"Mm..."
Professor Hu adjusted his reading glasses, narrowed his eyes, and scrutinized the few characters Shen Le had pointed out along the edge of the photograph.
As he looked, he traced the unfamiliar characters stroke by stroke in the air. His lips moved faintly as he kept muttering under his breath:
"Single characters? Compound characters? Form-signifying? Sound-signifying? Shape-compounding? Meaning-compounding? Form-meaning?... Variant characters? Variant forms?"
Shen Le, who had only skimmed the writing of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods for less than three classes in total—and had probably returned most of it to the teacher already:
"..."
He could understand what the professor was muttering, but he simply could not connect it to the characters on the screen...
Fortunately, he quickly regained his balance. The threshold for specialized fields was simply too high. The Seven Warring States each had their own writing system, and every state's script was somewhat different—
Otherwise, Qin Shi Huang would not have needed to standardize the script and unify the axle widths, sacrificing the scripts of the other six states to create the great unification of Chinese characters.
Faced with writing that was clearly not Qin seal script, Professor Hu agonized over it for ten minutes without figuring out what kind of characters they were...
The old professor decisively pulled out his phone, opened his contacts, and began making calls one by one:
"Hello, Old Xu... I have a few characters here I need you to identify..."
"Hello, Old Zhang..."
"Hello, Old Shen..."
He rattled off seven or eight calls in one go before tossing the phone aside. Shen Le hurriedly caught it, only to hear Professor Hu say:
"Come on, help me send some emails!"
Fine, fine... When there was work to be done, the disciple had to serve his master...
Shen