Floating Cloud County, North District.
Stalls and peddlers crowded the area around the overpass, bustling with life: tea stalls, food, medicines, rouge, sachets, jewelry, performing monkeys, wrestling, magic tricks, stone slabs smashed on chests, spinning Emptiness diabolos, fortune-telling and face-reading...
People from every walk of life gathered here to earn their keep, fish and dragons mingling together, men and women, young and old, their clamor boiling up to the heavens.
There were eight fortune-telling stalls in the area, if not ten. One more was nothing unusual. What was unusual was how spotless the fortune-teller remained. Even when a gust of dusty wind occasionally blew through, leaving everyone else grimy and disheveled, his white robes stayed brighter than snow, untouched by dust.
Even his hair was snowy white and translucent, as though it glowed. His stall, too, was clean and neat, its black and white sharply defined. The banner read: Correction: Yarrow Stalks reach through past and present; Tortoise Shell reveals fortune and misfortune; fate is mine to decide.
This strange sight filled quite a few people with awe. They felt that this gentleman must have some real ability.
Ten paces to the right stood another fortune-telling stall, in stark contrast to the white-robed gentleman's. It consisted of nothing more than a pitch-black piece of hemp cloth stained with grease and grime, spread on the ground with stones weighing down its four corners. Twelve large characters were written on it: Above, I glimpse Heaven's secrets; below, I fathom mortal lives. Believe it or not.
Behind the stall, a slovenly old beggar reclined against the corner of a wall, snoring away, utterly unkempt.
Across from the two stalls, roughly five paces away, stood another fortune-telling stall, also newly opened that day. This one, however, was entirely unremarkable: a plain table, a divination