On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, Chen Caozhi returned from the county town. These past few days, he had been visiting the county's prominent figures and attending all manner of banquets, whirling around like a revolving lantern, and had spent comparatively little time at Chen Family Fort. Today, he finally had some leisure to settle down and read closely through the books he had brought back from Chuyangtai Taoist Monastery the other day. These nearly thousand scrolls had all been copied by Ge Hong himself, and the Taoist Li Shouyi had let Chen Caozhi take them back to Chen Family Cove for safekeeping. Ge Hong had copied these books before the age of thirty; they were all classics, histories, philosophical works, and literary collections, precisely what Chen Caozhi needed. After reaching middle age, Ge Hong had devoted himself to the Great Way of the Golden Elixir, copying and collecting vast numbers of Daoist scriptures, such as the Profound Origin Scripture, the Nine Yin Scripture, and the Three Corpses Collection. Most of these scriptures had remained on Mount Luofu. After Ge Hong's passing, Li Shouyi had brought a small portion back to Chuyang Terrace, yet even that amounted to several hundred scrolls.
Chen Caozhi had previously borrowed and copied a third of the nearly thousand scrolls brought back the other day, including Huainan Honglie and Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü. Over the past year, Zongzhi and Run'er had read all those books. Now, seeing so many more, their delight shone on their faces. The young brother and sister examined one volume and stroked another; surrounded by their city of books, they would not have traded it even for a mountain of treasure.
During the two Jin dynasties, paper books had not yet become