Chen Ping'an ate a candied hawthorn stick—something he hadn't tasted in nearly a decade—while shouldering the branch of an old scholar tree and heading back down Mud Vase Lane. As he passed a house even more dilapidated than his own ancestral home, a pang of guilt stirred in his heart. He wondered whether he should borrow some silver from Master Ruan first, just to patch up the place. Though he had grown up in Mud Vase Lane, Chen Ping'an had never seen anyone live in this particular house. Earlier, when he had lured the mountain-moving ape across the rooftops during their chase and fight, he had deliberately led the beast to this spot—resulting in a gaping hole crushed through the roof. Chen Ping'an felt he must shoulder this mess himself. Otherwise, the house would be left to weather the elements—beaten by wind and rain until the roof beams rotted through. The place might have originally endured another twenty or thirty years, but now it would be fortunate to survive five. The decay would accelerate, much like Chen Ping'an's own body after Cai Jinjian had forcibly "guided" his meridians—a body left gaping and leaking on all sides. The thought made him all the more determined. He would repair this ownerless house, if only to make it solid and sound. It didn't need to be grand or impressive—just sturdy enough to last.
Chen Ping'an had considered using one of his gold copper coins to exchange for silver or copper currency—perhaps from Old Man Yang at the Yang Family Shop, or Master Ruan at the blacksmith's forge. But a gut instinct held him back. Gold copper coins were the sort of treasure that came only by rare chance. Every coin spent was one less coin in the world. Silver and copper, on the other hand, could be earned anywhere—just a matter of how much labor was required. So Chen Ping'an decided he would try borrowing from Master Ruan first. If that failed, he would use a gold copper coin to solve the problem. The thought pained him, but when an urgent matter stood clearly before one's eyes, pretending not to see it was worse. Chen Ping'an feared owing others—more than anything.
When he returned to his courtyard, he leaned the branch the little girl had given him against the wall. Thewhetstone—the whetstone of incalculable value—still sat in his wicker basket, but of course he wouldn't leave it out in the open. He had already carried it inside. Had time not been pressing, he would have dug a pit a full zhang deep in the courtyard and buried the seemingly unremarkable but priceless stone. Just hearing the name "Dragon-Slaying Platform" sent a chill through him—more precious, perhaps, than all three pouches of gold copper coins combined.
From the neighboring courtyard came the sound of chickens clucking. When Song Jixin and Zhigui had departed the small town, they had left behind an entire coop of hens and chicks. The birds were likely starving by now. Chen Ping'an went inside, retrieved the ring of keys, and brought a scoop of rice from his own stores before walking to the neighboring gate. He opened the coop, crouched down, and let the rice trickle through his fingers.
After feeding the chickens, Chen Ping'an opened the kitchen door to check whether any grain or leftovers remained—he didn't want them to rot and mold. But stepping inside, his eyes widened. A large vat of rice stood against the wall; merely lifting the lid was enough to fill him. The cabinets held pots, bowls, and ladles in abundance. Hanging from the wall was a row of cured hams and dried fish. Everything was immaculate—orderly, tidy, every item in its place.
His gaze was suddenly drawn to a pair of wooden figures near the stove. He crouched down for a closer look and confirmed his suspicion: these were the same wooden mannequins he had once seen Zhigui hacking at with a kitchen cleaver. She had clearly known nothing about chopping wood—her efforts had been hopelessly inefficient. If it had been Chen Ping'an, he would have reduced the nearly life-sized wooden figure to kindling in three or four strokes. Now, squatting low, Chen Ping'an noticed something peculiar. The wooden man was covered in red dots—scattered across its surface in irregular patterns. In some places they clustered densely; in others, they were separated by wide gaps, like cinnabar drops on parchment. Each red dot, no larger than a grain of rice, was accompanied by minuscule characters etched in ink beside it. The brushstrokes were so fine they were nearly invisible. Only someone with Chen Ping'an's sharp eyes would have noticed; an ordinary person would have seen nothing but red and black specks.
