Copying Scriptures

The pain twisted Xu Feixian's face into a grimace, but she was completely unaware of it, too stunned by He Zhuoming's words to notice. The shock mixed with the pain made her face look particularly strange.

He Zhuoming couldn't help but laugh. "What's wrong with your face? It's all scrunched up—so ridiculous!"

Xu Feixian pressed, "What were you thinking about Lin Qingyun for? Do you like him?"

He Zhuoming's smile froze. She was taken aback for a moment, then immediately jumped up. "What—what do you mean like? What are you talking about? That's nonsense!" She was so startled that she stuttered, but her voice grew louder than usual. Her heart was racing, yet she put on a display of bravado.

Xu Feixian said, "You're the one who said you were thinking about him."

He Zhuoming exclaimed, "I was just thinking about something related to him! It's not that kind of 'thinking about him'!"

Xu Feixian: "Love at first sight?"

He Zhuoming: "What love at first sight? Not at all! Me and him—wait." Her mind finally had a rare moment of clarity, and she caught a key phrase in Xu Feixian's words. "You think I was talking about the Lin Qingyun you know?"

Xu Feixian: "Who else would I be talking about?"

He Zhuoming couldn't help but laugh, and then she relaxed completely. "Of course not him. I hardly know him, you know."

"It's my good friend, Lin Qingyun. Didn't I mention it yesterday? I have a friend with the same name... And it's actually quite a coincidence. 'Lin Qingyun' isn't a common name, but I never thought he'd have a complete namesake here." After all, who would have thought that the novel's protagonist could share a name with someone else in the story?

Xu Feixian was surprised. "So there really is such a person."

He Zhuoming: "Of course there is! Why would I ask about his name otherwise?"

Xu Feixian's shoulders relaxed a little as she replied, "I thought it was just an excuse to strike up a conversation with Lin Qingyun."

He Zhuoming was a bit speechless. "Why would I want to talk to him? He's so old."

Xu Feixian: "...He's considered old already?"

He Zhuoming pointed at her own face. "Compared to me, he could be my uncle!"

Xu Feixian was silent for a moment, then looked up at He Zhuoming—He Zhuoming's expression was serious; she wasn't mocking, she genuinely believed what she said.

In He Zhuoming's eyes, a good-looking boy like Lin Qingyun, whose features still retained the delicate characteristics of youth, could be considered an older brother. But someone like 'Lin Qingyun', whose features had fully matured, overly tall and sharply defined, was already an uncle.

Xu Feixian thought about it but couldn't find a way to refute it.

Because He Zhuoming was only fifteen, while 'Lin Qingyun' was already twenty-five. A fifteen-year-old girl would think boys her own age were idiots, so of course she would think a twenty-five-year-old man was a middle-aged uncle.

Especially a girl with He Zhuoming's personality.

Xu Feixian understood and sighed, saying nothing more. She continued to bandage her leg in silence, while also guessing that the other Lin Qingyun He Zhuoming knew was her friend who worked as a musician at the Pear Garden, most likely the youth who was with He Zhuoming at the inn. But Xu Feixian didn't ask further.

After Xu Feixian finished bandaging her wound, He Zhuoming took out her flute and asked her to listen to her practice.

Xu Feixian had nothing else to do at the moment—her leg injury wouldn't heal quickly, so she couldn't go back to practicing with her saber. Sitting and listening to He Zhuoming play the flute was a way to pass the time.

He Zhuoming placed her fingers on the tone holes, took a deep breath to puff out her cheeks, and then blew slowly. As the air flowed, the sound of the flute echoed leisurely under the camphor tree.

Although there were many things she couldn't figure out, when she focused on one thing, she immediately forgot all the things she couldn't figure out.

When He Zhuoming paused to adjust her fingers on the holes, Xu Feixian spoke up. "Your playing has improved a lot compared to yesterday."

He Zhuoming: "I think so too! Today, for some reason, it went particularly smoothly. As soon as my fingers touched the flute, they automatically found the right touch! I'll play another one for you." She knew only two songs by heart: "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "Wedding in a Dream." The latter was the first time He Zhuoming played it on the flute, but it went just as smoothly. She played it all the way to the last note without any mistakes!

After she finished, He Zhuoming was shocked by her own performance. She held the flute and murmured, "Could it be... that I'm actually a delayed-bloomer genius? This is—" She wanted to say "divinely inspired," but as soon as the idiom popped into her head, she remembered the wish she made yesterday.

She jumped up. "Oh no!"

Xu Feixian was confused. "What's wrong?"

He Zhuoming: "It's the wish—I wished here yesterday that my flute playing would improve, and today I suddenly got the hang of it!"

"According to the karma theory, does that mean I'm going to have bad luck next?" Her face fell, and her brows drooped like a figure eight.

Xu Feixian was surprised. "Your wish was just to play the flute better?"

