Suddenly, the fisherman waved his hand. A ball of spirit light leaped into the painting.
The young man in the painting abruptly came to life and stepped down from the canvas. Before long, the woman came alive too, springing down from the painting.
The young man leaped down from the pavilion and walked to the riverbank. He plucked a river flower and stood beneath a green willow beside a blue-stone bridge.
"Flowers for sale! Flowers for sale! Would you like one, sir? They're fresh—just picked."
A scene that made Xu Yi and the others' eyes nearly pop out of their heads unfolded: a flower boy barely half a man's height was hawking flowers to the young man who had stepped out of the painting.
Everyone had thought the young man was an illusion, impossible for outsiders to perceive. Yet a flower boy with not a shred of cultivation could actually speak with him.
The young man waved the flower in his hand and returned a smile. The flower boy left.
The Green-clad woman bounded over. The moment her jade hand touched the young man's shoulder, a gale erupted across the river, whose surface began to boil and bubble.
The young man struggled to turn around. Cracks began to spread across the blue-stone bridges spanning the lake, and the drooping willows by the riverbank began to crumble.
In the end, the young man still hadn't turned around when he dissolved into a wisp of smoke. A trace of bewilderment appeared in the woman's eyes, and she looked up at the sky.
Suddenly, the fisherman beckoned. The woman turned into a ball of light and shadow, then returned to the painting.
The gale over the river stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The cracks in the blue-stone bridges remained, clear proof