PDLP Chapter 401 There are houses of gold and wisdom in books!
Chapter 401 There are houses of gold and wisdom in books!
As dusk fell, the sky above the bowl-shaped world was devoid of stars, save for a hazy, milky glow that gently enveloped every inch of land.
The library is a two-story wooden building with upturned eaves and corners, simple and elegant. The exterior walls of the building are covered with vines and mottled with moss. Two paper lanterns hang under the eaves, their candlelight flickering in the night breeze and casting a dim yellow glow.
Chen Fan pushed open the creaking wooden door and slowly walked in.
The space inside the pavilion wasn't large, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls, crafted from spirit sandalwood and emitting a faint fragrance. The books on the shelves weren't all jade slips; most were thread-bound books with yellowed pages, bamboo slips with curled and torn edges, and even a few ancient scrolls made of animal hide.
These books mostly come from the Great Abyss Imperial City Library, the Qingyun Sect's Scripture Pavilion, and miscellaneous books collected from various places over the years. The content is all-encompassing, including vernacular stories and legends, travelogues and anecdotes of cultivators, formulas for alchemy and formations, as well as ancient tales.
Chen Fan did not light the lamp.
As was his habit, he walked to the window seat, where there was an old wooden table with several books stacked on it that had not yet been put back on the shelf. He casually picked up the top book, brushed away the thin layer of dust from the cover, revealing the three delicate characters "The Tale of Nanke".
This is a folk tale about a scholar who dreams of entering the Kingdom of Huai'an, marrying a princess, becoming a governor, and enjoying all the riches and honors. However, upon waking, he finds an ant colony as large as a kingdom under a locust tree, realizing that it was all just a dream.
Chen Fan sat down at the table and, in the dim light streaming in from the window, opened the book.
At first, he just browsed casually, treating it as a pastime, but as he read on, his mind gradually became engrossed.
The book is written in a simple and unadorned style, yet it vividly portrays the scholar's joy in his dream, his arrogance when he gains power, and his bewilderment and loss upon waking.
Chen Fan traced a line of text with his fingertip: "...Seeing a small earthen city and building in an anthill, just like the governor's mansion in my dream. I realized that Huai'an Kingdom is an ant kingdom; its glory and disgrace, rise and fall, are nothing more than the struggle of ants."
He paused for a moment.
I could almost picture the scholar squatting under the locust tree, staring blankly at the anthill. It was an emptiness that came after seeing through illusion, a desolation of falling from the clouds back to the dust.
Chen Fan closed his eyes.
He thought of himself.
I recall the little eunuch struggling to survive when he first entered the palace, the perilous steps he took after embarking on the path of cultivation at the age of eighty, and the precariousness of hiding his identity and navigating between various forces.
Isn't this just a grand dream?
But his dream was longer, more dangerous, and more real. It contained the clash of swords and the shadows of blood, entanglements of cause and effect, unavoidable calculations, and moments of warmth that he occasionally found.
When Chen Fan opened his eyes, he found that the corners of his eyes were a little wet.
He paused for a moment, then reached out to wipe away the dampness, shaking his head and chuckling.
"Our family is being a bit dramatic..."
But the flutter in my heart had not yet dissipated.
He put down "The Tale of Nanke" and pulled out another book from the shelf, "The Records of Beiman Mountain." This was a travelogue written by a wandering cultivator, recording the local customs, monsters, and spiritual materials of the Beiman Mountain region, as well as several encounters along the way.
One of the stories caught Chen Fan's attention.
The story is about an old woodcutter who went up the mountain to chop firewood every day and always passed by a desolate grave. In front of the grave stood an old locust tree with lush branches and leaves. The old woodcutter was kind-hearted, and every Qingming and Zhongyuan Festival, he would clear the weeds and add soil to the desolate grave, and occasionally he would place some wild fruits as offerings.
Ten years passed like this.
One day, an old woodcutter was climbing the mountain when he was caught in a sudden downpour. Unable to avoid it, he lost his footing and fell off a cliff. In the nick of time, branches of a locust tree suddenly grew wildly from the edge of the cliff, like arms, and caught him, pulling him back to the top.