Chen Ping'an attempted to reassemble the scattered limbs and torsos. Before long, the wooden man took shape again. Fortunately, no major pieces were missing. Unfortunately, many of the joints had been hacked away or scraped clean by Zhigui's cleaver—those sections had lost most of their red dots and ink characters. Perhaps seventy or eighty percent of the original markings remained intact.
He rose and opened the window to let more light into the kitchen, then crouched again to examine every detail with painstaking care. The process took nearly an entire hour. Though Chen Ping'an could not read most of the ink characters, he did his best to memorize their brushstroke structures.
Reading and writing had always kindled a quiet hope in Chen Ping'an's heart.
When he had been a kiln worker, many times after climbing to the hilltop and gazing out over the small town—besides searching for the direction of Mud Vase Lane—the second thing he always looked for was the schoolhouse. As a boy, a thin, dark-skinned child would often slip to the schoolhouse and crouch against the wall beneath the windows. Above his head, voices recited lessons in a rising chorus. He couldn't understand a word, yet the sound filled him with an inexplicable sense of peace. A day's worth of grievances would dissolve into nothing, carried away by the cadence of reading.
But for an orphan of Mud Vase Lane, books were a luxury far beyond candied hawthorn—something to admire from a distance, nothing more.
Now Chen Ping'an closed his eyes and reconstructed the wooden man from memory. Where his memory blurred, he resisted the urge to open his eyes and verify—he skipped ahead and returned later. By the end, roughly forty or fifty red-dot-and-ink-character markings remained uncertain.
After identifying and committing each missing piece to memory, Chen Ping'an took a deep breath. He had intended to repeat the exercise, but the moment he shut his eyes, his head throbbed and a faint dizziness washed over him. He stopped immediately, not pushing further. Some efforts demanded more than brute force; trying too hard only made things worse. Since learning the art of porcelain-making, Chen Ping'an had come to understand this well—not from natural talent, but from the daily tongue-lashings of Old Man Yao, which had burned this lesson into his bones.
He scrambled the wooden man again, piling the pieces in a corner by the stove, then left the kitchen and closed the courtyard gate behind him. After a moment's thought, he decided to make one more trip to the town's eastern gate—to find the gatekeeper one last time. Once he became Master Ruan's official apprentice, he would likely live at the blacksmith's forge and have little opportunity to deliver letters. He wanted to bid farewell to the bachelor who kept the gate. But on his previous visit, the man had been nowhere to be found.
Chen Ping'an jogged to the eastern gate. The yellow-mud house was still shut and locked, just as before. He sighed and sat down on the tree stump where Zheng Dafeng—the gatekeeper—usually rested. The small town had no such thing as a "mountain god's seat," as the mountains did. Chen Ping'an sat there, staring into nothing, savoring a rare moment of leisure amid his busy days.
He didn't know how long he had been sitting when the sound of cart wheels echoed from within the town. He turned to look. Leading the procession was an ox-cart, followed by two covered horse-drawn carriages. Children filled the ox-cart, and among them were two familiar faces: Li Baoping in her bright red cotton-padded jacket, and Shi Chunjia with her rosy cheeks. The others, presumably, were the three schoolmates Shi Chunjia had mentioned—Li Huai, Lin Shouyi, and Dong Shuijing.
Five children chattered and laughed aboard the ox-cart, their voices bright and lively.
The driver was a middle-aged man Chen Ping'an didn't recognize. Behind him sat the old man who swept the schoolhouse floor.
