When Yun Ye saw Li Huairen, he almost didn’t recognize him. He was swollen from head to toe, dark and shiny, his entire body looking as if it had been inflated. A ghostly infant head was drawn on his chest. He lay weakly in a hanging bed, groaning. As soon as Daoist Sun touched his body, he would scream loudly in agony. This fellow couldn’t be touched anywhere except his palms and soles of his feet. Old Sun carefully examined his tongue coating and pulse, then told Li Xiaogong that Li Huairen hadn’t been poisoned—his internal organs were all intact. As for why his entire body had swollen up and was unbearably painful, he couldn’t figure out the reason. In all his years of practicing medicine, he had never seen such symptoms.

Old Sun was at his wit’s end, but Yun Ye acted completely unconcerned, holding a magnifying glass and carefully observing Li Huairen’s body—his chest, back, and even the soles of his feet, not missing a single spot. From the moment he entered the room, he knew what was wrong with Li Huairen’s body. The unbearable itching all over—Yun Baobao had also suffered from this symptom once last year. The child had been playing around and running everywhere with his bare bottom, and ended up getting covered with the flying catkins from a honey locust tree, which burrowed into his pores. The child wasn’t in pain, just terribly itchy. As soon as he put on clothes, he would cry and scream loudly. In the end, Yun Ye had barely managed to remember Fu Shan’s method of treating children with glutinous rice balls. He tried using warm glutinous rice balls on his son’s body, and the results were very effective. After rolling the glutinous rice balls over him three times, Yun Baobao was fine.

Li Huairen’s symptoms were a hundred times more severe than Yun Baobao’s. Having just carefully observed with the magnifying glass, this fellow’s body was also covered everywhere with fine fibers. Yun Ye didn’t know what substance it was. He used tweezers to pick up one strand—it was extremely fine and embedded very deeply. Glutinous rice balls probably wouldn’t work, but that was fine. This kind of edema caused by dermatitis wouldn’t kill anyone in a short time. He called over the steward and had him boil a basin of thin pine resin, and also prepare a large brush.

Seeing Yun Ye’s composed appearance, Li Huairen quickly asked: “Ye Zi, does your brother still have hope of being saved? If there’s no hope, say so clearly. Your brother can take it.”

“No problem, you can be saved. You won’t die. As long as you endure for three to five days, you’ll naturally recover. This matter isn’t urgent. I heard you took a concubine who is an incomparable beauty. Why not bring her out so your younger brother can meet her?”

The moment Yun Ye said there was no problem, the hearts of the entire Li Xiaogong household that had been stuck in their throats finally settled. Li Xiaogong invited Daoist Sun to the front hall for tea. As for his son’s condition, with Yun Ye there, nothing would go wrong. As for how to treat it, that was a matter between the brothers—he wouldn’t worry about it.

“You bastard! Your brother is about to die and you’re still making sarcastic remarks! Did you actually come to save your brother’s life, or did you come to seduce your second sister-in-law? What business is it of yours whether my concubine is pretty or not!”

Yun Ye sighed and said: “Of all the people you could provoke, you had to go provoke lunatics. It’s precisely because I provoked lunatics that I’ve been forced to hide at home, not daring to go anywhere. I can barely hide in time, yet you deliberately threw yourself at them. Go look—your concubine has definitely disappeared.”

“Of course I know that. She disappeared that very night. In just the time it took your brother to take a bath, she was gone. No one saw her. Then I became unbearably itchy. How could I have the mind to look for her? Stop talking nonsense and quickly cure me. Then we’ll go find her together and make her regret it. If I don’t skin her alive, I’m a bastard.”

At this moment, the pine resin Yun Ye had requested had been boiled. The steward brought the pine resin over and also found a brush for Yun Ye. Yun Ye waited for the temperature of the resin to drop a bit, put his finger in it, and found it wasn’t too hot. Taking advantage of it not having solidified yet, he dipped the brush in the glue, lifted off the thin blanket covering Li Huairen’s body, and mercilessly brushed the glue on his chest and back. After the glue solidified, Yun Ye carefully rolled up one edge of the resin skin, then yanked hard. Amid Li Huairen’s screams of agony, a large sheet of resin was torn off, not only removing those strange fibers but also tearing off the chest hair that Li Huairen was so proud of.

The pain brought tears to Li Huairen’s eyes. Just as he was about to speak, he discovered that Yun Ye was touching his chest with his fingers. Sure enough, his chest no longer itched. Seeing that Yun Ye was about to tear off the resin on his back, he endured it with tears in his eyes and gritted teeth.

Hearing his son’s screams of agony, Li Xiaogong’s hands began to tremble, and the old lady was so anxious she paced in circles. Sun Simiao calmly drank his tea and didn’t say a single word from beginning to end. In terms of medical skill, he was far superior to Yun Ye, but when it came to these unorthodox methods, Yun Ye was much better than him. Yun Ye, who never spoke in absolutes, had said it could be treated, so it must be feasible. Moreover, from Li Huairen’s screams, he could hear that this fellow’s vital energy was very strong—nothing would happen to him.

An hour later, a fat man with black gauze covering his face appeared in the hall with murderous intent. Upon seeing his father, he said: “Father, your son must go find that base servant and capture her to grind her bones to dust in order to vent my anger.”

“You beast! You just barely got your life back and you’ve already forgotten the lesson? Ye Zi exhausted his thoughts helping you with your illness, and Daoist Sun also busied himself front and back. Instead of thanking them, the moment you can move, you want to run outside?” Li Xiaogong, seeing that his son could go out seeking revenge, knew the illness had been cured. Thinking of those people’s inconceivable methods, he strictly forbade Li Huairen from running outside.

