of course, all things have two sides like yin and yang; a disciple whose foundation is built according to the thirty-six Innate Dao Map diagrams can almost adapt to all types of human-level, Yellow Rank techniques.

However, a Foundation Building completed solely through meditation and breathing exercises, if one wishes to practice martial arts involving fists, feet, knives, or spears, not only must they endure the suffering of stretching and opening their hips all over again, but the control over their bodies will also fall short.

People’s perceptions often face the constraints of reality, after all, not everyone possesses the vast arrays of spell laws and secret skills like those in Buddha’s Country.

Ordinary solitary cultivators, even if they reach the levels of Mortal Realm or Fierce Realm, still value fists and kicks as an important part of their martial arts. If they build their foundation purely through meditation and breathing, then they would lose a great deal of their martial capabilities.

But looking at the bigger picture, Tang Luo favored the meditation and breathing techniques, because for commoner cultivators, body refinement held absolutely no future.

How much resources are needed to create a robust body?

For the moment, let’s not talk about Foundation Building. Once reaching the Mortal Realm, one would have to pile up nutrition from Spiritual Food and beast meat and enhance their meridians through medicinal baths.

Upon reaching the Mortal Realm, the supply of Spiritual Food needs to increase, and ingestions of medicinal pills are to begin.

Moving further up, it becomes a contest between body-strengthening secret techniques. But even if techniques of the caliber of Undying Battle Body were given to a commoner cultivator, gathering enough resources for one person’s cultivation could likely take the accumulated efforts of several generations to become possible.

And to be honest, merely achieving a ninth or eighth grade Undying Battle Body, speaking in terms of overall combat power enhancement, didn’t improve a martial practitioner as much as ordinary killing methods or secret techniques.

The strength of Undying Battle Body truly starts to show after reaching the fifth grade and opening the Divine Storage, but the vast majority of cultivators may never achieve the fifth grade in their lifetime.

From this perspective, maybe for commoner cultivators, building their foundation through meditation and breathing exercises is the right way, after all, this is an era that belongs to Spirit Arts.

“So let’s set the first class of Foundation Building courses on meditation and breathing methods!”

With the scale of several thousand students, Tang Luo wouldn’t just research one set of Foundation Building techniques; he wanted to exhaust all martial knowledge in the shortest possible time and create as many Foundation Building techniques as possible.