If you die, I will be able to inherit your cultivation.

Fang Yuan squatted by the haystack, and by the dim moonlight, he brought the book that had fallen from the sky to his nose and began to read it out word by word.

"...Read a book a hundred times, and divine skills will naturally appear?"

After reading those eight words, he blinked and read them again.

After reading it aloud for the second time, he looked up at the bright moon and starry night sky, then at the book in his hand, and suddenly grinned.

He didn't care who threw the book at him or what their purpose was; as long as it was thrown to Fang Yuan, it was his.

He was just a third-class servant; besides his worthless life, he had nothing else that others could covet.

Fang Yuan tucked the book into his pocket, hastily wiped the tears from his face with his sleeve, stood up, patted the bits of grass off his backside, and crawled into the large communal sleeping area of ​​the horse farm.

The dormitory was pitch black, with seven or eight third-class servants sleeping in a row, their snores rising and falling, occasionally mixed with teeth grinding and sleep talking.

Fang Yuan reached for his bunk by the window, pulled the thin, stiff blanket over his legs, but didn't lie down.

Instead, he leaned against the wall and, by the pitiful moonlight filtering through the torn window paper, turned to the first page of the "Scripture of Crossing the World".

"The Tao has no name; it is forcibly named the Profound. Profound and yet more profound, the root of all things..."

His lips moved, and he spoke very softly, so softly that only he could hear it.

There's a rule in the communal sleeping quarters: anyone who disturbs everyone's sleep will get a beating the next day.

Fang Yuan had been beaten a lot, but he never wanted to implicate others, not even by chanting scriptures.

The scripture was very difficult to pronounce. Although Fang Yuan could read, these three thousand characters were too convoluted for him.

If he couldn't understand a part, he would stop and repeat that sentence several times until his tongue was no longer tied, before continuing.

One page turns, then another.

The moonlight shifted through the hole in the window onto the other side of the wall, and Fang Yuan had just finished reading it once.

He rubbed his sore eyes, exhaled, pulled the blanket tighter around himself, and started reading it a second time from the beginning.

Halfway through reading, Wang Laosan in the next bunk rolled over and mumbled sleepily, "Fang Yuan, what the hell are you muttering about...?"

Fang Yuan quickly shut his mouth, and only lowered his voice even further when Wang Laosan's snoring started again, almost to the point of being just a whisper.

After reading it a second time, Fang Yuan discovered something strange.

Those sentences that he stumbled over the first time he read them became much smoother the second time.

The words seemed to jump into his mouth on their own, one after another, as if they were flowing naturally.

He found it strange and read it a third time. The third time it flowed even better, as if someone was reading it to him.

Fang Yuan fell asleep when he read it for the fifth time.

The book was still open on his lap, his fingers were between the pages, his head was tilted against the wall, and a glistening drop of drool hung from the corner of his mouth.

He had a dream in which he was standing in an open space surrounded by people, all of whom were emaciated and dressed in rags.

He held up a book and read it aloud to everyone; it was the "Scripture of Crossing the World".

As the people chanted along with him, a warm light emanated from the top of each person's head, illuminating the entire open space.

Fang Yuan grinned in his dream.

A clapper sound woke him up.

"Get up! Get up!" the steward's voice came from the courtyard. "What the hell time is it? Still lazing around!"

Fang Yuan jumped up with a start, his first reaction was to look down, and the book was still there, it hadn't been lost.

He breathed a sigh of relief, quickly stuffed the book into his undershirt, and jumped off the bunk to put on his shoes.

There was no breakfast.

The Marquis's residence only provides two meals a day, the first of which is around noon.

Fang Yuan was used to being hungry, so he didn't feel anything. He followed the others to the well, fetched a basin of cold water, and splashed it on his face. He was then assigned his task for the day: brushing horses.

Su Mingyue's horses were all fine horses, one black and two chestnut, with glossy coats, but each one had a fierce temperament.

Fang Yuan carried a bucket and a brush into the stable. The black horse snorted and glanced at him sideways, reluctantly letting him approach.

Fang Yuan dipped the brush in water and brushed down the horse's mane, muttering to himself.

"...The Tao has no name, so we give it the name 'mysterious,' and the mystery beyond mystery is the root of all things..."

The sound was still so soft, so soft that it was almost indistinguishable from the smell of hay in the stable and the sound of horses' hooves pounding the ground.

But the black horse seemed to hear it; it stopped its restlessness and stood quietly, occasionally flicking its tail.