Yun Ye walked in with his hands in his sleeves and said: “Huairen, Uncle is right. You have no way to fight against those people. Let me tell you, that ghost head on your chest is very frightening. Don’t provoke them—you can’t afford to. Don’t glare at me. When I say this, it’s not some kind of goading tactic. I’m just stating facts. During this time, nursing your body back to health is what’s proper.”

Li Xiaogong opened his mouth wanting to ask, but ultimately didn’t ask. He only sent the steward who had bought the concubine for Li Huairen to see Yun Ye out. Sun Simiao, under his repeated urging, stayed at Prince Hejian’s residence as a guest for two days.

At the main gate, Yun Ye listened to the steward’s description of the situation, clapped his hands, mounted Wang Cai, and returned to the Yun family estate, muttering continuously: “A theatrical troupe?” He took out three ghost head drawings from his bosom and examined them carefully. The more he looked at these ghost heads, the more familiar they felt. Where had he seen them before? Where exactly had he seen these lines?

For a full two days, Yun Ye didn’t go anywhere, just hid in his study researching those three ghost heads. The earliest ghost head that appeared had the most complex lines. The ghost head at Han Zhe’s home also had very complex lines. By the time it reached the water gate and the ghost head on Li Huairen’s chest, there were only a few sparse strokes—clearly not on the same level.

“Interesting. Even among divine beings, there are differences in status? They also haven’t eliminated class distinctions? Logically, no matter what ideology or faith, when developed to its highest stage, shouldn’t it achieve material abundance and eliminate class? Even the gods haven’t achieved this? How is this kind of god any different from the mortal world?”

Yun Mu and Yun Baobao had been sitting obediently on their father’s desk drawing turtles. Yun Baobao had already finished drawing a huge turtle. After waiting for quite a while without hearing his father praise him, he shook Yun Ye’s arm, wanting him to look at his masterpiece.

His son was most important—let those ghost heads go to hell. He grabbed his son’s masterpiece and carefully admired it. Not bad—after all, he was surnamed Yun. Look at how imposing this turtle was drawn: a shell that was neither round nor flat, claws of varying lengths, a tail much longer than the head, and most distinctive was the triangular head with eyes that had grown outside the head.

“Son, what’s this short line under the turtle’s ears?” Yun Ye pointed at the black dot under the pair of large ears on the turtle’s triangular head, consulting his son.

Before Yun Baobao could answer, Yun Mu stuck her head over, took a look, and said: “That’s the mouth.”

No matter how hard Yun Ye tried, he couldn’t understand how this short line under the ears could be a mouth. Watching Yun Baobao continuously nod in confirmation, a flash of inspiration struck Yun Ye’s mind. That’s right! Why not? Why couldn’t it become a mouth? Who said you couldn’t draw ears when drawing a turtle? Who said a short line couldn’t represent a mouth? And who said ghost heads couldn’t be extended to become short lines of varying lengths?

What heavenly stems and earthly branches, what River Chart and Luo Script, what Hidden Talisman Scripture, what Five Elements and Eight Trigrams—as long as the dots and lines on the jade plaque were rolled up, wouldn’t they become a three-dimensional ghost head? It had nothing whatsoever to do with those profound learning.

Overjoyed, Yun Ye pulled open the drawer and took out a rubbed pattern. This was the line segments and dots on the White Jade Capital. He rolled the entire sheet of paper into a cylinder and looked closely, then felt somewhat discouraged. Rolling it into a cylinder seemed to produce some change, but it was still chaotic and disorderly without any clue. It wasn’t at all like the rough pattern at Han Zhe’s home, nor did it have the wild beauty characteristic of totems.

If he couldn’t figure it out, he’d set it aside. Yun Ye lifted the children onto his lap, and all three of them sat together on the rocking chair, swaying back and forth. Before long they were rocking drowsily. Autumn afternoons were perfect for sleeping. Sunlight streamed through the glass window into the study. All three of them had fallen asleep. Na Rimu walked in, quietly covered them with a blanket, tidied up the desk, picked up the paper cylinders scattered on the floor and placed them on the desk. Not a single sheet of paper in her husband’s study was allowed to be thrown away—this was the Yun family’s rule, a household regulation personally established by the old grandmother. Seeing that everything was tidied up, she walked out and closed the door.

The sun slowly set, its rays slanting across the surface of the desk. The evening sunlight shone on the paper cylinder, and on the back of the cylinder, a ferocious single-horned ghost head appeared distinctly. This scene only appeared for a moment before the sunlight shifted away. The sleeping Yun Ye knew nothing of this.

It wasn’t until the sky had grown somewhat dim that Xinyue came in to wake the three of them. The two children couldn’t sleep too much—if they slept enough now, they wouldn’t want to sleep at night. Besides, it was time for dinner again.

Yun Ye put the paper cylinder from the desk back into the drawer and led the two children to the front hall to eat. Of course, before that, they had to wash their hands. After all three of them had washed their hands clean and Xinyue had wiped each of their palms dry one by one, only then were they allowed to come to the table. The cook had worked very hard today because the Winter Solstice festival had arrived. The Yun family’s custom was to eat dumplings. A large plate of dumplings was already set on the table, and the children’s small bowls were also filled with dumplings. In the past, they used to eat wontons, but after Yun Ye took charge, he changed it. This custom had already continued for five years…