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墨書 Inktalez
The door of the woodshed slammed shut in front of Lin Dahe with a loud bang, sending a few wisps of long-standing dust tumbling down. He raised his hand to knock again, but heard a sharp sound from inside—a blade slicing through fabric.
"Xiaoman! That book really isn't..."
"What isn't it?" A half-glimmering knife tip suddenly appeared at the crack of the door. Cui Xiaoman's voice trembled, "The immortal lady that Li Zhuang burned last year said she could borrow the essence of the sun and moon!"
Lin Dahe felt cold sweat bead on his forehead. The red text on the system interface reading [Trust Value: 15/100] stung his eyes. 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 pinched the leaf away. There was another rustling sound, followed by the soft sound of paper being turned.
"This... these circles and lines..."
"From an overseas monk's teachings." Lin Dahe seized the opportunity, "In Tianzhu, they call this 'Crop Breathing Diagram,' just like how humans breathe..."
The latch suddenly slid open, and Cui Xiaoman's face appeared in the dim light. She held a diagram of photosynthesis from her notes between her fingers, her brow furrowed tightly enough to crush a mosquito: "So you're not chanting spells; you're calculating?"
"Exactly!" Lin Dahe nodded vigorously, "Calculating how much sunlight, how much water, how much soil..."
"No wonder!" Cui Xiaoman suddenly pounded on the doorframe, "You were measuring the spacing between wheat stalks with three fingers?" Her eyes sparkled with excitement as she pulled him into the woodshed. "Why didn't you say so earlier? My father's veterinary book has similar strange symbols!"
The musty smell mixed with hay hit him in the face. Lin Dahe finally saw that the notebook had been cut open and lay flat on a wooden stump used for chopping feed. Next to it was an opened embroidery frame—Cui Xiaoman had actually attempted to stitch the diagrams into patterns with red and green threads!
"Look," she pointed to a wheat ear pattern she had stitched in the corner of the page, "with this change, who could tell it's Yao Shu?" Among the turning pages, chemical reaction formulas transformed into vine patterns, and energy equations became auspicious clouds—a vivid depiction of a bountiful harvest.
Lin Dahe's throat went dry. The way she bit off thread ends under the oil lamp cast a golden edge on her profile, with strands of grass still clinging to 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 drew the citric acid cycle as an eight trigrams diagram.
"Brilliant!" Cui Xiaoman clapped her thighs in laughter, "Those fools at the county office definitely won't understand!" But then her expression turned serious. "But you have to tell me what those glowing words are about."
She pointed to an empty space in her notes—there lay a line of system-generated fluorescent annotations: [Chlorophyll activity insufficient]. Lin Dahe's back instantly soaked through with sweat as red alarms flashed wildly on the system screen.
"This is..." he thought quickly, "Night Pearl Powder! I stole it from the county office storeroom!"
Cui Xiaoman narrowed her eyes, about to press for more details when an elderly cough suddenly came from outside. Seventh Uncle's white beard drifted through the window gap: "Lin Family Boy, we found the genealogy."
A yellowed piece of rice paper was spread out on the table, its worm-eaten edges revealing its age. Seventh Uncle's gnarled finger pointed at a name: "Lin Youtian, five acres purchased in Wanli Year Thirty-eight." He traced over a line of small text: "In Tianqi Year Two, mortgaged two acres to Zhou Clan; contract lost."
"Mortgaged?" Lin Dahe leaned closer to examine the faded red seal. "Isn't that selling outright?"
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