Ever since Xiao Chan had let slip the story of “Prelude to the Water Melody” on Mid-Autumn night, Ning Yi had spent the past few days holed up at home, reading books and playing sick, occasionally playing a round of Gomoku with Xiao Chan out of boredom. Today was the first day he’d actually gone out—he’d taught his morning class at the academy, and in the afternoon had gone to pick up the wooden board he’d had someone whitewash for him earlier, then bought some charcoal sticks along the way. By the time he made his way over to the riverbank, both Old Qin and Kang Xian happened to be there.
As for the matter of the poem, Ning Yi had no particular psychological hang-up about simply using it now that it was out there. The classical poetry he happened to know was, in the present day, a rather valuable strategic resource; if he ever felt restless enough to want to make something of himself down the line, pulling out a few more pieces to build hype and a bit of fame could prove quite useful. But bringing it out now served little purpose beyond satisfying a bit of vanity.
The scholars and talented men of this era spoke and acted with constant reference to the classics, and anyone truly hoping to build a reputation would inevitably be tested on the spot. In matters requiring quick wit on this front, having the complete poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties memorized would do him no good at all. As things stood, if someone put a few texts like the Analects or the Great Learning in front of him, he could explain them in plain vernacular, even with a fair bit of originality—but beyond that, he genuinely had no scholarly depth to speak of. Throwing out that poem had, perhaps, come a bit too early—but since it had already happened, given his temperament, he simply accepted it and moved on without much concern.
To him, this wasn’t really much of a problem. Whether taking the unconventional path or the proper one, there were countless ways to handle a situation like this. A few days earlier, Old Master Su and Su Boyong had called him and Su Tan’er over to ask about it, and he’d simply made something up on the spot—claiming the verse wasn’t his own, and that things had just happened to work out strangely… Old Master Su had studied him for a long while before finally saying, with a smile, “Since it’s already happened, best to keep quiet about it going forward…” The old man was shrewd; whether he actually believed the story or not was another matter entirely. But if Ning Yi really were some great talent, that would put the Su family in an awkward position too—for now, it seemed, everyone was still just guessing at the truth.
Being a celebrated scholar was nowhere near as comfortable as being a live-in son-in-law was right now—no need to do much of anything, no need to take on much responsibility, and no one expecting much of him either, which meant no pressure at all. The old patriarch even looked out for him. Only a fool would want to give up a life like this. After finally getting to enjoy a few months of leisure, so long as nothing major came up, he fully intended to cling stubbornly to his status as a live-in son-in-law. That was what he privately thought, and he found the whole situation rather amusing—though if he ever said as much out loud, he doubted even Xiao Chan would believe him.
Rumors were certainly circulating out there by now, and he could more or less guess what shape they’d taken. It was only when Xiao Chan had told him about what happened at the Zhishui poetry gathering that the name Kang Xian had genuinely startled him, and in the end he couldn’t help but laugh at himself over it. He’d already known the old man wasn’t just anybody—he just hadn’t expected quite so grand a reputation.
After resting the appropriate number of days, he put the matter out of his mind for the time being and returned to his normal routine. As it happened, during his morning lesson that day, he’d been visited at Yushan Academy by none other than Yu Zixing—the very man Old Kang had scolded—along with a few other scholars, who had come, of all things, to apologize.
In a sense, being publicly reprimanded like that by Kang Xian at the poetry gathering had done considerable damage to Yu Zixing’s reputation as a man of letters—a genuine stroke of undeserved misfortune. Still, Kang Xian, valuing the man’s talent, had pulled him aside privately before leaving to offer some earnest guidance, and Yu Zixing had since made time to come apologize in person. Once word of that got around, it could actually earn him a measure of good standing—after all, admitting fault and coming to make amends counted, in its own way, as a kind of virtue too.
Since they’d come with a clear purpose in mind, Ning Yi played along a little, putting on a small show of mutual respect and understanding, and politely declined their invitation to join some gathering of scholars aboard a pleasure boat that evening. After exchanging farewells with the group, he went to fetch the freshly painted whiteboard.
