She had finished the bun in her hand, too.
Seeing Chen Shi'an still fiddling with the wooden box, Lin Meng Qiu couldn't help asking for the third time:
"What are you doing?"
Heaven knew why she was so curious about everything he did.
She could already vaguely tell that it looked like a gift box, which only made her curiosity harder to contain.
One moment, she wanted to know what the gift was; the next, she wanted to know whom he was giving it to. They said three times was the limit. Seeing the girl stubbornly refusing to give up like a little calf, Chen Shi'an finally answered her this time:
"Making a gift."
"What kind of gift-"
"Pigments I made myself before. I brought them down from the mountain this time."
"-Pigments?"
"Yeah. Indigo, rouge, gamboge, ochre, cinnabar, azurite, malachite, orpiment, soot ink, and so on."
As he spoke, Chen Shi'an took out several more large porcelain bottles, used a bamboo spoon to scoop powders of different colors out of them, and put them into several different, delicate little porcelain bottles.
When Chen Shi'an turned his head, the curious Class Monitor beside him had already gotten off the bed and was crouching next to him to watch.
"How did you make them?"
"From plant juices or natural minerals in the mountains."
"-How did you make them?"
"Different pigments are made differently. Take this ink, for example. First, you collect soot from pine branches, then grind and sift it-to make sure the ink you end up with is pure and fine. Or take this rouge-"
The Class Monitor didn't understand, but she pretended she did and said nothing.
"What do you think of these colors, Class Monitor?"
"They look really special."
Lin Meng Qiu liked drawing, and Chen Shi'an was