Wang Lu, the property management supervisor in Anming District, was in his thirties and still single. It was not that he did not want to find someone, but he had a particular hobby: studying all sorts of strange things. He was a paranormal enthusiast and had been interested in supernatural incidents since childhood. He firmly believed that supernatural powers existed in this world. Perhaps, as in fantasy stories, these powers could amplify an individual's strength without limit.
In fact, he had not believed in any of this before. The reason he now firmly believed that supernatural powers existed was that he had witnessed such power himself. It came from a battered old book he had found in the ancestral shrine back in his hometown.
He still remembered that it had been during the Spring Festival. He and his parents had returned to their hometown to celebrate the New Year, and, as in previous years, the whole family had to perform rites and worship the gods. Many people in his hometown were deeply superstitious. They firmly believed that worshipping the gods during the New Year would bring good luck in the coming year. But to him, with his formal education, it was utter nonsense.
"Lu, stop playing. Come over here. We're about to start worshipping the gods," his father called. It was the same every year at this time. With no choice, he could only turn back sheepishly. He had been planning to sneak off to the opera stage to watch a performance. If he was lucky, he might even catch the stage owner handing out a little money afterward. But the damned ceremony had ruined that, which was why he hated having to worship the gods every Spring Festival.
He had only been ten then and could not understand why the villagers believed in these things so strongly. Whenever he showed any reluctance, his father would lecture and scold him.
At last, after the long, tedious ceremony, his father made him stay behind to tidy and clean the shrine. At ten, he was still at an age when all he wanted to do was play. Taking advantage of his parents' absence, he ran all over the shrine, clambering up and down. Before long, he found the damaged book beneath a table.
Curious, he opened it. Most of the writing was in traditional characters, many of which he could not understand. Still, he could roughly tell that it was a miscellaneous book, filled with strange traditional characters and sentences that did not fit together. Puzzled, he went to ask his father, "Dad, there's a strange book in the shrine. Come and look. I can't understand any of it." His father was puzzled and asked what sort of book it was. "A dark-colored one. It's propping up the table." "Oh, your great-uncle uses that to prop up the table. What are you fussing about it for?" With that, his father stopped paying attention to him.
His father's great-uncle owned the shrine. He had heard that the man had once been a wealthy landlord, but his fortunes had declined during the Cultural Revolution, leaving him with only this shrine. He got by on the cash collected when people came to worship there.
After returning to the shrine, Wang Lu thought it over, then fetched a similar book from home and swapped it for his great-uncle's. At the time, he had no idea what sort of book it was. The writing had simply aroused his curiosity.
After returning from his hometown, he leafed through the book a few times. Most of it consisted of strange traditional characters he could not understand, and the people he asked did not know them either. After several attempts, he lost all interest and casually tossed it aside.
What he had not expected was that, when he turned eighteen and became an adult, his father would secretly show him their family heirlooms. He still remembered what his father had said: "You're an adult now. Once you have a wife and children of your own, I'll pass our family heirlooms on to you." He had been utterly uninterested at the time, because these supposed heirlooms were not pearls, gemstones, gold bars, silver bars, or anything of the sort.
Instead, they were three peculiar objects. The first was a wooden stick, the second a cracked piece of jade, and the third a somewhat larger, opaque glass marble. He had even suspected that his father was making a fool of him, but his solemn expression did not look like a joke.
Once, while his father was out, he secretly took the heirlooms from the hidden compartment in the cabinet where his father kept them. He examined the three objects carefully, but discovered nothing even after half an hour. He put them in a drawer and went to the bathroom. When he returned and opened the drawer, something strange happened. He saw writing on the round glass ball. The ball was not transparent, so how could he see the writing in the book through it? He looked again, very carefully, and confirmed that he could. Taking out both the book and the glass ball, he carefully compared other passages and discovered that not all the writing in the book could be revealed through the marble.
He immediately grew excited. He remembered a scene from a movie in which the protagonist used a special method to uncover a secret hidden in a book and ultimately discovered treasure buried nearby. He felt as though he were in that very sort of scene. As long as he deciphered this book, he could find its hidden treasure.