“That Zixing fellow is decent enough in character,” Kang Xian remarked with a laugh. “His talent isn’t top-tier, but it’s certainly respectable. It’s just that your ‘Prelude to the Water Melody’ was written so well that, once it came out, no one’s likely to bother writing another moon-themed verse at the Qin Huai Mid-Autumn gatherings for years to come. I really wouldn’t have guessed that a good-for-nothing brat like you actually had such genuine poetic talent.”
“I’ve told you already, I don’t know the first thing about poetry.” Ning Yi took a sip of tea. “When I was young, a wandering Taoist priest in tattered clothes passed by our house and recited this poem aloud, so I remembered it. That’s all there is to it.”
He’d told Old Master Su the same story. Old Qin let out a great laugh at this. “Even a three-year-old child wouldn’t believe a story like that.”
Kang Xian agreed. “This one’s simply too lazy for his own good—needs a firm hand to keep him in line… though I must say, having a reputation as a talented scholar seems to come in rather handy. That woman just now, quite striking in looks and bearing, walking along with you and chatting so pleasantly—if that turns into something, ha, young man, you’ll owe this old man a proper debt of gratitude…”
Given Ning Yi’s status as a live-in son-in-law, courting a woman was hardly a simple matter, and Kang Xian was only teasing him. Ning Yi explained the whole business of rescuing someone before Mid-Autumn, and only then did the two old men understand what had actually happened. By this point, their game had also come to an end. The three of them sat down to rest, and Old Qin, picking up his teacup, nodded, his interest turning to another matter entirely. “Writing? So you mean to write on this whiteboard with charcoal, for use in your classroom?”
“Mm, a sand tray can only hold so many characters at once, and it’s genuinely a hassle to use—far less convenient than something you can simply write on directly.”
As far as teaching went, students at the time learned to write entirely on sand trays—write one character, and the tray had to be smoothed flat again before the next. The teacher would simply demonstrate how to write a given character. With most knowledge delivered orally, students had to listen with total concentration while the teacher spoke, and afterward had to rely on their own understanding to remember and record the lecture. Unless a student was especially bright or especially diligent, keeping up with the pace of instruction was genuinely quite difficult.
Of course, to men like Old Qin and Old Kang, a teaching method that had persisted for over a thousand years hardly seemed like anything worth questioning. Scholarship was, after all, the domain of the elite; if you wanted to become one of the elite, of course you had to be willing to suffer for it—that was itself a kind of test. Old Qin picked up a stick of charcoal and scratched a line across the whiteboard, then frowned.
“A sand tray is soft—writing on it with a twig follows the same technique as using a brush. Charcoal, though, is difficult to write with. This kind of change might not be a good idea.”
Nie Yunzhu, earlier, had only paid attention to the quality of the characters themselves, but Old Qin, coming at it from a different angle, had raised an objection after just two strokes: a teacher demonstrating characters in the classroom without using proper brush technique was a matter that could be taken either lightly or quite seriously. Old Kang then came over to try it himself, and frowned as well. “This needs to be handled with care.”
If Ning Yi had been his own student, he might well have already given him a proper scolding, delivering a stern wake-up call about just how serious the matter was.
Ning Yi understood their concern well enough, and simply smiled, crouching down to pick up a stick of charcoal himself. “It’s not really that big a problem. Writing, after all, is meant to cultivate one’s temperament and character, and these characters actually do share some common ground with proper brushwork. If it’s purely for recording things, I think we can afford to be a bit more flexible about it—call it… another angle on the matter.”
With that, he reached out and began writing on the board. First, in regular script: a line about rosy hands and wine sealed in yellow wax, followed by two orioles singing among the green willows.
After these two lines, the script shifted to clerical style: a line about beyond the pavilion, along the ancient road, followed by a line of egrets rising into the blue sky.
Once these two lines were finished, the script shifted again, this time to a more rounded, uniform style: the three peaks half sinking beyond the blue heavens.
