"What is spiritual affinity?"
Holding a bamboo splint, Fang Zheng looked at Chen Miao.
Perhaps it was sympathy for someone who had suffered as he had, or perhaps he had finally met a true fellow craftsman. Either way, Fang Zheng's attitude had grown much gentler than before.
"I puzzled over that for a long time myself. It wasn't until one day, when I suddenly realized that the frames I built felt just right, that I understood."
"Put simply, spiritual affinity means that after making thousands upon thousands of paper effigy frames, practice makes perfect. The moment you pick up a bamboo splint, you know where it belongs."
"Why did masters in the old days always prefer clever apprentices with a knack for understanding things?"
"Because those apprentices didn't need to experiment with thousands or tens of thousands of frames. They only needed to make ten or a hundred to understand what 'spiritual affinity' meant."
"Of course, that's the brute-force method for people with no one to teach them."
"With someone to guide you, naturally, you don't have to try making them one by one like that."
As Fang Zheng spoke, he placed the bamboo splint in front of Chen Miao.
Then he selected two more from the other bamboo splints and laid them beside the first.
"Can you tell the differences between these three bamboo splints?"
Chen Miao looked down, picking them up and putting them down one at a time.
"Their colors and weights are different. They were probably heated for different lengths of time."
Fang Zheng nodded without saying anything and selected another three.
"Then can you tell the differences between these six bamboo splints?"
"Put the ones that are alike together and separate the ones that are different."
Chen Miao picked them up to examine them. This