Fang Yuan recited the words as he brushed the brush, brushing the black horse and then the chestnut horse, and then the chestnut horse and another horse.

By the time he had read the scripture nine times, he had just finished brushing all three horses until they were shiny and glossy.

Old Liu, who also worked at the stable, passed by and saw Fang Yuan squatting by the manger, muttering to himself and talking incoherently. He couldn't help but spit on him.

"Fang Yuan, have you gone mad?"

Fang Yuan looked up and chuckled, "Uncle Liu, I'm not possessed, I'm just chanting scriptures."

"Chanting scriptures?" Old Liu looked him up and down. "When did you become a Buddhist?"

"It's not a Buddhist scripture." Fang Yuan shook his head cheekily. "It's good stuff, Uncle Liu, would you like to listen to it too?"

Old Liu waved his hand, shouldered the hay, and walked away, muttering to himself, "That kid's probably up to some trick again."

Fang Yuan wasn't annoyed and lowered his head to continue reading. He had made up his mind that since the scripture said, "Read a book a hundred times, and divine skills will appear," he would obediently read it a hundred times.

Regardless of what kind of scripture it is or whether it's real or not, even if you don't achieve anything, at least you feel at ease when you're reciting the scripture, which is much better than thinking about those unpleasant things.

It was nearly noon when Fang Yuan finished cleaning the horses. He took two grain cakes and a bowl of salted vegetable soup and squatted down by the wall outside the stable to wolf them down.

The flatbread was so thick it hurt his throat, and the little saltiness in the soup wasn't even enough to make his tongue tingle.

But he ate with relish, silently reciting scriptures as he chewed.

With his mouth occupied but unable to speak aloud, he would go through it in his mind with his mouth closed, counting each time he went through it once.

After dinner, it's back to work.

In the afternoon, he was assigned to carry hay. The hay stacks, weighing over a hundred pounds, pressed down on his thin, stick-like back, and his legs trembled.

Fang Yuan gritted his teeth and carried the horse from the warehouse to the stable, step by step, and then from the stable to the mule and horse shed in the backyard.

With each step he took, he silently recited a line of scripture in his mind, reciting one line and taking one step, then reciting one line and taking another step.

After finishing the scripture reading, Fangyuan started reading it again from the beginning, before he had even gone halfway back.

The foreman stood in the courtyard, shouting and yelling, scolding this person for being lazy and that person for dawdling. When he got to Fang Yuan, he saw him muttering something and slapped him on the back of the head: "What kind of incantation are you chanting!"

Fang Yuan shrank back, not daring to make another sound.

After the steward had walked away, he continued chanting in his mind.

When he finished work in the evening, Fang Yuan rushed back to the dormitory, took out the book from his undershirt, and continued reading with great eagerness.

Some of the third-class servants who lived with him came over to ask what he was looking at, and Fang Yuan simply turned the pages of the book for them to see.

A servant named Zhang Luzi came over and glanced at it. He only recognized the character "之" in "之乎者也". The rest was like reading gibberish to him. He touched his nose and left.

He was a servant recently bought by the Marquis's household, and he was barely literate.

Another servant named Ma Liu recognized more of the characters and stumbled through a short passage, but after finishing, he said his head hurt and refused to read any more.

Fang Yuan didn't force him and continued reading the book himself.

He slept for less than two hours that night.

The snoring in the dormitory rose and fell. Fang Yuan, wrapped in a quilt, huddled in the corner, his lips moving, his pupils reflecting the moonlight and ink words, over and over again.

As he read on, the words no longer seemed like they were being seen with his eyes; they seemed to be drilling into his heart.

Occasionally, for one or two moments, he could feel a very subtle warmth in his dantian, like breathing warm air into his palm in winter—light, fleeting, but definitely present.

As dawn broke, Fang Yuan counted the tally marks he had made with his fingernail in the blank spaces of the book. He had already read it fifty times.

There are still fifty repetitions to go before reaching one hundred.

Fang Yuan rubbed her bloodshot eyes, stuffed the book into her undershirt, and jumped off the bunk to prepare for the new day's work.

He walked into the courtyard, the morning light shining on his still somewhat childish face. He took a deep breath, and the corners of his mouth couldn't help but turn up.

He remembered the dream he had last night. In the dream, so many people were chanting scriptures with him, and each person had a ball of light shining above their head.

He felt that the dream wasn't fake. At least, it wouldn't always be fake.