He Zhuoming: "Yes—ah, I didn't think this wish would actually come true! If I'd known..."

Xu Feixian: "If you'd known, you would have made a bigger wish?"

He Zhuoming shook her head. "No, if I'd known, I wouldn't have made a wish at all. It's fine if I can't learn the flute well. I'm already unlucky enough as it is; now I'm about to become even more unlucky." Xu Feixian fell silent again, looking at He Zhuoming with a strange gaze.

The girl was unaware of her stare, still spinning the flute in her hands, frowning and sighing, so worried she didn't want to play anymore.

Xu Feixian rolled down her pant leg and said, "Don't worry. You only wished to play well, not to become a master. Such a small wish, even if it comes true, won't bring bad luck, after all, you prayed to a True Deity."

He Zhuoming was stunned for a moment, then immediately cheered up. "Really?!"

Xu Feixian: "The chance of such a small wish being fulfilled is very low. Many people wish every day, and the less obsession behind a wish, the harder it is for the prayer to reach the deity... You were lucky." Although a small wish that comes true doesn't require bad luck in return, a thank-you visit was still necessary—He Zhuoming entered the temple to offer incense to the statue, sincerely joining her hands in prayer and thanking the True Deity in her heart.

After fulfilling her vow, He Zhuoming didn't leave. She wandered around the temple, finally stopping beside the group copying scriptures, and asked them for paper and a brush.

Next to the wooden box holding the brushes and paper was a stack of scriptures. He Zhuoming took the top one and opened it: she couldn't read any of the characters. Even guessing based on half the shapes, she couldn't make out the meaning.

Xu Feixian came over and asked, "What are you going to do?"

He Zhuoming held up her hands, the scripture in one and the paper and brush in the other. "Copy the scriptures—didn't you say that after ten days of copying, I can exchange it for that peace amulet?" After the flute incident, He Zhuoming now had great faith in the Two Principles Dao Lord.

Moreover, the peace amulet could be obtained through copying scriptures, and the price was known and controllable, which sounded much more reliable than making a wish.

He Zhuoming flipped through the scriptures noisily, muttering, "Am I illiterate? How come I don't recognize a single character here?"

Xu Feixian: "Those aren't common characters. Only the disciples of the Yuqing Sect who directly worship the Two Principles Dao Lord can understand them."

He Zhuoming: "...So, even if I just copy them blindly, it still works?"

Xu Feixian said indifferently, "Sincerity is what matters. But many people can't stick it out to the end. Otherwise, the Yuqing Sect's peace amulets would have been snatched up long ago." The conditions for obtaining the peace amulet, besides purifying your hands and burning incense for ten consecutive days, and copying with devotion, also required that within those ten days, you had to copy the entire scripture at least once, completely and without errors.

According to Xu Feixian, anyone who met these conditions could, on the tenth day, take a peace amulet from the lid of the furnace where scriptures were burned. Conversely, if a person didn't meet the conditions, even if the amulet was right there, they definitely couldn't take it.

Such a thing obviously didn't conform to common sense, but in a world with both immortals and ghosts, it seemed perfectly normal.

He Zhuoming copied by the small pond until evening. Around her, people were packing up their brushes and paper to go eat—she stood up, stretched, and rubbed her wrists, then looked over the few pages she'd copied. Because she couldn't read the characters, the writing was both laborious and inefficient, and she made mistakes often. The most troublesome thing about writing with a brush in ancient times was that it was hard to correct mistakes; a single copied character wrong would ruin the entire page.

Otherwise, He Zhuoming wouldn't have written only a few pages all day.

She estimated her copying speed and felt that if she wanted to finish at least one entire book within ten days, copying during the day alone wouldn't be enough—she'd have to write at night as well.

So when night came, He Zhuoming carried her paper, brush, and the scripture into the pure white room.

As soon as she entered, she ordered Lin Qingyun, "Quick, quick! Make me a table—there's so much stuff, it's so heavy, my hands are going to break!"

Lin Qingyun raised his head, facing He Zhuoming, and said airily, "They're obviously not broken." Even as he said that, a spacious desk appeared in the room.

He Zhuoming tossed all the paper and brushes onto the desk with a clatter and sat down with a long sigh.

Lin Qingyun frowned, got up, and walked around He Zhuoming, then suddenly grabbed her sleeve and pulled it to his eyes. His other hand rested on the desk, and he leaned half over, sniffing closely.

His nose got very close, and once or twice it actually touched the back of He Zhuoming's hand; his breath and his nose were both cold, his breath like a snake's tongue licking over, and the nose lightly touching was like a dog's nose.

He Zhuoming was taken aback, too slow to react as she looked at Lin Qingyun—but she couldn't see his expression, only the white silk covering his face.

Lin Qingyun raised his face slightly up but kept his body half-bent, and his tone was clearly displeased. "Why did you go to the Two Principles temple again?"

He Zhuoming answered honestly, "It was closer to the arena, so I went in to sit and rest... I took a shower before I came."

