The book Wu Ming had pulled out was precisely the culprit behind the perilous situation just now.
Liu Sanlang had stumbled across it while searching for books in the village, inside a building resembling an ancestral hall.
According to the original plan, Liu Sanlang only needed to follow the route once taken by the author of the Record of a Hundred Things. But when he realized that a book sitting plainly before his eyes had somehow never been recorded, he resolutely chose to stray from the plan.
And it was precisely because of this book, absent from the Record of a Hundred Things, that Liu Sanlang—despite being protected by a Spirit Talisman and supposed to come and go without a trace—had suddenly alerted the entire village and nearly been surrounded to death within it.
"...I only hope this book proves worthy of Sanlang and Brother Yi's hard work."
Then Wu Ming opened the book, and a sharp pain immediately stabbed through his head... They were plainly ordinary sheets of paper, ordinary ink marks, yet the instant his gaze touched the pages, it felt as if some invisible force were warping his perception.
The maxim of the Moli Immortal Mansion: Do not speak to strangers.
Books and writing had always been regarded as a medium through which authors and readers could converse across space and time.
At Green Hut Academy, nearly all relevant materials warned later generations in the sternest possible terms not to read the books within the Immortal Mansion. The words upon them were more corrosive than any "voice."
Yet to the present Wu Ming, these warnings from his predecessors meant only one thing: the words in the Immortal Mansion carried value greater than sound itself.
This momentary headache only further confirmed the value of those words.
At Severance