Four days later, at the Welcome Inn.
With the beginning of winter approaching, sunshine had become precious. After noon, brilliant sunlight poured down before the Welcome Inn, the air so clear that the shafts of light showed the Tyndall effect.
Yang Ge lay comfortably in a rocking chair outside his own inn, holding a crooked-spout teapot in one hand and a copy of Zhuangzi, personally annotated by Wang Jiangling, in the other. He silently recited it word by word, utterly absorbed. His mind seemed to cross time and space once again, traveling more than eighteen hundred years into the past to join that famous slacker among the Hundred Schools of Thought. Dressed in rags, they pillowed their heads on stubborn rocks and lay beside a stream with their legs crossed, lazily jiggling their feet and calling out, "In the northern darkness there is a fish, and its name is Kun. Kun is so enormous that one pot cannot hold him. He transforms into a bird, whose name is Peng. Peng is so enormous that he needs two barbecue grills..."
Perhaps it was a resonance between slackers. Over the past few months, he had skimmed the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Most he could understand but could not agree with; a few he could not understand but found profoundly astonishing.
Only Zhuangzi had proved impossible to put down once he picked it up. Reading many of Zhuangzi's ideas and arguments felt like looking into a mirror. Views and feelings that had previously left him tangled up and conflicted suddenly fell into place as he read. He often felt the enlightening shock of sweet cream poured over his head: "Oh, so that's what's going on with me."
He felt that his personality was very close to Zhuangzi's, but he lacked