Chapter 61: Summary of the Week’s Changes

Chapter 61: Chapter 61: Summary of the Week’s Changes

Chen Jingle had no interest in Sakura Girls. To put it bluntly: "The internet’s stereotype of Sakura Girls being gentle, sweet, and submissive is just to satisfy the fantasies of otaku who love watching anime. In reality, those who are pretty, have a good figure, and a good temper are ultimately the vast minority." And they definitely wouldn’t end up with an otaku anyway!

Sakura Girls were just as realistic and materialistic as domestic girls, if not more so. After all, they were the early adopters of that mindset. That kind of wild fantasy plot like *Foreign Beauty Falls in Love with Ordinary, Poor Me* would most likely only happen in dreams. Even anime and manga didn’t popularize that genre anymore.

The netizens in the comments section were sour with jealousy over Chen Jingle’s interactions with Sakura Girls, little knowing that this was merely a part of his learning process.

"Just keep talking big. When it’s time to learn, you don’t. If it comes to truly opening your eyes to the world, it won’t be your turn," Chen Jingle muttered, curling his lips.

Setting aside the rather unique core motivation involving Sakura Girls, whether it was for job hunting, understanding another country’s culture, or simply wanting to improve one’s personal knowledge, any reason could serve as the driving force to learn a new language. The issue was that if you wanted to learn quickly, it depended on whether you treated it as a language or as an academic subject. The difference between the two lay in the learning methods and areas of application.

If the content of English and Japanese exams were switched to Chinese exams of equal difficulty, many people could easily score high marks, because everyone was just too familiar with the language. They were so familiar with it that even without receiving higher education, and without knowing grammar concepts like subject, predicate, object, attributive, adverbial, and complement, they could still get most of the questions right.

Since that was the case, Chen Jingle felt that he could completely skip the grammar study phase. He would first use a language environment to learn, and once he had mastered the language, he would then take exams and study the so-called grammar. That way, his scores wouldn’t be too bad.

Conversely, if he learned purely to take exams, he would most likely only be able to apply it in the exam setting and wouldn’t be able to truly master a language. Many people thought that there was no good language environment in the country, but this idea was wrong. Today, with the internet being so developed, any video medium could serve as a language environment. When you could listen to characters speaking in a video without needing to read the subtitles, it meant your language proficiency had leveled up.

In the past, to learn English well, Chen Jingle had watched his fair share of *Peppa Pig* and *Family Guy*. Similarly, today, as he learned Japanese, he not only interacted with foreign friends in the comment sections but also watched *Monday Night’s Not Over Yet* and *Can I follow you home?*. Because what he wanted to learn was a language, not an academic subject. Just memorizing vocabulary without understanding the culture behind the language made it impossible to truly learn a language.

***

[Awesome job, baby! You have successfully completed the learning task. Reward: Removal of one black mole on your arm.]

The first knowledge study class ended. Chen Jingle stretched out of habit, picked up the water cup on the table, and took a sip. At the same time, he pondered over the system’s reward of removing a black mole. Previously, as he grew older, more and more grain-sized black and red moles had appeared on his body. Although it was hard for outsiders to notice them without looking closely, he knew his own body better than anyone and was acutely aware of any changes in every area.

"If we’re talking about impact, it isn’t really a big deal. If we’re talking about being ugly, they aren’t exactly eyesores," he murmured. But they still made him uncomfortable. He had gone to see a doctor, and the doctor said it was normal—a common phenomenon during the human body’s aging process.

Aging!! A familiar yet foreign term. Chen Jingle was stunned. He spaced out for a brief moment, followed by a long sigh, taking quite a while before he finally came to terms with it.

Sure enough, no one could resist the erosion of time, even if he still felt young at heart. But the fact that he was already over thirty was an objective reality. It was to the point where Chen Jingle once thought, "That young Chen Jingle, harboring ideals and brimming with fighting spirit, might have died a long time ago. What we’re seeing now is just the slow rotting process of his corpse."

When a person hung out with friends and no longer talked about ideals and beliefs, no longer beamed with high-spirited ambition, but instead thought about how to increase their income and buy a house and a car, they were already a completely different person from their past self. Chen Jingle’s decision to "lie flat" and give up on the rat race was, in a sense, him accepting the fact of his own "death."

Until later! The appearance of the system finally brought a new turning point to his life, allowing his decaying body to radiate vitality once again.

***

Chen Jingle stood before the mirror. It was hard to connect the version of himself in front of him with the one from just a week ago. "It’s been a week. Exactly a week from binding the system to today," he thought. In this one week, the changes had been absolutely massive.

The most obvious was naturally his appearance. He had transformed from his original, ordinary passerby looks into a handsome man that anyone would praise upon sight. In truth, the foundation of his facial features hadn’t changed much. What had improved was his skin and his overall spirit. His previously decadent and gloomy aura had been completely swept away, replaced by sharp, profound eyes and a sunny, warm smile.

Furthermore, the pimples and acne scars on his face, and even the various scars on his body—all the blemishes that affected his appearance—had been directly erased by the system through special means. Naturally, he looked more and more pleasing to the eye. After getting his life on a regular schedule, even his skin tone had lightened a few shades. After all, a fair complexion hides a multitude of flaws.

His height difference wasn’t very obvious. He had only grown less than two centimeters, which was unnoticeable for now. "If only I could grow another five centimeters," he thought. Then he would be 1.79 meters tall, which he could round up and claim as 1.8 meters to outsiders. With shoes on, that would be 1.85 meters. A casual jump would reach two meters, and there would be hope for the national men’s basketball team.

In contrast, the increase in his physical strength was much more obvious. The biggest factor restricting his strength growth was actually time. Boosting one’s strength wasn’t something that could be resolved in a day or two; it would take at least three to five months. Along with the growth of his strength, the muscle lines on Chen Jingle’s body were now visibly more pronounced.

Perhaps it was because he used to be on the skinnier side. Now that he was eating and drinking well every day, under the premise of deliberately increasing his food intake, his energy conversion rate was quite good. Although he wasn’t taking any steroids, nobody was dumping Xiangpiaopiao milk tea into his protein powder either.

Stepping onto the scale— "Whoa, I actually gained two and a half kilos!" Chen Jingle exclaimed in surprise. This was truly a rare occurrence. One had to know that with his ectomorph physique, toning up was simple, but putting on mass was no easy feat.

His current state should be the so-called "lean muscle" build that many girls liked, which was slightly better than being a scrawny stick. Of course, narcissism aside, he didn’t dare post photos or videos of himself online. He was afraid that he wouldn’t just attract cute girls, but also cute girls with a little extra hardware down there.

However, for Chen Jingle, the most important thing was still his absorption of knowledge. It had truly enriched his cultural literacy to a great extent, organizing his previously fragmented knowledge into a complete system. Now, he was fluent in English and Japanese. His knowledge capacity in history and political science was comparable to a typical graduate student. His culinary skills were on par with a star-rated hotel chef, and even his planting skills, which he didn’t care much about, were at the master level. Half a year ago, Chen Jingle wouldn’t have even dared to imagine this!