The Xu Clan School at the foot of Lion Mountain held lectures for three consecutive days, then rested for one. The day Chen Caozhi and Liu Shangzhi arrived happened to be a rest day, and Erudite Xu Zao had gone into town to visit friends, leaving the Thatched Cottage quiet and deserted.
Xu Miao and Chen Caozhi felt like old friends at their first meeting. By age, they were peers: Xu Miao had been born in the third month, Chen Caozhi in the eleventh. Xu Miao had not yet attended an Appraisal Gathering. When Liu Shangzhi told him that Regular Mounted Attendant Quan Li had raised Chen Caozhi to the sixth rank early that month, admiration spilled across his face. For all his propriety and composure, he was still a youth at heart, but there was not a trace of jealousy in him. He sat knee to knee with Chen Caozhi, and the more they talked, the more congenial they found each other.
Xu Miao came from a family with a deep scholarly tradition and was also naturally intelligent. Though only fifteen, he had thoroughly studied the various Confucian classics and possessed a substantial foundation in Xuanxue. Previously, Chen Caozhi had had neither books to read nor anyone to teach him; aside from being able to recite the Analects and Mao Poetry, he had possessed no other outstanding abilities. Only in the past half year, after gaining access to the library of the Chuyangtai Taoist Monastery and receiving Ge Hong's painstaking guidance, had his learning advanced by leaps and bounds. Yet Chen Caozhi had not greedily sought to master everything. He sought only to master each volume he read, rather than collect a scale from the east and a claw from the west and make breadth of reading his accomplishment.