Pei Yubai asked no more questions.
He turned the vocabulary booklet to a new page and reread the words he had mispronounced earlier.
Though his tones were still not quite right, they were a little better than before.
After he finished reading, he repeated them silently to himself, then closed the booklet, shut his eyes, and ran through their pronunciations in his head.
He was very earnest about it.
Since Qiguan Yuan had said he might tell him what it meant someday, he had no intention of looking it up online.
He knew someone online was bound to have translated it. Finding out exactly what that sentence meant would actually be quite easy.
But he did not really want to hear its meaning from someone else.
Qiguan Yuan had said those words to him. If anyone was going to explain them, it should be Qiguan Yuan.
As for when Qiguan Yuan would tell him, he did not mind. He could wait.
Qiguan Yuan stood beside him, watching Pei Yubai close the vocabulary booklet and silently recite with his eyes shut. Without a word, Qiguan Yuan turned around and leaned against a wooden pillar of the drum tower, his gaze settling on the guests in the clearing.
Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang stood far apart. Ji Shiyu was on the eastern side of the drum tower, leaning against another pillar, holding his vocabulary booklet and reading with his head lowered.
His voice was quiet, and from this distance, it was impossible to make out what sentences he was reading.
Jiang Wantang was on the western side of the clearing, standing beside a group of children.
She crouched down and spoke to the child with the little topknot. The child pointed to a word in the booklet. She leaned closer to look and read it aloud. The child shook their head. She read it again, and the child shook their head again.
Her expression was patient. Since she was asking for guidance, she ought to act like it.
Qiguan Yuan watched them, narrowing his eyes slightly.
In his vision, the space between Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang was not empty.
There were two threads. He had known from his very first glimpse of Jiang Wantang.
Two threads of fate extended from their bodies and intertwined in midair.
But now, Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang's two threads were not intertwined. They were tangled together in a very messy knot.
The knot lay roughly halfway between them, like a ball of thread that had been scrunched up.
The ball was very irregular in shape, loose in some places and tight in others, with ends sticking out here and there like a tuft of fluffed-up down.
Two threads extended from either end of the ball, one connected to Ji Shiyu and the other to Jiang Wantang.
The connecting sections were very thin, as fine as spider silk, and could snap at any moment.
Inside the ball, the tangle was worse. It was impossible to tell which thread belonged to Ji Shiyu and which belonged to Jiang Wantang. They were all snarled together.
And near the breaks in the two threads of fate, each had a gap.
The gaps were large, almost severing the threads. But a single filament still connected the two sides of each gap.
An exceedingly fine filament, thinner than a hair, trembled faintly in the wind, as though it might snap at any moment.
Qiguan Yuan studied the tangled ball for a while.
He wondered how that child attendant of Lu Zhao's had managed to scrunch two threads into an impossible knot.
As for the fine filament barely holding on at the break, it left this bond of fate neither severed nor alive, stuck somewhere in between. This was probably the real reason a destined match had become an ill-fated bond.
This bond should have broken long ago.
Qiguan Yuan was always curious about strange bonds of fate. At the very least, before he intervened to resolve this matter, he wanted to know exactly what that fine filament did.
So he withdrew his gaze and glanced down at his wrist.
The red thread was wound around it, quiet and still, like an ordinary red cord.
He touched the red thread with a finger. It did not move.
Qiguan Yuan glanced toward Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang again.
Pei Yubai stood beside him, looking down at the vocabulary booklet, his brow slightly furrowed as he silently practiced the pronunciation of a word.
Qiguan Yuan waited for him to finish this repetition and made sure he would not suddenly look up at him before drawing his gaze back.
His eyes turned red in that instant. The whole process took less than the blink of an eye.
The red thread on his wrist vanished.
No one noticed.
The red thread left Qiguan Yuan's wrist and appeared soundlessly beside the tangled ball between Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang.
It slithered over like a snake and coiled around the ball, circling it once, then again.
The instant the red thread wound around it, the tangled ball seemed to be pinched in the middle by a hand, and all its knots loosened at once.
The tangled ends came apart one by one, like a flower blooming in an instant.
Under the red thread's influence, the tangled threads of fate became two threads once more, one on the left and one on the right, connected to Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang respectively.
But the breaks remained.
The two sides of each break were very close, so close they were almost pressed together, yet they did not touch.
Only that single filament still stubbornly held them together, so thin it seemed about to snap, yet it never did.
The red thread circled the break once and stopped beside it.
It moved slightly, as if asking Qiguan Yuan, Should I mend this break too?
Qiguan Yuan moved the hand hanging at his side. His fingers bent slightly, beckoning to the red thread.
The red thread left the break and returned to Qiguan Yuan's wrist, winding itself back into its original position.
Its end lifted, hooked around Qiguan Yuan's little finger, and gave it a gentle tug.
Qiguan Yuan lowered his finger and lightly tapped the red thread.
The red thread drew back and obediently wound around his wrist, going still.
Qiguan Yuan withdrew his gaze from Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang.
For now, Qiguan Yuan set aside the question of whether to mend the breaks in Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang's threads of fate.
Until he was certain whether their bond still needed to continue, Qiguan Yuan would not intervene.
If their feelings for each other could return to a destined match, he would help them mend the breaks.
Otherwise, there was no need. Let it break. There was no need to cling so desperately.
Pei Yubai stood beside Qiguan Yuan studying the Miao language. He was quite interested in the Miao people.
Considering that knowing another language might come in useful for filming later, he studied diligently.
When it came to acting, Pei Yubai had always been meticulous and earnest.
Seeing how focused he was, Qiguan Yuan did not disturb him. Nor did he continue observing Ji Shiyu and Jiang Wantang. Instead, he raised his hand, pulled the red thread off his wrist, and idly wound it around his fingertips.
The red thread rubbed against Qiguan Yuan's fingers almost imperceptibly.
Qiguan Yuan was used to it. It had always been like this.
Watching the red thread make small movements against his fingers, Qiguan Yuan found himself, for once, recalling things from the past.
How he had become Yue Lao, and what he had spent those days doing.
And... Yun Yin...
In fact, at the very beginning, there had been no Yue Lao in the heavens.
There had only been a tree. An enormous tree that grew at the edge of the Heavenly Realm. No one knew when it had sprouted, and no one knew how much longer it would grow.
The tree was covered in red threads, all of them in disarray.
Some were tangled together, some were knotted, some were broken, and some had only one end, their other ends having drifted off to unknown places.
No one paid those red threads any mind, nor did anyone think they ought to tend to them.
That was the Tree of Fate in its earliest days.
Qiguan Yuan had been born beneath that tree.