The old woodcutter, still shaken, looked up and saw a blurry human face appear among the branches of the locust tree, nodding slightly to him before disappearing.
Later, the old woodcutter learned that the desolate grave contained the remains of a plant spirit that had failed in its cultivation and perished due to a failed tribulation. Its soul had attached itself to a locust tree, remaining in a daze for many years. The old woodcutter had been tending to the tree for ten years, unintentionally nourishing its remnant soul and restoring a sliver of its spirituality, which is why the woodcutter had come to its rescue.
At the end of the article, the author sighed, "Even a single meal's kindness can be repaid. How can ten years of tomb sweeping not be a consequence of karma?"
After reading it, Chen Fan remained silent for a long time.
He walked to the window and pushed it open. A gentle breeze carrying the fragrance of bamboo leaves wafted in, ruffling a few strands of white hair at his temples.
Outside the window, the bamboo grove rustled. In the distance, in the fields, Eunuch Wei was directing his ten servant disciples to carry water to irrigate the seedlings, his cursing faintly audible. Further away, under the dragon whisker fruit tree, Black Emperor and Little Flower were chasing each other, biting each other's tails and making a ruckus.
All of this seems ordinary, but it is all inextricably linked to him.
Because of his cunning, Eunuch Wei was left in the bowl, thus escaping the infighting in the palace, but he was also trapped in this place.
Those ten handymen disciples were abducted by him because the Qingyun Sect closed its mountain, but now they are living peacefully here, and their cultivation is much faster than when they were in the outer sect.
Black Emperor, Little Flower, Little Butterfly... Every encounter changed their destinies.
What is cause and effect?
It is the scholar's sudden realization upon waking from a dream and facing an anthill, the life-saving branch earned by the old woodcutter through ten years of good deeds, and also the inextricable karmic connection between Chen Fan and these people and events.
It is formless and intangible, yet it connects all beings like silk threads and a net. Good causes do not necessarily lead to good results, and bad karma does not necessarily result in bad retribution; the mysteries within are too numerous to fully describe.
Chen Fan returned to the table and picked up another book, "The Record of the Underworld".
This book is even older, written in cinnabar, and records various ghost stories and legends of reincarnation. One of the chapters talks about the "Mirror of Karma," which says that there is a mirror in the underworld that can reflect the karma created by living beings in their past and present lives. Good karma appears as white light, and bad karma appears as black aura. The intertwining of karma is what forms the soul.
A passage in the text deeply moved Chen Fan: "...A soul arrived before the mirror, its body shrouded in black mist, except for a single point of white light that remained undying at its heart. The judge questioned it, and the soul replied: 'In this life, I have killed countless people, my sins are grave, but when I was young, I saved a sparrow, which repaid me with a lingzhi mushroom, saving my mother's life. This small act of kindness protects my true spirit from falling into the Avici Hell.'"
Can a single good deed offset a thousand bad ones?
Chen Fan seemed to be deep in thought.
He thought of Chuntao.
That simple and naive palace maid's fate was changed when he impulsively decided to become his lover.
That was a touch of warmth he accidentally encountered on his cold journey of cultivating immortality.
Could this warmth also be a glimmer of white light on his "mirror of karma"?
Chen Fan didn't know.
But suddenly he really wanted to see her.
It wasn't in the guise of an old eunuch, nor in any disguise; it was simply Chen Fan meeting Chun Tao.
Once this thought arose, it grew wildly like weeds, impossible to suppress.
He forced himself to pull himself back to reality and continued flipping through the book.
The next few books included historical records of dynastic changes, biographies documenting the loves and hates of cultivators, and purely fictional tales of gods and monsters. Chen Fan read them one by one, completely absorbed in them.
He would frown when reading about loyal ministers dying unjustly.
When he reads about chivalrous heroes who seek revenge and repay kindness, he smiles.
He would sigh when reading about lovesick men and women who couldn't have the love they desired.
His eyes would well up with tears when he read about the reunion of father and son or the reconciliation of close friends.