Black Snake's days remained monotonous and uneventful.
Seven or eight days slipped past in the blink of an eye, filled with hunting, basking in the sun, listening to evening lessons, and learning to read.
Black Snake often lay in ambush beside the road at the foot of the mountain.
Yet no second horse laden with gold ever came along, nor even a stray cow or sheep.
Lonely souls and wandering ghosts always drifted aimlessly along the road, looking rather pitiful.
One day, an idea suddenly occurred to Black Snake. During the day, Black Snake scraped away a patch of turf beside the road, exposing the fine, soft soil beneath, then waited for the sun to slowly dry its surface.
That night.
The Yin Spirit held a slender little stick and practiced writing on the fine, soft earth dried during the day, laboriously tracing each stroke.
Black Snake had already chosen the thinnest twig.
Yet every stroke still took tremendous effort, as though dragging a weight of a thousand jun forward.
Still, this method killed two birds with one stone.
It taught Black Snake to read while genuinely tempering the Yin Spirit. The cultivation methods of unaffiliated cultivators were always this crude.
One noon, beneath a scorching sun, the Abbot returned to the mountain after many days away.
The Abbot casually carried an iron kettle plastered with talismans. Its shape was perfectly ordinary, with a slightly crooked spout and several dents in its body, looking for all the world like some old utensil picked up at random from a shop.
Black Snake kept feeling that something was inside the kettle.
That one who was so good at hiding was a living creature, wasn't he? How could he fit inside an iron kettle?
The more Black Snake thought, the more bewildering it