"What is it?" She turned back.
"I think I dreamed about something," Pei Ye said dazedly, lying back on the rock.
"What?"
"...Nothing much. Probably because I keep thinking about the 'Nether Immortal.' What fills your thoughts by day fills your dreams at night." Pei Ye's head cleared a little, and he braced himself against the rock to sit up. Only then did he notice that she had taken off her silk socks as well. A flash of white that made something deep in his heart contract had just disappeared beneath her skirt. He instinctively turned his head aside and lowered his gaze, only to freeze again at what he saw.
The old, rotting little Ground Aconite beside the rock had snapped and fallen over. In the space of a single night, it had become a corpse.
But beneath it, a fresh cluster of Ground Aconites had sprouted, stretching their damp, frail stems. They seemed not yet quite accustomed to the outside world, trembling faintly in the wind.
Pei Ye stared for a long time.
He suddenly realized he had been wrong about something.
This rocky patch lay far from the woods. Pei Ye had thought the little Ground Aconite beneath the rock had appeared by chance.
Once it died, perhaps nothing would grow here again for a long time.
But after a single rain, they had eagerly sprouted in clusters. Then perhaps most would die, leaving only one or two.
How could there be so many "seeds" here?
Unless they were not seeds.
Pei Ye thought of a possibility that left his mind spellbound. He bent down, reached out, and pulled up an entirely ordinary blade of grass a foot away from the Ground Aconites.
There was no sign of medicinal fungi ever having grown around it.
But when