This particular uniform-block style of script hadn’t yet come into existence in this era. Old Qin and Old Kang exchanged a glance. To properly illustrate the point, though, a bit of visual impact tended to work best—Ning Yi, in his old life, had always favored exactly this kind of understated-but-striking approach when pitching business deals to clients. The next line shifted into a more elegant, flowing “slender gold” style: two streams splitting around Egret Isle.
Then into cursive script: In the northwest there lives a beauty—hanging herself from a southeast branch.
Then into a slanted, blocky style: To see a thousand miles further—hang yourself from a southeast branch.
The whiteboard was only so large. Once he’d finished, he set down the charcoal. “Well? What do you think?” Old Qin and Old Kang had already burst out laughing and scolding him in the same breath.
“The characters are worth looking at, but the poetry is absolute nonsense…”
“An insult to literature, how infuriating…”
“You really are too lazy for your own good—what on earth is this supposed to be…”
Even as they said this, though, neither man’s eyes ever left the white board, and every so often one of them would read a line aloud and offer a comment.
“‘In the northwest there lives a beauty’—what utter ignorance, it’s clearly ‘in the north there lives a beauty, peerless and unmatched’! This line comes straight from the Book of Han, and then you follow it up with ‘hanging herself from a southeast branch’—ha, do you honestly think ‘northwest’ rhymes with ‘southeast’…”
“Old Kang really is as sharp as ever.”
“If you were my student, I’d have someone fetch a switch to whip you with—casually scribbling graffiti that drags the great masters of old into it! ‘To see a thousand miles further,’ and then ‘hang yourself from a southeast branch’—aren’t you afraid Wang Zhihuan’s ghost will come looking for you? Every single line ending in ‘hanging from the southeast branch’—that poor peacock that flew southeast is having a rough time of it too, what did that southeast branch ever do to you?”
“Ha ha, I just had a sudden thought the other day—if you string together a bunch of classical lines like this, it might actually create a rather unique effect. Doesn’t Old Kang think so too? ‘In the northwest there lives a beauty—hanging herself from a southeast branch. Raising my head to gaze at the bright moon—hanging myself from a southeast branch. In the empty mountains, no one is seen—hanging myself from a southeast branch. Since ancient times the sages were all lonely—only in hanging from the southeast branch. Since ancient times, who among men does not die—better to just hang from the southeast branch…'”
Old Kang shook his head. “When it concerns the sages of old, one must be careful.” There was a note of amusement in his tone, but also a hint of genuine caution. Old Qin, meanwhile, was studying something else, and remarked, “‘When will the moon be full and bright’…” Old Kang finished the thought: “I suppose that one too must end with ‘hanging from the southeast branch,'” and the two of them laughed.
Old Qin then picked up a stick of charcoal and pointed at the first few lines. “These too look cobbled together, though I can’t quite place where they’re from—I’d guess they’re an old piece of your own, Liheng. Ha, ‘rosy hands, wine sealed in yellow wax’… the line after doesn’t fit well—’two orioles singing among the green willows’ and ‘a line of egrets rising into the blue sky’ really ought to belong together as a single couplet… while ‘the three peaks half sink beyond the blue heavens’ and ‘two streams split around Egret Isle’—what fine imagery. That should be a different poem entirely…”
He circled these lines with the charcoal, separating “rosy hands, wine sealed in yellow wax” from “beyond the pavilion, along the ancient road,” studied them a moment longer, then drew another line down the middle, apparently concluding that these two lines didn’t belong to the same poem either. Kang Xian nodded in agreement. “These should be two separate pieces.” He glanced over at Ning Yi.
Ning Yi found himself rather impressed. Had he been the one looking at these twelve characters under similar circumstances, he might well have assumed they belonged to a single poem—after all, the meter matched up reasonably well, and lyric poems of this kind tended to run fairly long, more than enough room for such a shift in tone. These twelve characters weren’t easy to pull apart, and yet the two men in front of him had managed to separate them on instinct alone.
“That would make four separate poems, then. I wonder—do you already have the full pieces these came from, or are these simply fragments that happened to come to you?” Old Qin turned to Ning Yi and asked.