Lin Qingyun: "I told you, that kind of smell can't be washed off with a shower. It's like shit." He Zhuoming was disgusted by the comparison and quickly pulled her hand back.

Lin Qingyun then went to rummage through the paper, brushes, and scriptures. None of the paper belonged to him, yet when he reached for it, he had an air of natural entitlement, as if all the paper and ink in the world—even the most private diary—was his to read if he wanted.

But He Zhuoming smacked his hand away. "Don't rummage! You've messed it all up. And you can't even see, so why are you going through it?"

Lin Qingyun was stunned by the slap, his outstretched hand hanging in the air, and for a moment he even forgot to retract it.

He said in disbelief, "Just because I can't see, I can't touch things? How can you be so unreasonable?" In this world, there was something he couldn't touch? Surely that couldn't be!

He Zhuoming replied, "But you can't see, so why bother?"

Lin Qingyun: "I want to."

He Zhuoming refused firmly. "No! I've finally copied a few pages. If you mess them up, I'll have to figure out where I left off—Hey, don't you have your own things to do? Go play with your candle or something, don't bother me while I'm doing something important."

Lin Qingyun straightened up instantly, poking at the open scripture with his finger. "You go to the Two Principles temple to offer incense, and you copy the Two Principles scriptures. You have that much faith in him?"

He Zhuoming smacked his straying hand away as well. "Because everyone says he's very effective."

Lin Qingyun: "Go worship the Earth Immortal; he's even more effective."

He Zhuoming looked up at his face and said, "Unless the Earth Immortal can fix your eyes, I don't believe it." Although the white silk covered all but half his face, He Zhuoming could still tell Lin Qingyun was angry—his mouth turned down, his expression turned cold, and he stood by the desk with his arms crossed.

After a long moment, he let out a mocking laugh, turned around, and walked away, deliberately going to the farthest spot from He Zhuoming and sitting down with his back to her.

Lin Qingyun swore to himself: unless He Zhuoming spoke to him first, he absolutely would not say half a word to her tonight! Let her sit there alone, lonely and cold, copying scriptures. When she finally finished all that hard work and realized that that dog of a Two Principles wouldn't fulfill her wish at all, he'd throw her own words right back at her!

He Zhuoming ignored Lin Qingyun, dipped the brush in ink, and started working in a hurry.

She copied earnestly. By now she didn't make many mistakes anymore, but she still wasn't fast.

The characters in the scripture were complex and unfamiliar. When they were all lined up together, they looked like heavenly script to He Zhuoming. If she stared at a single line for too long, she actually started to feel dizzy and had to stop to rub her eyes.

As she was copying, the room suddenly went pitch black.

She gave a startled "Ah!" and looked up, brush in hand, bewildered: the pure white room had somehow turned into a bedroom—and a bedroom without any candles lit. Everything was shrouded in gray and indistinct.

The only source of light was Lin Qingyun, who was the farthest from He Zhuoming—the candle in his hand. He stood hugging the wall in the corner, holding the candle. For some reason, the flame's glow was much weaker than He Zhuoming remembered, casting a thin, stream-like light on Lin Qingyun's face, making him look like a ghost.

At first glance, it startled He Zhuoming again.

She pushed herself up from the desk and stood. "Why did it suddenly go dark?"

Lin Qingyun said in a somber voice, "I need to sleep. How am I supposed to sleep with that much light?"

He Zhuoming was simply baffled. "You need to sleep? Don't you not sleep at all?"

Lin Qingyun sneered. "I'm not a dog that has to be ready to serve others at all times. Of course, I need to sleep occasionally."

He Zhuoming didn't feel anything at first, but the moment Lin Qingyun mentioned sleep, she actually did feel a bit sleepy.

While Lin Qingyun was grinding his teeth and sneering, He Zhuoming covered her mouth and yawned widely.

He Zhuoming: "Mm, that's true. It's late. I'll go to sleep too."

She moved toward the bed by the dim light, and was about to bump into the chair—Lin Qingyun, his face cold, reached out and pulled the chair aside. He Zhuoming, oblivious, half-asleep with her eyes nearly closed, stumbled to the bed and flopped down, kicked off her shoes, rolled onto the bed, and still remembered to pull the blanket over her chest and stomach.

Lin Qingyun walked to the bedside, crouched down, and poked her forehead with dissatisfaction. "Are you really going to sleep like that?"

He Zhuoming shrank back, too lazy to open her eyes, and answered drowsily, "Because it's late... Copying scriptures is so tiring... Not a single line I can read... Qingyun, good night..." Her voice got lower and lower, and she fell asleep quickly.

Tang Shuyu poked her forehead again, but she didn't move. Her even breathing brushed over the base of Tang Shuyu's fingers.

Tang Shuyu's finger against her forehead paused. A moment later, he let his fingertip slide downward, gently tracing the contours of her face.