With one glance, Chen Ping'an noticed the stark differences in the children's clothing. Li Baoping, the little girl in red from the Li clan—one of the four great families of Fulu Street—wore her jacket with a kind of understated comfort. Shi Chunjia's family had lived in Dragon-Riding Lane for generations, tending the shop called Sui Sui—an old establishment that provided a comfortable living but not great wealth. Her clothes were warm and neat, nothing more. Beside her sat a cold-faced peer draped in a brand-new black fox-fur cloak, its fur gleaming. The youth's complexion was pale, his expression indifferent. Li Huai's father, Li Er, was the town's most famous good-for-nothing. Li Huai also had a sister named Li Liu, but the parents and sister had all gone off to seek their fortunes, leaving Li Huai behind with his uncle. Now he too was leaving home, following the old man surnamed Ma to the distant Cliff Academy. The last boy wore two thin, patched outer garments over a threadbare spring shirt—the very picture of poverty. A child raised in a poor alley, unmistakably.
Li Baoping, Shi Chunjia, Li Huai, Lin Shouyi, Dong Shuijing.
Five children from a small town, riding an ox-cart that offered no shelter from wind or rain, heading toward the holy land in the hearts of countless scholars across the Baoping Continent: the Cliff Academy, one of the Confucian school's seventy-two great academies. At this moment, the children could not possibly know that in a continent where kingdoms jostled for supremacy, the greatest noble houses—no matter how desperately they schemed, no matter how many favors they called in—would have given anything to place their own sons and daughters within those halls, to study the Confucian sages' teachings of self-cultivation, governance, and the pacification of the world under heaven.
Even less could they know how rare it was to call Qi Jingchun "Master." On the contrary, the children would only feel that Mr. Qi had too many rules, that he was always keeping a stern face and never let them feel at ease. On the rare occasions when Mr. Qi smiled, the children often didn't even know what they had done right to make him so happy.
Li Baoping, sharp-eyed as ever, spotted Chen Ping'an sitting on the tree stump. She leaped from the ox-cart with lightning speed, stumbled slightly, then sprinted toward him and skidded to a halt. For a moment she seemed at a loss for words. Finally, she puffed out her chest and declared, "I'm going very, very far away!" Her small face brimmed with pride.
The old man in the tall crown called out sternly: "Li Baoping!"
Though clearly displeased, the old man still ordered the driver to stop. The little girl pouted but turned back toward the cart. Just then, she heard Chen Ping'an call her name. She looked back and saw him raise his fist in a small, encouraging wave—a silent message: work hard.
Li Baoping raised her fist in return, signaling that she would.
Chen Ping'an smiled warmly, thinking that the little red-jacket girl's "hard work" would mostly be spent playing—she would leave her footprints in every corner of the Cliff Academy, no doubt.
He looked up. The old sweeping man at the schoolhouse—whom he had seen several times—nodded toward him. Chen Ping'an instinctively smiled and returned the gesture.
At the same moment, someone in the rear horse-carriage gently lowered the curtain.
Though it was only a fleeting glimpse, Chen Ping'an caught the person's face clearly. It was the scholar who had visited Master Ruan at the blacksmith's forge.
Chen Ping'an watched the ox-cart and carriages slowly roll out of the small town.
Had Chen Ping'an been able to ride a sword through the air like Ning Yao—gazing down upon this newly rooted thousand-li landscape from above—he would have been struck by a series of strange and wondrous phenomena.
Countless beasts and birds of every kind sat motionless along the boundary where the Lizhu small chiliocosm met the territory of Great Li. Beyond them, swarms of their kind rushed madly toward the line, as though drawing sustenance from something unseen.
Along that invisible border, none dared cross a single step forward, nor would they retreat a single step back.
An old woman stood at the headwaters of a stream within the boundary, her upper body rising from the water. Hair the color of a raven's wing cascaded down like a waterfall, spreading around her body like a black lotus in bloom.
The face that had once been as mottled as the bark of a dead tree now belonged to a woman not yet forty.
And there was Pi Cloud Mountain—rising as though the earth itself were arching upward, swelling visibly before the eyes.
The small chiliocosm was shattering, descending to the rank of a blessed land.
Every commoner born and raised within the former Lizhu small chiliocosm—regardless of wealth or poverty, virtue or vice—would now possess a future life.