Funiu Mountain, East Zou Commandery, on Great Qian's eastern border.
Auspicious clouds spread like a royal canopy, shrouding heaven and earth for thousands of miles.
Amid the sea of mist enveloping the mountains and the billowing white clouds of immortals, cranes could faintly be seen dancing in flight.
A streak of golden light sped past the Jade Towers, an earthly paradise, and landed on a patch of level ground on Funiu Mountain's main peak, revealing a scholar dressed in white.
This was the seat of Master Han, Great Qian's Second Sage. The white-robed scholar carried himself with lofty grace, possessing the proud bearing of a dragon or phoenix among men, but now a trace of anxiety seemed to cloud his face as he hurried toward the rear courtyard.
Before long, he reached a grove of low trees and finally found Master Han chopping firewood on a stump in the clearing.
Master Han wore a short, plain cloth jacket, dressed like an old mountain farmer. With considerable effort, he stood pieces of wood upright, each gleaming with a metallic sheen and suffused with extraordinary energy, then raised his blunt axe high and brought it down.
Crack!
The axe struck the wood in a shower of sparks, barely opening a split an inch deep. Master Han then raised the axe again with the log still attached and slammed it down with all his strength.
The white-robed scholar blurted out anxiously, "Teacher, this is terrible! Something dreadful has happened!"
Master Han stopped and turned to look at him, calm and unhurried. "What has made you so flustered?"
He did not reprimand the white-robed scholar, knowing that the young man had cultivated his temperament well. Unless something truly serious had happened, he would never have behaved like this.
No sooner had the words left