The Shamaness Who Taught People to Read

The next day, in Li Household Village.

"..."

Li Boyang watched the rain pattering outside the window and fell silent.

On the wall not far from Li Boyang, the Nine Chapters on the Secrets of Divination had been spread flat and hung up.

Chen Yun had done that the previous night, after Li Boyang and Big Girl returned and told her what they had been through.

Not only that, Chen Yun had also made a point of reading roughly through the contents of the Nine Chapters on the Secrets of Divination in front of Li Boyang.

Only then had Li Boyang realized, to his surprise, that Chen Yun could read?

Like Big Girl, Chen Yun did not know many characters.

But it was still better than Li Boyang fumbling his way through them alone.

After Li Yu returned, he too haltingly supplied a few more characters.

He did not, however, ask many questions about what had happened to Li Boyang and Big Girl.

At some point, Li Yu and Chen Yun seemed to have fully accepted their child's unusual qualities and adopted a whatever-will-be-will-be attitude.

Before going to sleep last night, Li Boyang had even heard Li Yu and Chen Yun discussing whether they should consider giving him a beginner's education.

Unfortunately, educated people were exceedingly rare in this era.

In all the years Li Yu and Chen Yun had lived, the only literate teacher they actually knew was Big Girl's father.

Li Boyang, on the other hand, had made an unexpected discovery while eavesdropping on their conversation.

In a small town about a hundred kilometers away, there was a shamaness who taught people to read.

The shamaness did not know many characters either, and she might even have gotten some wrong.

But she only charged a little grain and held lessons nearly every day, making her much easier to get acquainted with than those actual literate teachers.

Of course, Li Boyang had no intention of becoming the shamaness's disciple.

His parents might have accepted his supernatural qualities, but Li Boyang was not stupid enough to go around announcing them.

A newborn child learning to read from a shamaness?

Whoever found out probably would not dismiss it as just a joke or a rumor.

So Li Boyang quietly opened his Heavenly Eye and secretly learned from the side while the shamaness taught the other children to read.

Fortunately, by comparing Li Yu and Chen Yun's descriptions, Li Boyang found the shamaness's home without much trouble.

Then Li Boyang encountered a problem he had not anticipated.

If I can't hear the pronunciation, how am I supposed to learn to read?

Scratching his head in frustration, Li Boyang could only do his best to watch the mouths of the shamaness and the children, trying to work out the correct pronunciations.

I have a feeling that by the time I've learned to read, I'll have taught myself lip-reading too.

In a ramshackle courtyard behind the Land God Temple in Gao Village Town.

Children sat on the ground in little groups, tracing characters in the sand before them with their own twigs.

Directly in front of them, a hunched old woman with only a few teeth left taught them pronunciation with a smile on her face.

Her own pronunciation was outrageously crooked, yet the old woman corrected the children's pronunciation with great strictness.

"Granny! We just learned this character yesterday! Why do we have to learn it again today?"

A little girl with matted braids raised her hand high and asked, full of reluctance.

"Just because you learned it yesterday, you can't learn it today?"

"There are always new children who haven't learned it yet. I can't let you be the only one who learns it, can I?"

"Read it after me again. This is 'one,' the 'one' for a quantity, the 'one' in 'one copper coin'!"

The old woman reached out and patted the little girl on the head, chattering away with an undiminished smile.

"Huh? But aren't I the newest one here?"

"Even I've learned it. Could there really be someone who hasn't?"

The little girl looked around and saw that even the youngest child there was several years older than her. She muttered in puzzlement.

"Granny, you haven't gotten muddled again, have you?"

"Everyone clearly knows it already, don't they? I know it too."

The little girl was telling the truth.

A few of the older children beside her had already grown bored and started doodling in the sand.

"You child, why do you have so much nonsense to say?"

"When I tell you to learn, learn. This is to build your foundation."

"Otherwise, when you really need it someday, you might forget how to write it."

Because of the rain, the shamaness's lesson lasted a full four hours.

Li Boyang did not know whether it was his imagination.

But when she announced the end of the lesson, he felt that the shamaness had glanced in his direction, whether deliberately or not.

Were all the characters she taught today simple basics? Or does she teach these same characters every day?

As he recalled those utterly basic characters with suspicion, Li Boyang realized that everything the shamaness had taught today was at the beginner level.

Even someone like him, who could only "watch" while secretly learning, could easily work out the pronunciation of those characters from the movements of her mouth and their meanings.

More importantly, the shamaness did not make the children memorize them by rote.

Li Boyang often saw the shamaness list a series of characters with the same pronunciation.

From easy to hard, from simple to complex...

In an era without pinyin, Li Boyang even felt that those actual literate teachers might not teach as well as the shamaness.

After all, elementary education and teaching were two different things.

The former did not require profound learning; being accessible, simple, and clear was what mattered most.

One only had to think of the catchy Three Character Classic and Hundred Family Surnames from the ancient past of his previous life to know the standard for elementary education.

Actually, looking at it that way, those supposedly wrong characters might not be wrong at all...

He looked up again at the Nine Chapters on the Secrets of Divination on the wall.

Li Boyang saw the few "wrong characters" Big Girl and his mother had written.

Perhaps they were differences between the writing of a thousand years ago and that of a thousand years later...

Or perhaps those characters had always been written differently in different regions...

So why could other transmigrators become familiar with the language and writing after transmigrating so easily?

Didn't they ever run into this sort of evolution in writing?

Thinking of the complicated writing systems that had existed before the Qin Dynasty unified China, Li Boyang felt a pounding headache.

If this world likewise lacked a unified central writing system,

then the characters in the Nine Chapters on the Secrets of Divination were most likely the regional script used around the Huai River a thousand years ago.

That meant reading the Nine Chapters on the Secrets of Divination correctly had become a few degrees harder for Li Boyang.

A miss by a hair's breadth could lead one a thousand miles astray.

Nowhere was that principle more evident than in the translation of written language.

I have a secret manual in my hands, yet a language barrier has shut me out. I'm probably the only transmigrator who could run into something like this, right?

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