Chapter 540: Du Tingxiu (6)

Han Yi pulled a stack of folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Luo Qi.

Luo Qi guessed what it was the moment he took it. A4 printer paper; this was the original copy of the phone photos.

He opened the folded pages, and after just one glance, he believed that Han Yi was likely not lying. On this paper, someone had written ten lines of Advanced Spell with the thickest ballpoint pen. Setting aside the fact that the spells themselves were profound and difficult to understand, the person who copied them had also clumsily left many ink blots at the turns of the Talisman strokes, which shouldn't have happened. All Talismans have commonalities; a Mage might not recognize Advanced Spell like Luo Qi, but Mages learn Simple Spell from a young age and at least know how to handle a brush. Yet, the person who hand-wrote these spells clearly did not understand them at all; every stroke looked like it had been painstakingly traced by copying a gourd to draw a ladle, and a closer look revealed quite a few low-level writing errors.

Luo Qi carefully examined the printer paper several times and finally believed it completely. "What is going on here?"

Han Yi did not answer immediately; he swiped his phone screen again and opened the next photo, which showed a dusty little girl wolfing down a bowl of rice.

The little girl looked to be about eight or nine years old, her skin tanned brown, her small hands holding the rice bowl rough and chapped, and the cuffs of her clothes worn to the point of fraying. This was a somewhat neglected little girl from the countryside, who looked like she came from an underdeveloped human region.

"Did she copy the spells?" Luo Qi frowned slightly. "That's actually not bad, considering."

"It really is 'a ghost drawing talismans'," Han Yi nodded in assessment. "But no one asked her to copy them. This is a long story; look at the next photo first."

Luo Qi followed instructions and swiped the phone screen, opening the second photo. It was an old black-and-white photo of a young woman with cold, tightly pursed lips, wearing two thick, stiff braids. Her jaw was wide and strong, and her two rough eyes glared at the camera with a gloomy expression. Luo Qi observed more closely and identified from this half-length portrait that she was wearing a military uniform from many years ago, with a duty belt around her waist, though there were no shoulder boards. So, although she was dressed like a soldier and her expression looked like that of a warrior, she was not a member of the military; in that era that "preferred armed gear over feminine attire," this counted as a type of fashion photo.

Luo Qi looked at the photo with interest; he knew things were starting to get complicated, but also more interesting.

"You know, I traced the path Du Tingxiu took at the end of his life. It can be said that Du Tingxiu's temperament changed drastically in the final stage of his life, and the turning point was when he arrived at Kongsang Mountain in Ganzhou and left three months later to return to our world. Kongsang Mountain is a place of harsh conditions and poor soil; no Mages have settled there for a long time. The reason Du Tingxiu went there, embarking on the final leg of his life, originated from a letter from a stranger," Han Yi said.

"Who sent him the letter?" Luo Qi asked.

"Let's start with this old photo first," Han Yi said. "The woman in the photo is a human; you can probably guess that this is a photo from many years ago. This woman was named Liu Xiaofen, and she lived in a village deep in Kongsang Mountain at the time. When she was young, everyone said she wasn't quite mentally sound, but she happened to be born in an era where everyone was already going crazy, so she didn't seem too prominent."

Luo Qi understood what he meant; he probably knew what years she was young in, a time when humans had spent a great deal of effort to put an end to that madness.

"Those lunatics absorbed her into their organization as well. In their frantic actions, she was always on the front lines, fighting with particular viciousness, and she actually managed to become a small leader. At that time, human society often sent people who looked like they had some standing to the countryside, and some unfortunate people were assigned to the village where she lived. Among them was a man who had originally been a foreign language teacher at a university in the city; he was very handsome and unmarried. This Liu Xiaofen somehow took a fancy to this talented man from the city. Perhaps to improve her own situation, the young talent who had once studied abroad married this female warrior," Han Yi said, laughing with disdain at this point.

Luo Qi said nothing; what right did he, living comfortably, have to easily judge the hardships of others?

Han Yi continued, "Perhaps at the beginning, Liu Xiaofen's madness wasn't too severe; it was only intermittent, and when she was mad, she would babble and scribble nonsense. After this talented man had been married to her for a long time, he would inevitably encounter her when she was having an episode. I don't know how he felt as a man at the time, but as a talent in linguistics, he discovered that the things Liu Xiaofen scribbled had extreme logic, like a formed language. Based on his knowledge and professional sensitivity, he judged that this language did not belong to any language family in the world."

Luo Qi gasped, "Advanced Spell is the language of the Ancient Mage, after all."

"Correct. It is said that in the ancient era, Magic was at its peak, and the Progenitor Mage cast spells much more easily than we do," Han Yi said. "However, at the time, this Scholar certainly couldn't have guessed what that was; he thought Liu Xiaofen must have seen these characters somewhere, and that there must be some kind of ancient ruin in that great mountain. Although his situation was poor at the time, his academic enthusiasm remained, and he really wanted to find the lost ancient civilization. But Liu Xiaofen flatly denied it; she wouldn't even admit that she had written them, and she was particularly afraid of the matter. Actually, this is understandable; when she had an episode, she would smear these 'ghost drawings' everywhere, and the situation looked like she was possessed by a ghost. But according to the social atmosphere at the time, anything involving the supernatural was highly inappropriate; she might have been treated as a saboteur, deliberately feigning madness to frighten the masses and disrupt production. Disrupting production seemed to be a major crime? That's the part I don't quite understand, so let's leave it aside for now; it's not important anyway. It was the same for her husband, this intellectual among humans. He didn't care about these things, and he believed even less in the nonsense of ghosts and spirits possessing and harassing humans. He speculated that his wife might have inadvertently seen some ancient tomb in her childhood, was frightened, and her mind had become troubled as a result, leading her to transcribe the ancient characters she had seen back then during her episodes. During the few years he lived in the mountain village, he relied on his wife's protection to live quite comfortably, and he spent all his time wandering around the mountains searching for legends and surveying ancient ruins."

"What did he find?" Luo Qi asked nervously.

Unexpectedly, Han Yi shook his head. "He didn't find anything."

"Didn't find anything?" Luo Qi asked in surprise. "He didn't find anything at all?"

"Right," Han Yi said. "I can be certain that even if we went to Kongsang Mountain now, don't expect to find a single stone slab carved with characters. Because that thing simply does not exist."

(End of chapter)