Strolling down a bustling street with no task to complete, free to take it easy... Pan Long felt it had been a long time since he had enjoyed anything like this.
While studying under Bi Lingkong, they had often visited lively, prosperous places. But every time they went out, he had an assignment. Bi Lingkong demanded that he pay attention to as many people as possible along the way. When they returned each day, she would pick several people at random and have him draw them, then infer their identities, backgrounds, and moods at the time.
The assignment was extraordinarily difficult. Even now, Pan Long's success rate had yet to exceed twenty percent. Remembering someone's appearance well enough to draw them was hard already. Drawing them clearly and then working out their circumstances was harder still.
Bi Lingkong's way of choosing subjects made it much worse. If she had picked only people who made a strong impression—people like Zhong Ziliang, for instance—Pan Long could at least have managed the first step. But she often picked a passerby who had merely brushed past him, someone he had seen for no more than five seconds.
To remember and draw someone like that... Pan Long thought that if he ever succeeded every time, he could call himself "Heavenly Eye" and become a human surveillance device.
Bi Lingkong could do it. She could even draw anyone she had met in the past thousand-odd years, capturing their voice, face, and smile without the slightest error. She could depict everything they had done, one event after another, as though she had followed them around with a camera.
Pan Long had nothing against training, and he envied her abilities. But given the choice between remembering everyone he saw, wherever he went, and strolling at ease through a