Xu Yi was well-traveled and knew the tricks behind fortune-telling and character divination. If this fortune-teller had brought out a high-end prop like Auspicious Duck, he might have believed him.
But the moment he heard it was character divination, his heart went cold.
He casually wrote the character "one," keeping it as simple as possible so he could hear how the man would spin it. If the man said something like "the last stroke of life, the first stroke of death," Xu Yi would slap him twice and leave at once.
The middle-aged Daoist priest did not speak right away. He paced around the green bamboo table a few times, and an old compass appeared in his hand. It seemed to be made of jade, with a spirit stone set in its center. At a glance, it was clearly no ordinary object.
Suddenly, the middle-aged Daoist priest stopped. He murmured an incantation, and the compass cast countless tiny spots of light that drifted across the white paper.
Xu Yi was taken aback. "Wasn't this supposed to be character divination? Why aren't we playing the usual game of breaking apart and combining characters?"
As he worked the compass, the middle-aged Daoist priest smiled. "My character divination is different from everyone else's. Heaven and earth are the paper, and people are the characters written upon it. Where a person stands in heaven and earth, whether yin and yang, heaven and earth, are beyond their control—one need only divine to know..."
As he spoke, the sunny sky, bathed in the evening glow, was suddenly swallowed by dark clouds. A gale rose, and a bolt of lightning hurtled down from the ninth heaven. With a thunderous crash, it struck the compass in the middle-aged Daoist priest's hand.
The compass disintegrated into dust, and the