Chapter 24 The Art of Courtship
When Jiang Han returned to his room, his phone was fully charged. It was only when he turned it on to surf the web, did he realise that it was the fifth day of the golden week holidays. Furthermore, today was already coming to an end. Jiang Han did not expect that this short closed door cultivation session of his had took 4 days.
Jiang Han did not feel the passage of time when he trained. Moreover, he was merely at the early stage of Qi Absorption. Generally speaking, after Qi Absorption was Qi Refining, and then after that should be something like Core Formation and Nascent Soul. Wouldn’t the closed door training for these realms requires 10 or so years, maybe even tens of years. After all, there are no such thing as a free lunch, cultivation required an investment of time.
Jiang Han wasn’t too bothered with his breakthrough failure this time. He told himself that he could only succeed by the sweat of his own brow. Furthermore, he had gained an insight into several helpful ideas from this experience and he felt that his next attempt would go a lot smoother. After he recovered his energy and spirit and try a couple more times, he felt that he was bound to succeed.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t continue right now as his current condition wasn’t optimal. His state of mind was drained and it require some time to recover. He lied down on his bed and then noticed that there were quite a few unread messages and notifications. He opened these up and began to go through them on at a time.
Jiang Han opened his friends’ social media feeds and discovered multiple activity & postings from Yang Mengjiao and Liu Xing. Their travels looked like it was pretty exciting and a lot of fun. They even tagged Jiang Han in a couple of them, and there was even a discussion among them.
“ @JiangHanTheForgotten : Junior, you will regret not coming along on this trip for at least three days because you missed the look on seniors face as we climbed the mountain.”
Following that message was an exchange of teases from Liu Xing and the bunch. This interaction was made a couple of days ago but Jiang Han had only just saw it, thus it was meaningless for him to respond to it now. He continued to scroll down to find a post by Su Yuxin.
There were a couple of pictures with picturesque backgrounds and some very elegant looking infrastructures. One glanced and you could tell that it wasn’t your typical vacation spot. There was even a family picture, but only Su Yuxin who had a big wide smile on her face was visible, her parents face were obscure.
Jiang Han wrote a respond to one of these post, “That looks pretty good, are you having fun?” and just as he was about to hit send when suddenly Taling stopped him.
“Stop stop stop. Look at that, would you look at that. Big brother, I, looked away for a second and look at you. What on earth are you trying to send? What is this?”
Jiang Han was stunned, he took another look at what he had just typed. It looked good, a rather ordinary reply but there are no problems and no typos either.
“What’s wrong?”
“Aih, this smelly pleb. A look at you and it’s obvious that you rarely ever respond to this sort of thing. How long do you plan on hanging on to this Michelin sign?” Taling jumped on top of the phone’s screen with a painful look on his face.
(t/s: no idea what the reference to Michelin meant. If anyone does, could you explain it in the comments please.)
“Speak properly. I’ve become a pleb just by sending a reply, what sort of logic is that?” Jiang Han did not know how to deal with this worm. He previously tried but he couldn’t even hit nor catch it, even his telekinesis was useless against him, this was why he was so unbridled with his response.
“I did not say that responding made you a pleb, I said that you are a smelly pleb.” Taling wasn’t polite at all, and he didn’t care if Jiang Han accepted it or not.
“Look at that post, I’ll articulate and you’ll type, ‘The environment’s very chic, but your face is too big, blocking out most of the scenery. Terrible quality /baiy’ then hit send. Taling saw that Jiang Han was full of doubts and shook his head. He looked like a teacher who was looking at a student disapprovingly.
“Do I really need to respond like this, I don’t think her face is big, and what does /baiy even mean? Stop messing with me.” Jiang Han typed out what Taling said word for word, but no matter how he looked at it, he felt that it was inappropriate.
