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墨書 Inktalez
The door of the woodshed slammed shut in front of Lin Dahe with a loud bang, shaking off a few strands of long-standing dust. He raised his hand to knock again, but heard a sharp sound from inside—a blade slicing through fabric.
"Xiaoman! That book is really not..."
"Not what?" A half-visible, glinting knife tip suddenly appeared through the crack in the door. Cui Xiaoman's voice trembled, "Not a spell depicting the sun absorbing the leaves? The fairy that Li Zhuang burned last year was accused of borrowing the essence of the sun and moon!"
Lin Dahe felt cold sweat bead on his forehead. The red letters on the system interface reading [Trust Level: 15/100] stung his eyes painfully. Suddenly, he crouched down and slid a potato leaf under the door.
"Feel it," he lowered his voice, "is there a pore on the back of the leaf?"
After a long silence, two muddy fingers reached out from the crack and took the leaf. There was another rustling sound, followed by the soft noise of paper being turned.
"This... these circles and lines..."
"From overseas monks," Lin Dahe seized the moment, "they call it 'Crop Breathing Diagram' in Tianzhu, just like how humans breathe..."
The latch suddenly slid open, and Cui Xiaoman's face appeared in the dim light. She pinched a diagram from her notes showing photosynthesis, her brow furrowed tightly enough to crush a mosquito: "So you’re not chanting spells; you’re calculating?"
"Yes, yes!" Lin Dahe nodded vigorously, "Calculating how much sunlight, how much water, how much soil..."
"No wonder!" Cui Xiaoman suddenly pounded on the doorframe, "You keep measuring three fingers against the wheat; you’re measuring inter-nodal spacing?" Her eyes sparkled with excitement as she pulled him into the woodshed. "You should have said so! The veterinary book my father left behind has similar strange symbols!"
The musty smell mixed with hay hit him as he finally saw that the torn notebook lay flat on a wooden stump used for chopping feed, next to an opened embroidery frame—Cui Xiaoman had actually attempted to stitch the diagrams into patterns using red and green threads!
"Look," she pointed to a wheat ear pattern she had embroidered at the corner of the page, "with this change, who could tell it’s Yao Shu?" In between the turning pages, chemical equations transformed into vine patterns, and energy formulas morphed into auspicious clouds—a lively depiction of a bountiful harvest.
Lin Dahe's throat went dry. The girl’s profile as she bit off a thread under the oil lamp glimmered with a golden edge, with a few stray bits of grass still stuck in her hair. He reached out instinctively but was startled back by the system's alarm:
[Warning! Risk of cognitive barrier exists.]
"Actually..." he withdrew his hand and pulled out a charcoal pencil, "it can be made even more discreet." Under Cui Xiaoman's astonished gaze, he translated nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium symbols into a diagram of the twenty-eight constellations and sketched the citric acid cycle as an eight trigrams chart.
"Brilliant!" Cui Xiaoman clapped her legs in laughter. "Those fools at the county office definitely won't understand!" But then her expression turned serious. "But you have to tell me about those glowing words."
She pointed to an empty space in her notes—there were lines of fluorescent annotations generated by the system: [Chlorophyll activity insufficient]. Lin Dahe's back instantly soaked with sweat as the system screen flashed red alarms wildly.
"This is..." he thought quickly, "Night Pearl powder! I stole it from the county office storeroom!"
Cui Xiaoman squinted as if about to ask more when an elderly cough suddenly came from outside. Seventh Uncle's white beard drifted in through the window's crack: "Lin Family Boy, we found the genealogy."
The yellowed rice paper spread out on the desk revealed worm-eaten edges that spoke of age. Seventh Uncle's bony finger pointed at a name: "Lin Youtian, five acres purchased in Wanli Year 38." He traced over another line of small text: "In Tianqi Year 2, mortgaged two acres to Zhou Clan; contract lost."
"Mortgaged?" Lin Dahe leaned closer to examine the faded red seal. "Isn't that selling off?"
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