Chapter 352
Chapter 352
We dropped Wang Xiaoxiao off at the entrance to her neighborhood.
The truth about Lu Yihao had hit her hard.
To be honest, both she and Su Lan had been blinded by love. They had only seen Lu Yihao’s looks. When the outside of a person was that different from what lay beneath, their true colors were bound to show sooner or later.
Lu Yihao was rotten to the core – a selfish bastard through and through.
“Don’t take it too hard, Miss Wang,” I said, trying to comfort her. “At least you got the chance to see him for what he really is. Any later, and he might’ve murdered you for the insurance money.”
Wang Xiaoxiao had cried the whole way. Her eyes were swollen red.
“I know I’m ridiculous. Of all people, I had to fall for scum like him. I even fought with my dad so I could be with him.”
“Everyone steps in shit at least once in their life. Just think of him as one particularly nasty pile. Wipe your shoes, keep your eyes open next time, and move on. With what you’ve got going for you, finding a man a hundred times better than Lu Yihao will be easy.”
“Thank you…”
Before she left, I asked her to put in a good word with her father and tell him not to come after us.
After all, I had promised Wang Jiangguo I wouldn’t save Lu Yihao, but I had saved the bastard anyway. I was worried Wang Jiangguo might take offense and make trouble for us behind the scenes.
Wang Xiaoxiao nodded and promised she would speak to him, then turned and left.
We still couldn’t go home. We had started helping, so we might as well see it through. We went with Su Yi to the police station to file a report.
The police had already recovered Su Lan’s body. Su Yi had now reported the crime, and the Wang family had abandoned Lu Yihao. There was no question he would be arrested, and he would most likely get the death penalty.
It was well past midnight by the time we left the station.
Su Yi thanked us over and over and tried to pay me, but I refused.
Some money you could take. Some money you couldn’t.
His family had suffered a tragedy, and his mother was seriously ill. If I took too much, my conscience would bother me. If I took too little, it wouldn’t amount to anything anyway. Better to take nothing and earn myself a reputation for saintly compassion.
In the end, each of us accepted a bottle of water he bought. That way we hadn’t left completely empty-handed. We had spared another man disaster and lightened our own karmic burden.
It was too late to go back to Meng Yifan’s place, so I went straight to Seventh Master’s house.
The footage Anning had secretly recorded had already been sent to him.
As soon as I arrived, Seventh Master eagerly pulled it up. He watched, analyzed, and took notes all at once.
I couldn’t help asking why he insisted on secretly learning other people’s techniques.
Seventh Master set down his pen and paper. In a very serious tone, he told me it wasn’t that he insisted on stealing anyone’s knowledge. Some things were slowly being lost and disappearing altogether.
In ancient times, the Mystic Sect had flourished, and every school had enjoyed its own golden age. Back then, any school that wanted to grow naturally had to keep its discoveries secret.
But times had changed. The Mystic Sect no longer flourished as it once had. If people still clung to the old ways now, everything passed down by their ancestors would eventually be lost for good.
“The times will leave many things behind, but some things deserve to be preserved,” Seventh Master said, a trace of sorrow in his voice. “They are the crystallized wisdom of our ancestors, treasures left to later generations, and part of our country’s culture.”
“How can we have confidence in our culture if we cannot even preserve its foundations?”
“Our people would rather believe in Western astrology, then turn around and dismiss their own traditions as superstition. What they don’t know is that the Western zodiac copied our Twelve Palaces. In early times, the Twelve Palaces were called the Twelve Degrees, or the Twelve Stations. The Yin and Yang Palace among them is what people now call Gemini. Those foreigners simply didn’t know how to translate the words ‘Yin and Yang.'”
“Since we believe in this culture, we ought to pass it on. Otherwise, one day our descendants won’t even know these things ever existed. They’ll just blindly follow the cultures of other countries.”
After hearing Seventh Master speak, I felt a whole new respect for him.
Very few people still cared that deeply about anything.
Only a rare few were willing to preserve the lost teachings of the sages.
I remembered believing in astrology when I was in school. In fact, Fang Man and I had gotten together because I checked our zodiac signs, decided we were a perfect match, and finally made a move.
Then my cursed fate got Fang Man killed…
It wasn’t until I learned Six Yao that I realized astrology had exactly one purpose: to insult people’s intelligence as thoroughly as possible.
If I had believed in the Eight Characters back then, I might even have avoided that tragedy.
…
I left Seventh Master’s house in the morning and took a cab to the agency.
I slept from the moment I got in until the moment I got out. I could barely keep my eyes open.
Fortunately, business had been slow lately. Meng Yifan wasn’t coming in either. An elder in his family had died, and he had gone back to his hometown for the funeral.
With him gone and no customers around, I simply went into the office and crashed.
I slept until the afternoon and even missed lunch.
When I woke up, Anning was in the office too. She still had that children’s smartwatch on and was sitting there reading a book.
I walked over and saw that it was written in classical Chinese, without any annotations.
Now that was strange. I distinctly remembered that she had only finished elementary school.
“Can you understand that?” I asked.
She looked up at me and shook her head.
I laughed. “Then why are you reading something so difficult?”
Anning’s delicate brows drew together. “Song Xiaotian said I’m uneducated…”
I burst out laughing.
“Don’t listen to his bullshit. He’s the uneducated one.”
I remembered asking Song Xiaotian how the Qing Dynasty had fallen.
He said Erkang and Ziwei had spent all day dating until there was no dynasty left.
I seriously suspected the man had never attended school.
“I can’t understand any of it…” Anning looked at me, practically overflowing with curiosity. “But I want to know what all these words mean.”
I took the book and glanced at the page. It read: All under heaven return to the same destination by different paths; a hundred deliberations arrive at the same conclusion.
“It means that although all living beings take different paths, they ultimately reach the same destination,” I explained.
“People may approach a question from different angles and think in different ways, but they ultimately arrive at the same result.”
“That’s why the ancients often said there is no trouble in the world until fools disturb themselves. A lot of life’s worries are things we invent in our own heads.”
Understanding dawned on Anning’s face. She pointed to the next line. “What about this one?”
I read aloud, “The worries of one who knows no contentment can never be dispelled in a lifetime. It means that someone who never knows when to be satisfied will never be free of worry for as long as they live.”
Good thing Meng Yifan wasn’t there. Doing something this unrelated to work on company time was pretty damn brazen.
I was still giving Anning her lesson when Song Xiaotian walked in on the phone.
It seemed to be Pan Xiaorou calling, but they weren’t being lovey-dovey. Something had apparently happened.
He hung up and said excitedly to Anning and me, “We’ve got a job! Something went wrong at a real-estate tycoon’s new development, and he’s looking for someone to fix it. Xiaorou recommended you.”
“Come on. Let’s go make some serious money!”