“Who cares if her face is big or small, as long as she has a face. Why don’t you say that she did not block out the scenery.” Talong anxiously jumped up. This student of his had a brain made of wood, “/baiy is qq’s (1) supercilious look emoticon, but it does not appear as an emoticon on wechat’s messages. This is common sense, just your everyday common sense my friend.”
(t/s: FYI, that supercilious look emoticon is )
“Then isn’t it better to just send the actual emoticon? Why send one that doesn’t appear, furthermore she wouldn’t necessarily know what it means.” Jiang Han had a different outlook on the matter as compared to Taling, it made no sense to him.
“If she is interested in you, then she would look it up on Baidu (2), she might even try sending emoticon in code. This would inadvertently become a sort of unique interaction between you two. It’s much better than just sending a plain emoticon as her impression of you would be much deeper.” Taling snorted and in the end chose to explain it to Jiang Han.
The Shaman’s Legacy had caused Jiang Han’s brain domain to develop to an unprecedented state. This sort of logic and principles wasn’t a very complicated matter to begin with and thus Jiang Han was able to understand it rather quickly. This was it, now everything made sense.
Jiang Han didn’t need Taling to explain the flip side. If the other party wasn’t interested in him at all, then no matter what he send, it would be meaningless. If this was the case, then wouldn’t it be better to send her the emoticon code to grab her attention a little. Jiang Han looked at Taling, courtship, even such a simple action could have such in-depth study. He had no idea how much research and understanding this little worm had on this topic.
Only after sending that message did Jiang Han realise he didn’t understand why he listened to Taling’s advice, he definitely did not thought of Su Yuxin that way. Despite what Jiang Han may have thought, he could not hide how his heart truly felt from Taling’s all-seeing eye, who just smiled without saying anything. Regardless of what he said, Jiang Han had already sent the message, who would believe him if he said he had never thought about it.
It didn’t take long before he received a reply. A quick look indicated that it was indeed from Su Yuxin, its content was “/baiy””/baiy??baiy” a string of similar looking codes could be seen, Jiang Han was a little surprise and looked at Taling, “So mysterious?”
As he said that, his phone lit up again, it was her again, “Senior, what does that mean. It looks like a code for an emoticon, but how come it doesn’t show up?”
Jiang Han picked up his phone and was about to answer her when suddenly Taling stopped him, “Don’t rush, wait for three to five minutes. Let her check it out on baidu before answering her.”
Jiang Han followed Taling’s train of thoughts and instantly understood his reasoning. This was like playing those dating simulators, except that it really did work. Jiang Han covered his face, how much more did this little worm know.
After a few minutes, Jiang Han followed Taling’s advice and sent Su Yuxin a message, explaining the meaning behind the code. As expected, Su Yuxin had already found out the reason and with the topic open, she started conversing with Jiang Han.
“The first step of online chatting, is to create a topic of discussion. Learn well, brat.” After that, Taling jumped off the phone’s screen and disappeared.
While they conversed, Su Yuxin told him that she would return to the city tomorrow with her parents. After that, she would prepare to head back to the university in the afternoon. Jiang Han who was seemingly influenced by Taling, had a spark of inspiration and replied “I’ll see you off.”
Su Yuxin was naturally happy to see this few words. But she was immediately a little suspicious, it was surprising that this senior of hers could think of such a thing. The Jiang Han in her mind was not that sensitive nor understanding.
Regardless, it was a good thing and so she agreed to it.
t/s notes:
qq, to quote Wikipedia,“Baidu, Inc. incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese web services company headquartered at the Baidu Campus in Beijing’s Haidian District. It is one of the largest Internet companies in the world.
As of 2006, Baidu provided an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu offers multimedia content including MP3 music, and movies, and is the first in China to offer Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and personal digital assistant (PDA)-based mobile search.
The company also hosts a music service, called Baidu Music, that has more than 150 million monthly active users. On December 4, 2015, Baidu announced plans to merge with Taihe Entertainment Group to help the service compete with Apple Inc.’s Apple Music, which Apple plans to make available in China.”