The world of film and television begins with Hikaru no Go

After the tomb sweeping was completed, Di Renjie did not set off immediately, but chose to stay in Taiyuan for two more days, taking Zhang Rui to visit several old city wall sites in the ancient city of Jinyang.

On an autumn afternoon, the thin sunlight spread across the broken walls and ruins, making the shattered tiles embedded in the rammed earth walls shine.

Judge Di walked slowly, his indigo robe fluttering gently in the wind, without a book or pen in his hand.

It was just an old man with a child, walking slowly along the old city wall.

He stopped at a gap in the wall, pointed to a section of the culvert ruins half-hidden by weeds at the base of the wall, and told a story from the past.

"There's a secret passage down here. Back then, the city was besieged for eight months, and when the food ran out, the people escaped through this passage."

Zhang Rui had read about the Battle of Jinyang in his textbook—just a few lines, a year, and an outcome.

But the version told by Di Renjie contains many details: which gate was breached by the water attack first, which tree the defending general finally took off his belt from, which culvert the people used to escape through after the city fell, and where they went after leaving the city...

There were no comments, no sentiments, just a series of events laid out before Zhang Rui.

After Di Renjie finished speaking, he looked down at the broken tiles at his feet, reached out and broke off a small piece of dry soil from the rammed earth wall, crushed it between his fingers, and clapped his hands.

"Go back. We'll head back to Beijing tomorrow."

Before leaving, Di Chun checked his luggage in the courtyard. While carrying the sand table wrapped in coarse cloth onto the cart, he whispered to Di Jinghui, who was tying up a felt blanket.

"You know, these days, the master is always talking to himself. Who is he talking to?"

Di Jinghui was tightening the hemp rope around the horse's back without turning his head.

"have no idea."

"I've seen him get so absorbed in his thoughts when he was working on cases before. But he's been wandering around all day without a case, muttering to himself. Isn't that strange?"

Li Yuanfang, who was wiping the saddle beside him, casually added, "Sir, you hold a high position, so you must have many things to consider. The more you think, the more you talk."

Di Chun thought for a moment and found the two of them rather boring, so he stopped chatting and turned to check the copper kettle on the charcoal stove.

On the morning I left Taiyuan, the sky was overcast and the clouds hung low.

Di Chun got up before dawn to hitch up the carriage, wrapped the sand table in coarse cloth and stuffed it into a corner of the carriage, and checked again whether there was any water left in the copper kettle overnight.

When Di Renjie came out of the house, he had changed his indigo robe into a thick cotton robe that he wore on the road, with the collar covering him completely.

He paused at the threshold, glanced back at the old plaque above the gate, said nothing, and got into the car.

Heading south from Taiyuan, the official road gradually departs from the foothills of the Taihang Mountains.

The earthen plateaus on both sides gradually sag, and the view slowly opens up.

The villages we passed became increasingly dense; every two or three miles we could see the rooftops of several houses, with wisps of smoke rising from the cracks in the tiles, dispersing in the morning breeze, and mingling with the mist from the distant Fen River.

Farmers carrying loads of radishes on one end and cabbages on the other walked along the official road. When they saw the caravan, they moved aside to make way for it.

Inside the carriage, the copper kettle on the charcoal stove was bubbling away.

Di Renjie took out a volume of official gazette from the book box. It was taken from the post station before leaving Taiyuan. The ink was still fresh, the paper was crisp, and it was densely filled with reports from the Six Ministries and imperial edicts.

"From today onwards, use this to learn characters. The characters in the official gazette are more difficult than those in the Thousand Character Classic, but they are all useful. Learn one at a time."

Zhang Rui leaned closer, and sure enough, it was much more difficult.

"Imperial edict," "approved," "to be implemented immediately"—these words have a vague meaning, but when written on paper, the strokes are dense, and it takes a long time to piece together each character.

He could only recognize one character at a time, and after stumbling through half of it, he stopped at the character “覈”.

"The character '西' (xi) has '敫' (jiao) at the bottom. '覈实' (heshi) means to verify or check. It's similar in pronunciation and meaning to '核' (he), but this character is more commonly used in official documents. Now, continue reading."

After chanting for about the time it takes for an incense stick to burn, Zhang Rui recognized most of them.

I would get stuck when I encountered a character I had never seen before, but I wouldn't ask for help every time I got stuck. Instead, I would first try to break down the radicals and then guess the pronunciation. Only when I really couldn't figure it out would I look up and wait for Judge Di to explain.

After he finished speaking, Judge Di would ask him to repeat the meaning of the entire passage.

Zhang Rui sometimes answers correctly, and sometimes he answers incorrectly.

For example, once I misunderstood "交部议处" as "交到部里议议处置", which was inaccurate in wording but got the general idea right.

Di Gong did not correct him, but simply turned to another page of the official gazette and let him continue.

As the official gazette was read aloud and the sand table was brought out, the carriage was passing through a reed marsh.

The withered yellow reeds swayed in the wind, forming a gray-white wave. Several water birds fluttered up from the reeds, skimming the water's surface and gliding far away, the water droplets they kicked up glistening in the morning light before falling back down.

"Clouds hang across the Qinling Mountains, snow blankets the Blue Pass."

Judge Di read a sentence and then made a new request: "From today onwards, we will no longer practice individual characters, but rather passages."

Zhang Rui used his finger to write on the sand table from top to bottom, continuing the writing one character at a time.

When writing a single character, you can focus all your attention on that character and barely control the structure. When writing a line, you have to lift your hand immediately after the previous character goes down to pick up the next one. The vertical spacing and horizontal avoidance all depend on your feel. If the rhythm is disrupted, the whole line will be crooked.

When writing the character “拥”, the hand radical was too wide, squeezing the grass radical of the character “蓝” downwards out of place; when writing the character “关”, the last stroke was too long, leaving no room for the starting stroke of the next line.

Looking at the crooked and messy writing on the sand table was truly discouraging.

Judge Di leaned against the carriage wall, his gaze sweeping over the sand table, and said, "The spacing is much more even now; there's been progress."

"Writing in lines feels completely different from writing alone; if it gets messy, it all goes crooked."

"Then practice until you can't go astray anymore."

Zhang Rui smoothed out the sand again and wrote it down once more.

This time, when writing the character "拥" (yōng), I deliberately reduced the width of the radical "扌" (hǒu) to leave some room for the character "蓝" (lán) below.

Although the character "关" is still a bit crooked, the whole line of characters is neater than before.

"Do you know what these two lines mean?" Di Gong suddenly asked.

"It means that a person traveled a long way and for a long time, only to be stranded halfway by wind and snow."

"Stuck on the road, and then what?"

Zhang Rui thought for a moment but couldn't answer.

"Knowing you have come from afar with a purpose, please collect my bones by the pestilential river."

There was a moment of silence in the carriage as Zhang Rui silently recited those two sentences to himself.

An old minister, who had been demoted to a malarial land, wrote a letter to his nephew far away, saying, "Come and fetch me, come and take care of this old man."

The carriage swayed slightly as it left a rut.

The copper kettle on the charcoal stove gurgled and steamed, and the white mist rose up and scattered in the sliver of morning light seeping in through the window cracks.

Zhang Rui smoothed out the words on the sand table, without asking "why choose these two lines?" He simply lowered his head and rewrote the first four characters vertically from right to left: "Clouds hang over the Qinling Mountains."