On Anxi Street outside Taiping Medical Hall, Cloud Goat and Bright Rabbit, both dressed in close-fitting black clothes, squatted side by side in front of Dream Rooster, chins in their hands. "He looks like he's in a bit of pain... Is he like this every time he makes a dream?"
Cloud Goat shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe I paid him more this time, so he's putting more of his heart into the dream?"
Across from them, Dream Rooster's face was twisted and contorted, and his body twitched in spasms, as if he were a spirit medium possessed during a ritual dance.
Cloud Goat had the nagging feeling he'd seen this before. He frowned. "Why does Dream Rooster look like I've been sticking him with needles? No wonder he charges so much every time he makes a dream. The price he pays really is steep."
Bright Rabbit nodded rapidly, in complete agreement. "Mm-hmm. Worth every penny. He's earned it!"
Inside the dream, Dream Rooster, in the guise of Zhou Chengyi, was being held down and jabbed with needles by the Bright Rabbit and Cloud Goat Chen Ji had conjured up. They switched spots every three seconds and had nearly covered his entire body.
Chen Ji stood some distance away in thought. He now knew this was a dream, but how had it come about?
Cloud Goat!
He remembered that outside Liu Shiyu's house, Cloud Goat had inexplicably cut off a lock of his hair!
Only that bizarre act could explain the bizarre situation he was in now!
With that thought, Chen Ji decided to leave the dream.
In an instant, the courtyard of the Zhou Residence before him turned transparent, and behind it another blurred image appeared... the main hall of the medical hall.
The two images overlapped. Chen Ji wanted to return to reality, but it was as though he were stuck fast in an enormous spiderweb. He could not break through this layer of the dream.
Dream Rooster sneered. "Trying to leave? Come play in Avici Purgatory!"
As his words fell, the Zhou Residence suddenly collapsed into an abyss. Heaven and earth changed color, and Cloud Goat and Bright Rabbit turned into wisps of blue smoke and dispersed. The original dream had contained only one small courtyard, but now it was boundless.
In his daze, Chen Ji could no longer quite tell which layer was reality and which was the dream. Once again, he sank into confusion.
Dream Rooster returned to his own appearance. Standing in the abyss, he shook out his front-opening robe and smoothed his disheveled hair with both hands. In a high, thin voice, he said, "I nearly came a cropper at the hands of a little apprentice like you. You've really made me angry... I never expected you to have the makings of a 'xingguan,' forcing me to create a grade-A dream!"
As Dream Rooster spoke, Chen Ji felt as though he were splitting apart. He could not tell left from right or up from down, as if the world had turned upside down.
All at once, the floor of the abyss gave way. Chen Ji fell into the darkness, and when he opened his eyes again, he was in lava. Packed tightly around him were tens of thousands of people struggling in the magma alongside him, suffering its searing heat.
The next moment, the world of lava vanished too. Chen Ji fell again, plunging into a freezing pool, crushed by suffocation and cold.
He tried to hold on to his reason, but each time he did, he fell into another world below.
With every new world he fell into, he lost another measure of his awareness of the real world. He could no longer see the blurred image of the medical hall's main hall, either.
Just then, molten streams poured forth in full force from four furnace flames and flowed through his entire body. Chen Ji discovered that he could move his hands!
The molten streams lifted him from the world of the freezing pool back to the world of lava, then from the world of lava back to the world of the abyss, and finally back to the Zhou Residence!
Then they slowly stopped.
But what use was moving only his hands? He was still one step away from escaping the dream...
No, it was useful!
Chen Ji reached out and felt around the counter. He found the General Outline of Medicine and flipped through it, making the pages rustle.
A moment later.
"Chen Ji?" Liu Quxing's voice rang out, tearing the dream apart and pulling Chen Ji back to reality in an instant.
The dream was over!
Chen Ji stood behind the counter, breathing slightly hard. He turned to Liu Quxing. "Senior Brother Liu, what brings you here?"
Liu Quxing stood beside the counter with a padded coat draped over his shoulders, looking at the General Outline of Medicine lying open and disordered in front of Chen Ji. He was beside himself. "The sound of you flipping through a book in the middle of the night was deafening. It's hard for me to sleep... Junior Brother Chen, could you stop reading at night? I'm scared..."
Chen Ji smiled. "All right, I'll stop."
Liu Quxing beamed. "That's more like it. Master always says you have to go to bed at the hour of Hai to nourish yourself!"
Chen Ji said sincerely, "Thank you for the reminder, Senior Brother."
This time, he really was grateful to Liu Quxing. If not for him, he would probably still be trapped in the dream.
Liu Quxing took Chen Ji by the arm. "Get some rest early. We fellow disciples share our blessings and bear our troubles together. When Master beats people, we'll take it together!"
Meanwhile, Dream Rooster also woke from his cross-legged trance, his eyes rolling back into place.
He looked at Cloud Goat and Bright Rabbit, and his body suddenly shuddered. Then he snapped, "Didn't you say he was just an ordinary person? Next time you need me to make a dream for someone with the talent to become a xingguan, you have to tell me beforehand. That costs extra!"
Cloud Goat and Bright Rabbit looked at each other in bewilderment. "We didn't know either. Does he have the talent to become a xingguan?"
Dream Rooster said angrily, "Would I lie? A grade-C dream only trapped him for the time it takes an incense stick to burn before he woke up, and a grade-B dream could only hold him for half a shichen."
Still, he had a question of his own: how had Chen Ji escaped the dream in the end?
