“Grandpa…Grandpa?” Li Mingke turned around.
The room was dimly lit by candlelight, which made Li Jianshi's face appear indistinct.
"What are you looking at?" he asked again.
Li Mingke's heart skipped a beat.
Why does Grandpa look so serious?
She glanced behind her.
Is it possible that this book cannot be seen by others?
"I...I bought sesame dumplings." She smiled stiffly, holding the large bag to her chest. "Grandpa, look, these are the sesame dumplings you specifically asked me to buy."
Li Jianshi stared intently at her, making her feel a chill run down her spine.
It took me quite a while to finally take it from her hand.
Li Mingke thought the matter was over. "Well... Grandpa, please continue eating. I'll go rest first?"
She carefully moved away from the table.
Seeing that Li Jianshi didn't speak, she assumed he agreed and raised her right foot, preparing to take a step forward.
But just as her foot was lifted into the air, before it landed, Li Jianshi said, "Wait."
Li Mingke trembled all over.
"What's wrong... Grandpa?"
It's awkward to put my foot down, but it's also awkward to leave it.
Li Jianshi slowly opened the bag, took out a sesame dumpling, carefully tore open the packaging, and then put it in his mouth.
The aroma of roasted sesame seeds mixed with ghee wafts out the moment the parchment paper is opened.
"good."
What...not bad?
"The sesame dumplings taste exactly the same as before!" Li Jianshi sighed with satisfaction.
Li Mingke was like a rubber band that had been stretched for a long time, suddenly going limp.
"Of course, it doesn't even matter who bought it!" Li Mingke said with a touch of pride.
If she hadn't taken out a gold ingot before the aunt closed her stall, would Grandpa have been able to eat such delicious sesame dumplings?
Li Jianshi was still chewing.
"Then...Grandpa, I'm leaving?" She had already made a gesture to walk out.
Li Jianshi swallowed the last bite of the sesame dumpling, then took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands. Li Mingke then felt the weight on his shoulder.
"You can't leave."
Li Mingke took a deep breath.
...
"So you mean you can see that the words on this are slightly different from the other colors?"
Bright candlelight illuminated the dimly lit room, making it as bright as day, as the grandfather and grandson sat shoulder to shoulder, studying the "book" on the table.
“Yes.” Li Mingke nodded emphatically.
Li Jianshi practically pressed his eyes against the paper, but he still couldn't see any difference.
Li Mingke tapped on the book with his hand.
"Look, these few characters, and these few others, are different from the others."
It's not that several consecutive words are the same color, but rather that they are not consecutive; the same color is displayed only after several words are spaced out.
In Li Mingke's view, the words of the same color on a page seemed to form a pattern.
Li Jianshi stroked his chin, seemingly lost in thought.
"Mingke, what about the other pages? Take a look, are they as you described?"
Li Mingke flipped through the book from beginning to end, his expression gradually becoming serious.
“Each page has different colored text, and I just skimmed through it, so I guess it’s trying to convey something sequential.”
"So that's how it is..."
Li Jian seemed to have suddenly realized something.
"Hahaha, I understand!" Li Jianshi suddenly burst into laughter.
Li Mingke: Why has the old man gone mad?
He patted Li Mingke on the shoulder, "Mingke, do you know where your eyes came from?"
The mention of eyes immediately dampened Li Mingke's spirits. "Yes..."
She thought of that tone-deaf man again.
"This is fate!"
What divine will?
"Shenjizi, Shenjizi, it turns out everything was under your control!"
Li Mingke was confused. Why was Shenjizi mentioned again?
Li Jianshi remained in a state of madness.
"Eighteen years ago, no, perhaps even earlier, you had already begun to arrange all of this?"
Eighteen years ago? Or even earlier?
What should we arrange?
Why is Grandpa like this?
What exactly did Shenjizi do?
Li Mingke didn't know, but judging from Li Jianshi's state, it was definitely something important that concerned her.
