0158 Creative Block? Not on My Watch!

Looking at the new prompt that popped up on the interface, Chen Jue inwardly sighed, "Those ancient Taoists really knew their stuff. Just on the first try, the effect of eye-refining is already stronger than eye exercises!"

Having finished his morning exercise for his eyes and ears on the rooftop, he was now only half a step away from mastering the true [Nine-Sun Eye-Refining], with only the trick of generating force from the dantian remaining unmastered.

"Lowering qi to the dantian is truly difficult!"

"If I want to take this step forward, I will have to continue improving my horse stance and stake posture." Chen Jue shook his head and let out a light sigh.

They say a true transmission takes a single sentence, while false transmissions span ten thousand scrolls.

This most crucial step had not only stumped countless enthusiasts of traditional martial arts and kung fu, but it had also baffled Chen Jue, a man equipped with a system panel.

However, the small booklet left by Old Master Shi Zheng also mentioned that wanting to truly lower qi to the dantian, apart from enduring bitter grinding like a pestle grinding into a needle, those with peculiar bone structures and extraordinary talent could also rely on their personal experiences to achieve enlightenment.

This was because it involved a highly specialized physical skill: using intent to control the flow of blood.

Some people are naturally gifted at mobilizing their qi and blood to fill specific parts of their bodies, such as their eyes, ears, cheeks, or male erectile tissue, and so on.

However, the vast majority of people are subjected to external stimuli, causing their bodies to experience involuntary passive congestion. Only a very few individual cases can master this divine skill.

Chen Jue had practiced for so long without yet capturing the sensation of stimulating the blood gates during breathing and exhaling; clearly, he did not belong among those exceptional cases. He could only continue relying on the panel to grind his progress, seeing if he could seek a new breakthrough starting from [Horse Stance] and [Stake Posture].

……

Since he had to shoot a new installment of his special talent videos in the morning, Chen Jue returned to his room to pack some props.

He drove to the park and first met up with Wu Fang to brief her about buying a house.

Upon learning that Chen Jue had actually acquired a villa measuring nearly 400 square meters, Wu Fang was quite astonished.

Because in Wu Fang's impression, housing prices around Xixi had always remained stubbornly firm. Aside from old, dilapidated apartments, better housing estates cost fifty to sixty thousand per square meter, meaning a single villa would easily run twenty to thirty million.

"I managed to snag a bargain this time, just catching the year-end price drop." Chen Jue waved his hand nonchalantly, acting as if he had spent a few thousand bucks rather than tens of millions.

This was because his income level had reached this tier, and his perspective had broadened; such major life milestones as acquiring assets no longer filled him with the previous sense of constraint.

This was why people online often said that money is a man's courage.

However, upon hearing Chen Jue blurt out the blunt statement, "This afternoon, I'll take you to look at our bridal chamber," Wu Fang's face flushed with heat as she playfully pounded Chen Jue's chest with her pink fists.

After a brief moment of playful bantering, the two went to the lakeside for their morning exercise.

One practiced stretches and played with a spear, while the other practiced Tai Chi stake postures and the Dragon Gate Tai Chi Thirteen Forms.

By a little past eight o'clock, the proficiency of the stake posture on the panel had increased by over 200 points, and the Dragon Gate Tai Chi had also leveled up to Lv1.

As for the free attribute points, they had only risen by +0.01, with an extremely slow efficiency.

After leaving the park and having breakfast together, Chen Jue drove out to find a tailoring shop to buy some fine colored threads.

By a little past 10 o'clock, the scheduled Qianhe cameraman, Xi Guancheng, arrived at the park with a bunch of professional equipment, accompanied by Wang Jin, a girl in her twenties from their group chat.

Both of them were collaborating with Chen Jue on-site for the first time, though they had met previously at the signing ceremony, so they did not appear overly unfamiliar.

However, upon seeing that the special talent master's girlfriend was actually Teacher Wu, the internet sensation who had saved the little boy and gone viral online last time, Xi Guancheng and Wang Jin could not help but feel a bit surprised.

Standing out in the sunlight, the two of them possessed such wonderful demeanors that they looked just like celebrities—truly living up to the old saying of a talented man and a beautiful woman.

"Boss Special Talent, what kind of content are we shooting with this high-speed camera?" Xi Guancheng asked curiously while debugging his equipment by the lakeside.

"After the shoot starts later, you just need to focus on capturing close-up details of the object I throw out; that footage will need to be edited into the overall video later," Chen Jue instructed, arranging the shooting workflow.

He had Wu Fang use the drone to oversee the panoramic view as usual, while Xi Guancheng was responsible for capturing close-up slow-motion shots.

As for Wang Jin, she was in charge of the script and creative concepts. Since it was her first time here just to observe and learn for the sake of coming up with creative ideas for future shoots, she simply picked up the reflector board and acted as an assistant.

As for Chen Jue, once the preparations on site were complete, he put on his facial mask, holding a leftover skipping stone from earlier in one hand, and a handful of sewing needles pre-threaded with various colored threads in the other.

"Skipping stones and playing with flying needles again?"

"I feel like we've already put out several similar videos; won't people suffer from aesthetic fatigue?" Wang Jin muttered to herself while holding the reflector board. As someone in charge of scripts and creative brainstorming, her biggest concern was that the produced videos would lack creativity.

Moreover, the numerous special talent videos Chen Jue had released previously had all performed exceptionally well, serving as a very strong beginning.

