The speaker was still a boy, with youthful features and a small, thin frame. He wore a flimsy, collarless shirt of pale moon-white and carried a slender, unsheathed wooden sword on his back. His black hair was neatly combed into a topknot, with a wooden pin thrust through it—the pin looked as though it might fall at any moment, yet seemed as immovable as a green pine rooted on a mountain.
"When the chief monk was expounding the scriptures, I once saw countless flying ants rise, bathed in light."
The speaker was a young monk dressed in a tattered cotton cassock. The blue-black stubble newly sprouting on his head looked sharp, as resolute and unyielding as his face and words.
The boy with the wooden sword shook his head. "Flying ants will fall in the end. They can never touch the sky."
"If you persist in thinking that way, you will never understand the heart of the Dao." The young monk lowered his eyelids slightly and gazed at the ants beneath his feet, which were scattering severed limbs. "I hear your abbey master recently took in a child surnamed Chen. You should understand that a place like Zhishou Abbey will never have only one genius."
The boy with the wooden sword raised an eyebrow and replied with a trace of mockery, "I've never understood what qualifies someone like you, who cannot free himself from restraint, to walk the world on behalf of Xuankong Temple."
A carefree young man smiled. "Perhaps his chief monk has a discerning eye and sees something special in him."
The young monk watched the ants scurrying anxiously beneath his feet. "Ants can fly and fall, but they are better at climbing, at becoming footholds for their companions. They do not fear sacrifice. Pile them up,