Li Jianshi placed the book in her arms.
“Mingke, you don’t need to do anything else these days. Just read this book carefully and mark everything you can see.”
"this……"
What kind of book is this that is so important that she has to read it even if she doesn't practice her martial arts?
"Go, Mingke, this is something only you can do."
The book in his arms felt incredibly heavy, and Li Mingke held it with utmost care.
Seeing Li Mingke still in a daze after leaving, Li Jianshi sighed deeply.
"No wonder I haven't figured it out after fourteen years of research!"
Without such eyes, he would probably have remained immersed in regret, clutching his books, until his death.
Such is the will of Heaven...
...
Li Jianshi saw Li Mingke again a month later.
During that month, Li Mingke read day and night, almost going blind from exhaustion, all to complete the "task" entrusted to her by her grandfather.
Now, with dark circles under her eyes and a lifeless gaze, she numbly stuffed a thick stack of papers into Li Jianshi's arms.
"Here you go, Grandpa, here's what you wanted."
After saying that, he mechanically turned around.
"Wow, that's really well done." Li Jiashi glanced through it briefly. "Wait, Mingke, where are you going?"
"sleep!"
Does he know how she's been doing for the past month? She hasn't had a single full night's sleep, and she's even skipped her daily afternoon nap!
Now that she's finally finished, she needs to sleep a lot, for three days straight!
"Grandpa, if I don't show up next, please don't look for me..." She waved her hand, hunched over and walked out, looking as if she had aged more than ten years in an instant.
"Ah, okay..." Seeing his granddaughter like this, Li Jianshi felt uncomfortable and blamed himself.
Is it too demanding to expect Li Mingke to accomplish something that I myself couldn't figure out in fourteen years in such a short time?
Li Mingke went to rest, and he carried the thick stack of papers back to his study by himself, turning the pages one by one.
Because only Li Mingke could see the color difference, she deliberately used the same color family, but not exactly the same, so that ordinary people could also see the difference, to rewrite the words.
In other words, she copied the entire book again from scratch.
Not only that, she also wrote down her own insights.
Three days.
Li Jianshi spent three days reading Li Mingke's version word by word many times, analyzing the words in special colors one by one, and comparing them with the original version.
The more he looked, the more alarmed he became.
Just as she said, Li Mingke didn't leave her room until three days later.
When she reappeared, she was radiant.
She practically skipped and jumped as she ran.
"How's it going, Grandpa? Any new discoveries?" Seeing Li Jianshi sitting there, reading a single page for ten minutes, she mischievously shook his shoulder.
"Mingke, you're here!" He pulled himself out of his reverie.
"Have you rested well?"
"Yes!"
"Then let's have a chat!"
He asked Li Mingke to sit opposite him and placed the original version and Li Mingke's remastered version between them.
"You've already copied it once, now, tell us!"
Li Mingke did not speak immediately, but instead flipped through the book he had written from beginning to end again.
Then, she cleared her throat.
"Well, Grandpa, you can call this book 'the Book of Heaven' if you want..."
"I didn't call it that; Shenjizi said it first."
"Oh, whatever, it's fine with me," Li Mingke continued. "It's a book written in the heavens, it's meant to be incomprehensible. I really didn't understand this book either."
Li Mingke was dumbfounded when she copied the book. She recognized every single word, but when they were put together, she found that she couldn't understand it.
The sentences above lack punctuation; to separate the continuous text, one must rely on one's usual speaking habits.
However, the sentences here do not follow the usual subject-verb-object order; instead, they are a mess, and there are many interjections with unclear meanings.
This presented her with a significant obstacle to reading.
So she simply stopped thinking about the meaning of the sentences and instead marked them with colors.
After recopying the entire book, she carefully examined the colored words from beginning to end and finally discovered a major problem:
Perhaps this book isn't meant for people to read the text, but rather to look at the pictures.
The illustrations in this thick book, from beginning to end, seem to depict a story.
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