To put it in colloquial terms, the tone for the previous installments had been set very high; the main worry was starting strong only to taper off, suddenly hitting a creative bottleneck and leaving the following fans feeling underwhelmed.

Of course, Wang Jin's worries were not unfounded.

Many creative video UP hosts, upon encountering creative bottlenecks, would delay or even stop updating for months or over half a year.

If they produced sub-par videos just to make up numbers that didn't hit the right notes, it would provoke strong repulsion from fans and lead to unfollows. At times like this, professional brainstorming staff like them needed to step in.

After all, an individual's train of thought is limited; having a team brainstorm together and pool their collective wisdom was the only way to help an internet celebrity successfully navigate the path of growth.

However, Chen Jue was clearly an anomaly among internet celebrities. Ever since he started making videos, this guy had never once encountered the so-called creative bottleneck!

Once the drone took off and all the cameras began rolling, Chen Jue looked up at the bright sun overhead and immediately entered the zone without a word, beginning his special talent performance.

With a sudden wave of his left hand, the petal-shaped skipping stone did not bounce continuously and densely across the water's surface as it usually did. Instead, with its tilt angle adjusted, he flung it forth with great force, stirring up several layers of fine, curtain-like water mists across the lake's surface.

Before these layers of water mist could fall, Chen Jue's right hand—which had just been swinging—violently flung out the sewing needles pinched between his fingers. The colorful cotton threads dragging behind the tails of the needles streaked across the air side by side, passing straight through those layers of water mist before finally plunging into the lake.

"Done, wrap it up!"

Chen Jue brushed his hands together upon seeing this and promptly removed the mask from his face.

"Ah???"

"That's the shoot finished?"

Wang Jin, who had yet to figure out what had just happened, was completely dumbfounded!

She had come with a learning mindset to observe the special talent master shoot a video and absorb some advanced experience.

She also wanted to see what kind of magical qualities the top ten internet celebrity of 2023 possessed—the kind where casually filming a vlog would terrify countless netizens so badly that they feared wetting their beds in their dreams.

To her utter surprise, upon arriving at the scene, she just watched the guy wave his hands twice, throwing stones and flying needles into the water. She hadn't seen a shred of any special talent at all; the entire segment had completely fallen flat.

Even Wu Fang, who was in charge of panoramic videography on the side, was somewhat surprised at that moment!

Because she hadn't managed to make out what special skill Chen Jue had performed either; she had only vaguely seen that when Chen Jue hit the lake surface with the skipping stone, he had executed a high-difficulty dart technique involving several flying needles piercing through a water mist.

This technique looked simple, but anyone who had actually practiced throwing darts knew the difficulty hidden within.

It placed extremely rigorous demands on timing, force, and technique. If even one requirement fell short, it would be impossible for so many needles to be shot simultaneously straight through the water mist.

However, while such a technique seemed terrifying upon deep thought in the eyes of an insider, it didn't appear all that impressive to an outsider.

Much like lethal moves in traditional martial arts styles such as "Crouching Down to Catch the Sparrow, Scattering Magic Sand into the Face" or "Reaching to the Bottom of the Sea, Monkey Stealing the Peach," these appeared to outsiders as nothing more than a few incomprehensible body movements, while only insiders understood the sheer terror behind them.

However, before Wu Fang and Wang Jin could react, Xi Guancheng, who was in charge of the high-speed camera, turned flushed red on the side, staring down at the slow-motion playback on the machine, and screamed in utter excitement, "A rainbow! It's a rainbow! I caught a rainbow!"

His shout instantly stirred up the emotions of the two girls on the scene!

For girls, who naturally adored all things beautiful, such a natural marvel as a rainbow was something they would never miss; even just catching a glimpse of it would grant them a wonderful mood for the rest of the day.

"Where?"

"Where is there a rainbow?"

Wang Jin hollered as she hastily grabbed Wu Fang and crowded over to take a look.

In the slow-motion footage, those fine layers of water mists stirred up by the skipping stone were actually refracting a hint of seven-colored halo under the illumination of sunlight, and a miniature rainbow instantly appeared within the slow-motion frame.

Yet, the absolute highlight of this shot wasn't this artificial rainbow that anyone could create by throwing a stone.

Rather, it was those seven flying needles trailing red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple threads. At the exact moment the artificial little rainbow appeared, like an aerial demonstration team trailing colored smoke in the sky, they flew into the frame at parallel angles, coincidentally overlapping and intertwining with the seven colors of the rainbow.

Such an exquisitely beautiful slow-motion shot not only shocked Wang Jin—who specialized in scripts and creative brainstorming—she never expected that someone's dart-throwing skill could produce such breathtaking visual footage.

This was no longer just skill; it truly lived up to the ancient Chinese saying: "Skill approaches the Dao!"

Even Wu Fang was so moved by this blunt man's video concept—romantic to the extreme—that her heart melted completely.

"Jue Ge, have you thought of a title for this installment?"

Wu Fang wrapped her arms tightly around Chen Jue's sleeve and asked softly, knowing this was her boyfriend making a bold declaration of love to her, making her heart feel as sweet as honey.

Hearing this, Chen Jue smiled and nodded, leaning close to her ear to whisper, "Let's call the title [Special Talent: Weaving Rainbows], meaning weaving a rainbow."

"With the New Year approaching soon, I didn't know what to prepare for you."

"Sending money or a house feels too cliché, so let's just use this woven rainbow as a gift for you!"