When he considered that the glass marble was a family heirloom and that the book had belonged to his great-uncle, a wealthy landlord of an older generation, he felt certain that this was treasure buried by his forebears, if only he could find it. He could almost see the gold pouring in.
He set everything else aside and concentrated on studying the book. It took him three full hours to find every character that could be seen through the glass marble. He wrote them all in a notebook and soon discovered that they actually formed sentences. Reading through them, he quickly found many traditional characters he did not recognize, so he looked them up online. Strangely, some of them could not be translated even on the internet. With no other choice, he translated those he could and copied down the ones he could not for later.
From what he had translated, he gained a rough understanding of what this was. There was no treasure, nor any gold, silver, or jewels. The opening portion of the deciphered book mainly concerned a man named Li Qing from the Three Kingdoms period, who had passed this book containing his secrets down to his descendants before his death. The book itself was no ordinary book, either. It was made from a kind of bamboo called ink bamboo. As for what ink bamboo was, Li Qing had not mentioned it.
At this point, he suddenly remembered that his great-uncle at the shrine was also surnamed Li. In that case, the man was probably a descendant of Li Qing. Why his own family's heirloom could reveal the secrets in Li Qing's book, he did not know, and the book did not mention it either. But his intuition told him that this glass ball was probably a "family treasure" in the truest sense.
The other two heirlooms were probably no ordinary objects, either. Just as he was about to study them, his father returned. Seeing the family heirlooms lying "carelessly" on the floor where his son had put them, his father shouted angrily, "You little brat! Rummaging through the heirlooms while I'm gone! I knew you'd get ideas once I showed them to you. Just you wait!" His father picked up a clothes hanger and made as if to strike him, though Wang Lu was already an adult and his father could not really hit him. After a round of scolding and repeated apologies, his father finally let him off.
He seized the opportunity to ask, "Dad, which ancestor left us these heirlooms?" "Just don't break them, and I'll call you my ancestor," his father said, looking as though he could not get away from him fast enough. "Dad, I'm only asking. What ancestor would leave us this sort of junk?" "Junk, my foot! These things might not be worth much, but our ancestors left them to us as keepsakes. If they were gold or silver, wouldn't a wastrel like you have sold them off?" With that, his father chased him out.
Unable to get any clues from his father, he searched online for this man named Li Qing. Unfortunately, Li Qing was no famous historical figure, and the name was so common that the search proved useless.
Afterward, he studied the book some more. What he obtained after deciphering it was actually a passage of mnemonic verses. The verses were strange, and he could not understand them. In his explanation of them, Li Qing said that he had obtained them through a chance encounter during a dangerous incident. He did not know their origin either. Relying on these verses, Li Qing had become an immortal master in other people's eyes and made the acquaintance of such renowned occult practitioners of the time as Zuo Ci and Immortal Nanhua.
However, he had not been a true immortal, nor had he possessed the legendary power to move mountains and fill seas. In the end, Li Qing explained that these verses could only sharpen one's hearing, vision, and intellect, and refresh one's spirits. Even so, Wang Lu thought they were quite miraculous.
That very night, he could not resist trying out the verses. He had never expected that this trial would last more than a decade.
More than ten years had passed since he obtained the verses at eighteen, and by now he knew them by heart. Over those years, he had spent most of his time practicing them. Their effects had not been particularly obvious at first, but as time accumulated, bit by bit, they slowly began to reveal their extraordinary nature.
At first, he had simply felt more energetic. Then he discovered that he could go a day without sleeping. Later, he could go several days without feeling sleepy. Only in recent years had he begun to vaguely sense something, but the sensation was strange and very faint, and he could not say exactly what it was. Most incredible of all, he could actually sense other people's emotions, however indistinctly. It was a subtle sensation, and it only worked when he concentrated and the other person was experiencing strong emotions.
He firmly believed that this was neither an illusion nor a coincidence. He could often sense a faint depression in the woman who lived opposite him, because she frequently argued with her newlywed husband and seemed very dissatisfied with him. He could also sense some happiness in his colleague over the past few days, because the company had recently settled on him as the next manager. If this sensation had occurred only once or twice, it might have been his imagination. But he could sense it almost every day.