Chapter 60: Child's Words Have No Taboos: The Cruel Truth Behind the Peerless Unique Copy

Xiao Sizi turned her head. Reading novels every day to cure book shortage, ttkk. tw is super practical

Her fingers picked at the hem of her pajamas, a layer of moisture rising in her eyes.

"Why did it disappear? This is clearly the calligraphy scroll Father liked most."

"When we were in Taiji Palace, Father held the original in his hands every day, looking at it over and over, even holding the original himself to teach me to copy it."

She sniffed, her childish voice trembling slightly.

"A thousand years is too long. Where did Father go? Did he leave too hurriedly and abandon this piece of calligraphy?"

Inside the study.

The air stopped flowing.

The little girl's innocent question stabbed Lin Xuan's nerves.

It pierced the fig leaf hidden beneath thousands of years of history.

The smile on Lin Xuan's face froze.

That was the purest attachment a four-and-a-half-year-old child could have for her father.

She thought her Emperor Father had just gone on a long trip and accidentally lost his favorite toy.

Lin Xuan could not open his mouth to lie.

He could not brush aside this heavy cultural lineage of Huaxia with a mere "Your father accidentally lost it."

He bent his knees and squatted beside the desk.

His line of sight aligned with Xiao Sizi's.

Lin Xuan remained silent for a long time. His gaze went over Xiao Sizi's shoulder and settled on the freshly copied ink trace.

The modern society's regret and helplessness over the rupture with ancient artifacts climbed onto his eyebrows at this moment.

"Your father did not abandon it."

"On the contrary, he loved this piece of calligraphy so much he went mad for it."

Xiao Sizi stopped sobbing and blinked her eyes, listening.

"When your father passed away, he left a last edict."

"He treated the original of the world's finest running script as a private possession of his own."

"He had it packed into a Jade Casket and buried with his coffin in the underground palace of Zhaoling."

Xiao Sizi froze, her small hand letting go of the hem.

"He thought he could take this treasure with him forever, but he underestimated human greed and also underestimated the fires of time."

Lin Xuan walked to the window.

He pushed it open a crack, and the night wind rushed into the study.

"Later, the world became chaotic, and warlords rose up everywhere."

"The underground palace of Zhaoling was blown open by tomb raiders, and everything inside was looted clean."

"For a thousand years, wars raged, and the tomb suffered countless disasters."

"That original, which your father forcibly took into the coffin, was likely torn apart, trampled, and turned to dust in the cold underground long ago."

Lin Xuan turned around and delivered the final verdict.

"In this world, there is no longer a true 'Lanting Collection Preface'."

"The one point four billion descendants of Huaxia in later generations can only look at those fragmented rubbings to piece together the glory of your era."

Lin Xuan's words fell silent.

Inside the study, only the ticking of the wall clock's second hand remained.

Xiao Sizi sat dazed on the chair.

She could not comprehend the cruelty of "burial with the dead" and "turning to dust" in her mind.

Lin Xuan continued to explain: "In your era, all under heaven was the King's land."

"Your father was the Son of Heaven; he believed all good things in the world—famous horses, beauties, and peerless calligraphy and paintings—were private possessions of the Li family."

"He would play with them while alive, and take them into the coffin to continue looking at them after death."

Xiao Sizi instinctively refuted: "Father is the Emperor... the Emperor is rich across the four seas."

"What is wrong with taking a scroll into the Yellow Springs?"

Her understanding remained stuck within the highest privileges of feudal imperial power.

Lin Xuan shook his head.

His gaze went over the desk, pointing toward the brightly lit modern city outside the window.

"This is the greatest divide between our two eras."

Lin Xuan grabbed a tissue and handed it to Xiao Sizi.

"Do you know how modern people treat those old objects?"

Xiao Sizi took the tissue, sniffed, and looked at him blankly.

"We built countless huge houses called Museums."

"We enshrine broken porcelain bowls dug from the ground, copper swords covered in rust, and incomplete bamboo slips inside them."

"We cover them with bulletproof Glass, and regulate the most suitable temperature and humidity."

"We station people to patrol and guard them twenty-four hours a day."

"Dozens of old experts with white hair, wearing reading glasses, use tweezers to piece together fragmented scrolls bit by bit."

"They spend years, even decades of their lives, just to restore a single page of paper."

"The doors of the Museum are open to everyone: street-sweeping sanitation workers, farming peasants, and children carrying schoolbags."

"For a few coins, one can walk inside."

"Through the Glass, I want to see with my own eyes the beauty left by our ancestors."

Lin Xuan's finger pointed beside the fresh ink on the table.

"Culture, art, the crystallization of civilization."

"It does not bear the surname Li, nor the surname Zhao."

"It belongs to all people across generations who carry the bloodline of this land."

"One point four billion modern people protect even a single broken tile of your Great Tang as if it were a family heirloom."

Lin Xuan looked straight into the little girl's eyes.

His words were like knives, cutting through the selfish pretense of a thousand years of imperial power.

"But your father, the Tang Taizong hailed by later generations as an eternal sage monarch."

"To satisfy his own pitiful desire for possession after death, he took the most brilliant, most peerless treasure in five thousand years of Huaxia calligraphy history."

"Forcibly locked it inside a Jade Casket, and dragged it into the dark, damp earth."

"He deprived countless future generations of descendants of the right to gaze upon this pinnacle of art."

"This is not the grandeur of an emperor; this is extreme selfishness, a crime against the entire cultural lineage of Huaxia."

Above the Sky Screen.

Lin Xuan's voice shook Jiuzhou.

Above the Sky Screen.

Lin Xuan's voice shook Jiuzhou.

This was not merely an explanation, but a cultural confrontation spanning a thousand years. It was the most severe spiritual judgment passed by modern public civilization upon the private ownership system of ancient feudal imperial power.

In the Great Tang's Taiji Palace.

Cold wind swept into the great hall, making the flames of the giant candles sway wildly.

Li Shimin sat rigid on the Dragon Throne.

He felt his entire spine shatter inch by inch.

His body lost the strength to move.

The color drained completely from his cheeks, leaving him pale as paper.

Emperors taking treasures into their mausoleums has been the norm since ancient times.

Qin Shi Huang and Han Wudi; whose tombs were not piled high with rare treasures?

For him, Li Shimin, to bury a copy of the "Lantingji Xu" was, within the values of this ancient society, a matter of absolute natural justice.

He had never felt it was wrong.

He even took pride in it, considering it a refined act that displayed an emperor's taste.

But at this moment.

Through that glowing Sky Screen.

He saw the future generations clearly.

He saw the dedication poured by those one point four billion descendants to protect a single broken tile.

He heard the extreme heartache and sighs of regret from future generations over the eternal disappearance of that peerless treasure.

Below the great hall.

The entire court of civil and military officials stood silent as winter cicadas.

Wei Zheng stood holding his tablet, his jaw tight.

The official most skilled at remonstrating directly against the ruler's face, now said not a word. Wei Zheng knew clearly in his heart that Lin Xuan was right to scold.

Compared to that broad-mindedness of later generations who shared culture with all people under heaven.

Your Majesty's act was indeed narrow to the extreme.

Chu Suiliang knelt on the golden bricks, looking up, tears sliding down the corners of his eyes and soaking into his beard.

As the foremost calligraphy master of the Great Tang, he felt the destruction of the "Lantingji Xu" more painfully than anyone.

He had once been fortunate enough to view the original work in the Imperial Study.

What a breathtaking and magnificent talent it was.