"May I ask who you are?"
"Kang Kuangshi, at your service."
"I mean over there, over there." Xiang Yuan's eyes widened as he scratched a flurry of lines into the ground with the branch in his hand.
Pulling back, one could see the two writing out their conversation beneath a great tree, lest walls have ears. The handwriting was altered and abbreviated in countless ways; sometimes one character was split into two, sometimes three characters were written as one.
"The one over there is called Ji Boli."
Who was that? I had never even heard of him.
After pondering for a moment, Xiang Yuan confirmed that he knew no one named Ji Bochang and swiftly wrote, "Isn't he called Ji Boda?"
"Who's that?"
"I just made it up. Go on."
"The me over there—that is, Ji Boli—comes from True Heart Dao, just like you. His Daoist title is 'Clear Insight.' He asked me to tell you that he is Old Daoist Quexin's disciple, your senior brother." Kang Kuangshi wrote and erased as he went, his handwriting shifting from a dog's crawl to a chicken's scratch, taking quite a while to get it all down.
"Ah, this..."
Xiang Yuan scribbled, "I've never met Senior Brother Clear Insight. Can that be divined too?"
"How would I know? I can't divine anything. When I drank with him in that dream last time, he happened to mention it. He said Master Quexin had finally returned and even described what you looked like. Maybe Master Quexin told him."
What a Master Quexin—so fitting... no, so disrespectful! Senior Brother, I'll definitely tell Master about this!
Thinking thus, Xiang Yuan continued writing, "What else did Senior Brother Clear Insight say? Why did Master tell him what I look like? He and I aren't even in the same