Cloud Goat waved a hand. "Never mind that for now. Tell me, is Chen Ji a Jing Dynasty spy?"
Dream Rooster said irritably, "He definitely isn't."
With that, he got up and dusted off his backside. "My payment? Double it, and I only accept Buddhist tongbao."
Cloud Goat thought for a moment, then finally took a string of prayer beads off his wrist. Strange patterns and densely packed numbers were engraved on each dark purplish-black bead.
His heart ached as he said, "Five hundred taels of silver. You can withdraw it at any temple."
Only upon seeing the Buddhist tongbao did Dream Rooster dust himself off in satisfaction. "Deal. Remember to come to me next time you have an interrogation job."
Bright Rabbit said, "That much money could buy so many new clothes and jade bracelets. Treasure Monkey charges much less than you. We'll go to him next time."
Dream Rooster smoothed his hair and said unhurriedly, "Then go to him. He has a big mouth and can't keep a secret."
Bright Rabbit curled her lip. "We're colleagues, and all you ever talk about is money, money, money."
Dream Rooster said disdainfully, "Then go kill Wu Xiu for me for free."
Bright Rabbit rolled her eyes at him. "I won't."
Dream Rooster put the prayer beads around his wrist, turned and waved. "I'm off. The assignment in Kaifeng Prefecture is done. I'm leaving for Jinling tomorrow."
Watching him leave, Cloud Goat whispered, "Chen Ji actually has the talent to become a xingguan. All the more reason we can't let the Lord Inner Chancellor know he exists... Otherwise, he might really end up riding on our necks."
Late at night, Chen Ji lay on the shared sleeping platform, unable to fall asleep. Everything that had happened to him lately churned through his mind.
Suddenly, a rustling came from the next bed. He opened his eyes slightly and saw Liu Quxing, a padded coat over his shoulders and a book tucked under his arm, tiptoe out of bed and leave the room.
Puzzled, Chen Ji peered through the crack in the door and saw Liu Quxing slip into the kitchen. A moment later, he lit an oil-residue lamp inside...
You son of a bitch...
Chen Ji sat up too. First, he lifted his bedding and checked the five small silver ingots hidden in a gap between the boards. Then he pulled a book out from under the bedding: Records of Reflections on Things at Hand.
It was the book Dark Cloud had helped him retrieve from Liu Shiyu's residence.
At the time, Chen Ji had drawn everyone's attention to the Chapter and Verse Commentaries on the Four Books. They had no time to look for anything unusual in the other books.
But after just a couple of glances, Chen Ji had confirmed that the book concealed a secret-message technique: the fanqie method.
The fanqie method combined the initial sound of one character with the final sound of the next to form a new character. For example, the initials and finals of the eight characters shi zhang, xiao da, zong luo, and yi jiu corresponded respectively to the four sounds shang, xia, zuo, and you.
By the faint light from outside the window, Chen Ji sat on the sleeping platform and read through Records of Reflections on Things at Hand character by character and sentence by sentence, arranging every combination that could form a new character.
When he was a little under halfway through, he suddenly pieced the individual characters together in his mind: The Jing Dynasty does not believe that I am passing on a message on behalf of the prince's estate. They need to confirm it with you in person.
Chen Ji's pupils contracted slightly. The message this book was meant to convey was even more explosive than the one in the Chapter and Verse Commentaries on the Four Books. It directly implicated someone inside Prince Jing's Estate.
Zhou Chengyi was a Jing Dynasty spy, passing messages to Liu Shiyu on the Jing Dynasty's behalf.
And this book in Liu Shiyu's home was meant for an important figure at the prince's estate. Liu Shiyu was the intelligence link between the Jing Dynasty and an important figure at Prince Jing's Estate!
When Cloud Goat had told Chen Ji to implicate Prince Jing's Estate, Chen Ji had thought he meant to frame them. He had never expected Cloud Goat's words to prove prophetic: Prince Jing's Estate really was colluding with the Jing Dynasty!
Chen Ji's eyes shone. He felt no sense of belonging to either the Ning Dynasty or the Jing Dynasty, so it did not matter what happened. What mattered was that he could seize the initiative.
He continued deciphering the latter half of the book. Only when dawn was approaching did he finally obtain the rest of the message: The spy inside the prince's estate will find a chance to meet you.
Chen Ji was stunned.
There was a Military Intelligence Directorate spy inside the prince's estate. Who was it?!
Wait, could that spy inside the prince's estate be someone from Taiping Medical Hall?
Earlier, Master had cast a divination using the six-line method. The reading had said that going out to treat a patient was an omen of great misfortune, and that very morning, Master had gone off with the Liu Family...
Judging by that, Master seemed to have a connection with the Liu Family. Could it be that he had gone not to treat a patient, but to exchange intelligence?
Could Master be a Jing Dynasty spy?!
Wait again. Liu Quxing kept his dirty clothes unwashed and insisted on taking them home to his mother. He could have been hiding intelligence in them...
Chen Ji did not know whether to laugh or cry at his own deductions. His nerves had been stretched too tight these past few days, so now everyone looked like a spy to him.
At that thought, he leaned halfway off the sleeping platform and quietly pulled the door open a crack to look toward the kitchen opposite.
At that moment, Liu Quxing, holding a book in his hands, was also leaning out of the kitchen, quietly watching the apprentices' sleeping quarters to see whether anyone had discovered him studying in secret...
Their eyes met.
Liu Quxing: "..."
Chen Ji: "..."
The two silently withdrew. Only She Dengke lay in bed, sleeping soundly and without a care.