Sanyou Bookstore

Pingyang Prefecture was an ancient town by the Fen River with a history stretching back a thousand years, and also a key city in southern Jin. Its long history had endowed this land with abundant resources and left behind a deep reservoir of culture.

Over the past decade or so, as underground resources were developed, the ancient culture slumbering in history had gradually come back to life. Private schools, antiques from old stacks of paper, had become popular again.

Sanyou Private School was one such refurbished old fossil.

This private school was located inside a bookstore in one of the street-facing ground-floor shops of Yunhua Residential Area.

The bookstore was called Sanyou Bookstore.

The tutor, who was also the bookstore owner, was surnamed Wu. Short and plump, he wore round black-rimmed glasses and habitually greeted people with clasped hands and a bow. This earned him an inexplicable degree of respect throughout the residential area, where everyone called him "Mr. Wu."

Mr. Wu's private school was very small, with only one teacher and one student.

The teacher was Mr. Wu himself.

The student was a boy from a family living in Yunhua Residential Area, named Zheng Qing.

Yunhua Residential Area was a model housing development built by the Pingyang City government in the 1990s. Though it was indeed small by modern standards, with only nine residential buildings, its location was excellent.

To the east was a bustling commercial street, with the city's largest supermarket directly across from the eastern gate. To the west stood Pingyang Academy, the only institution of higher learning in Pingyang City. To the south was Pingyang Experimental Middle School, a key provincial middle school; beside it was Jin'nan Middle School, one of the province's finest private schools. Together with the city-run key primary school across the street, unlucky children from the residential area never had to travel farther than two blocks from birth until university graduation.

Zheng Qing felt that he was only one step away from that legendary kind of life.

Many of Zheng Qing's elders were teachers. His grandfather was a professor at Pingyang Academy, his father taught at Jin'nan Middle School beside the residential area, and his mother taught at Pingyang First Primary School across the street. His other uncles and aunts were also active in those teaching buildings. Ever since he could remember, he had listened to the piercing bells marking the start and end of class. When he grew a little older, he ran wild across the playgrounds of several schools.

But no matter how he ran, his life seemed confined within those playgrounds and classroom buildings.

A circle.

Zheng Qing held a heavy calligraphy brush and wrote the character on the snowy white rice paper.

"Focus! Don't forget what you came here for!" Mr. Wu lightly tapped the desk with the wooden ruler in his hand, producing an eerie dongdong sound.

Zheng Qing took a deep breath and slowly let it out, trying to clear his mind as he carefully copied the model script before him.

In the beginning, Zheng Qing had practiced calligraphy with his grandfather. As an old-fashioned intellectual, Professor Zheng not only wrote beautiful calligraphy himself, but also held the younger generation to extremely strict standards.

Before the age of six, it was all memorizing ancient poetry and prose—from the Three Character Classic, Hundred Family Surnames, and Thousand Character Classic, to Three Hundred Tang Poems, then the lyrics, arias, and classical prose personally selected by the Old Professor. From the moment they learned to speak, they began learning characters and memorizing classics. Under the Old Professor's ruler, Zheng Qing and his cousins began a difficult, seemingly endless life of recitation amid sniffling sobs.

Day after day, with no Sundays and no winter or summer vacations.

At six, it was no longer enough to recite texts. He had to begin learning to write.

Starting with how to hold the brush—dot, horizontal stroke, left-falling stroke, right-falling stroke—the dashed lines of the practice grids were filled with Zheng Qing's dull childhood; the ink wells in the inkstone were soaked with his bitter tears.

At six in the morning, he was dragged out of bed on the dot to practice morning copywork. He had to finish fifty large characters before breakfast. After breakfast came morning recitation: he had to memorize the assigned passage by noon, then practice several more sheets of large characters. After lunch, he rested for half an hour, then got up to continue reciting and practicing calligraphy. After dinner, it was still recitation and calligraphy. At exactly nine, he was sent to bed. Every day, the time from then until he fell asleep was Zheng Qing's happiest.

Because he could let his thoughts roam freely. He did not need to practice large characters or memorize classical prose.

But letting his thoughts run wild was exhausting.

Whenever Zheng Qing fell asleep after letting his mind wander, he entered a chaotic dream. It was like an ink-splashed landscape painting—ethereal, abstract, impossible to grasp, yet relentlessly pursued.

Whenever he woke from such dreams, he would always scream and shout, drenched in cold sweat, often remaining listless for a day or two. His family assumed he had suffered a nightmare and took careful care of him, lightening his schoolwork for a day or two as well.

To Zheng Qing, those days were as joyful as a holiday.

But nightmares were not something he could summon whenever he wanted.

When he was younger, Zheng Qing found it difficult to enter that dream, suffering a nightmare only about once every six months. Perhaps driven by a powerful wish deep in his heart, his nightmares became increasingly frequent as he grew older, and the situation gradually worsened.

At first, he merely woke up screaming. Then, gradually, he began sleepwalking. Sometimes, when he woke in the morning, he would discover in terror that he was sleeping atop the large wardrobe at home, with no memory at all of how he had gotten up there. Sometimes, he would sleepwalk onto the balcony, sing some incomprehensible song, then silently climb back into bed. Sometimes, he would even get up in the middle of the night, take out his calligraphy brush, and squeakily draw a huge patch of bizarre symbols.

As his nightmares worsened, Zheng Qing began suffering from headaches.

At first, his family thought he was trying to slack off and did not pay much attention. But to be safe, they took him to a specialist hospital in the city for scans. The doctors could find nothing wrong and could only attribute it to excessive pressure on a child, saying he needed a balance between work and rest.

It was not until one day, when Zheng Qing began banging his head against the wall to relieve the pain, that his family became alarmed. Professor Zheng sought out old classmates and took Zheng Qing to the provincial capital and then the capital, visiting every famous hospital they could find. Yet no one could detect anything wrong, while Zheng Qing's headaches grew worse by the day.

In the end, Professor Zheng followed an old friend's advice and allowed Zheng Qing to rest and cultivate a peaceful disposition, using conservative methods to ease his condition. After returning from the capital, Zheng Qing no longer had to rise and sleep at fixed times, recite texts, or practice large characters.

But this complete relaxation did not improve his condition. Instead, his headaches came even more frequently.

Zheng Qing was eight years old at the time.

That same spring, Mr. Wu arrived at Yunhua Residential Area wearing those round black-rimmed glasses, and opened the antiquated Sanyou Bookstore in Shop No. 3 along the street.

Professor Zheng was an old-fashioned intellectual, while Mr. Wu of Sanyou Bookstore happened to be a learned man of culture. Before long, the two old men became close friends through books and paintings.

One weekend afternoon, Zheng Qing followed his grandfather to Sanyou Bookstore again. Professor Zheng and Mr. Wu brewed a pot of tea and discussed Zhang Zhongjing's Synopsis of Golden Chamber, while Zheng Qing happily picked up a copy of Harry Potter and began reading.

When he saw Harry's lightning-shaped scar bring him a terrible headache, Zheng Qing felt as though he shared Harry's pain. His own head seemed to start hurting too, and his mood immediately soured. With a sigh, he closed the book and shook his head, only to discover that the headache, which had seemed like an illusion, was real.

A violent headache struck without warning. Zheng Qing only had time to groan, "My head hurts," before his eyes rolled back. He collapsed before the two old men and began convulsing.