When she spoke, it was like spring waters were overflowing from her eyes, pooling atop cool slabs of rock; living up to her name, she refreshed the mind. [1] "Get up and speak," Li Shiyi said. Qin Niang let out an affirmative sound, rising with her waist bent, as graceful in bearing as a white snake wending its way up a stick. Women of romance, Song Shijiu had met many times; usually, they were lazy, but Qin Niang wasn't like that; others would be lazy or swing their hips, or the lower their eyelids, while Qin Niang's expression was candid, her figure agile, and she left laziness in her breaths, breathing in a small, gentle breath, and then let it out softly, a pitiful terror showing from within the indolence. Song Shijiu couldn't help herself, and said, "In a place this desolate and wild, what are you doing?" "I…" Qin Niang only spoke half a word, somewhat hesitant. Li Shiyi waited quite patiently for a while, and only then swept her gaze acro...

"You, do you capture yao?" Yang-er-shenzi strove to absorb the words from just before, repeatedly casting a glance at this man before her; he had a large belly and a wide forehead, and as he spoke, his right leg was placed on the threshold, the shaking of his leg even more fragmented than his words. The two young ladies behind him were unexpectedly dignified, their faces as neat as if from a landscape painting, their expressions half hidden and half revealed, and when looking at them carefully, there was unexpectedly some strength of Daoist practitioner's character. "Ah," Tu Laoyao replied, drawing Yang-er-shenzi's back, his foot pressing against the threshold once more, and he asked her, "has there been anything out of the ordinary?" Song Shijiu held Li Shiyi's hand behind her back, looking about calmly and collectedly. Three days ago, they'd received a letter from Yushiqie, saying that the strange beast of Mount Zhongshan, the Bashe, had ...

The day that A Jiu entered the Taishan Prefecture, Empress Dowager Longyu's imperial edict of abdication had just appeared in the newspapers. The first time she fought with Ling Heng, she heard say that Yuan Xiangcheng [1] had died. But after, she hadn't seen the bustle and raucousness of the restoration of the plaited Qing, nor did she hear the cries of May Fourth. Only the dream which Yushiqie sent bumped slightly against the extreme boredom of the Taishan Prefecture. It was reasonable to say that, if a day were passed in boredom, A Jiu would look for somewhere else, but she suspected the Taishan Prefecture had a secret, other function, which could tug one's heart, like floating duckweed, down, and place it beneath the ground. Lianyu was eighteen levels; one was the rustling wind by one's ear, one the scattered, fragmented rain by one's pillow, causing one's senses to dull, settling their seven emotional states, wearing down ninety years' will to fight, a...

A Yin rose, looking in the direction of the sound, but she only saw the foggy shores of the Yellow Springs, a burst of wet wind blowing, easily darkening the sun. From a distance, the sound of a strange ringing rose intermittently, as if a woman who had dropped a long-decocting pot, and was quietly wailing; A Yin turned her head to look; it was a ghostly official bringing along a gaggle of wandering ghosts, muddle-headedly crossing over the Naihe Bridge. Those wandering ghosts had blank faces, their eyes like two inlaid marbles, rubbed lustrous by sandpaper, confused and muddied. A Yin shuddered. It was as if she were waking from a dream, for the first time realising that the Taishan Prefecture was different from the mortal realm.. Amongst the group, there was a woman in her thirties, wearing a dusty, worn, blue aozi, her hair half white, her movements slower than the others. She'd just stepped onto the Naihe Bridge when she was halted by the sound of the ghostly official's cal...

"Take me back to the Taishan Prefecture," A Yin said, her handkerchief hitting the tabletop with a " pa ". Across from her, Li Shiyi, tidying up the books, had just briefly flipped through a couple ancient texts, and raised her gaze to look at her. A Yin's mouth pulled to the side, revealing a seldom-seen weakness. A Luo had returned to the Taishan Prefecture to deal with affairs; it had already been over a month, and, since Li Shiyi and Song Shijiu had both returned to Shanghai, she had disappeared without any correspondence, not even a greeting having been sent back. Today, she'd gone to see an opera, the story's contents of a top scorer in the exams looking for scholarly honour, having forgotten his wife who had gone through the hardships of poverty; she'd had that flower cap, [1] the beautiful, delicate wife; how could she have remembered the Wang Baochuan, who'd gone through freezing and fires for eighteen years? [2] The grievance in A Yin...

It was said that, in the south of Sijiucheng, there was a family, whose husband in the past had packed tobacco for an official; afterwards, the official had plaited his hair, and no longer had the mind to smoke, and so the man had set up a tobacco stand, right at the mouth of the Nansanshi Alley, and others called him Tobacco Stand Wu. Tobacco Stand Wu's wife was a fool; once, she'd looked after the stand for him, and although she'd sat at Zhu Rougui's stand, when people asked how much two liang of pork cost, [1] she would say, "What sort of tobacco do you want?". This comedic happening travelled about the whole neighbourhood, half because their lives didn't have any prospects, and partially because Tobacco Stand Wu's fool wife looked lovely. How foolish was she? The uneducated, coarse-skinned residents of the marketplace couldn't describe it, but when they passed by her, they would whistle. When I met her, she was already no longer that pretty; a...