He turned her life upside down, yet somehow it was impossible to hate him.
Xin Ziming, who was still helplessly following behind Qin Qianluo, was pondering how to give this girl another nudge.
One moment she was thinking, "Next time she manipulates time and space again, I'll confiscate her protective jade and let her deal with the Heavenly Dao old man herself."
Then she thought, "Why not find an opportunity for her to experience what it's like to clean up a mess, like having her appease the alarmed City God?"
He was thinking, "I need to go to the heavens and get more spiritual fruits so that I won't be short of things to use when I need to help mortals next time."
Little did they know that most of their future tasks would be thanks to this perfect pair of lively and mischievous people.
They needed to cover up the traces of disturbing the ancients, for example, explaining to Li Bai that "that peach blossom wine is celestial wine, and drinking it can inspire creativity."
They need to clean up the messed-up fragments of time and space, such as restoring the seismograph that was touched to its original state, and also send Zhang Heng a dream so that he thinks he is seeing things.
They also have to smooth things over with the old man of Heaven after they cause trouble, saying, "They were just curious and had no ill intentions. They will definitely change next time." But there will always be a next time.
The wind carried her low complaints as it caught up with her: "If you do that again, I won't care... let's see how you deal with that old man Tiandao then!"
"When the lightning strikes, I won't be giving you the protective jade anymore!"
But it was shattered by the silver bell tied in Qin Qian's hair. The silver bell jingled "ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling" with her footsteps, like a string of cheerful notes.
The complaints were transformed into light, fleeting laughter, drifting into the long road ahead, following the figures of the two as they floated off in the next direction.
I don't know how many times time has slipped through my fingers; I only feel the clouds in the sky gathering and dispersing, dispersing and gathering again.
The sunset glow has been dyed the crimson of the Tang Dynasty, the orange of the Northern Song Dynasty, and the purplish-red of the Qing Dynasty.
Stars rise and fall, rise and fall again, and the light dust scattered in the gaps of time and space changes its fragmented appearance several times.
Xin Zimo stood on the cloud steps beside the path of reincarnation, watching the two figures that shattered the flowing light as they approached.
Qin Qianluo's plain white skirt was still covered with peach petals from the Qujiang Pool in Chang'an during the Tang Dynasty. They were pink and tender, as if they had just been brushed off the branches, and even her clothes were filled with the faint fragrance of peach blossom wine.
Su Jinyun's hair was tinged with the fragrance of a painted boat on the Bian River in Bianjing, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, mixed with the refreshing scent of Longjing tea before the rain.
It was the tea smoke she accidentally picked up when she secretly drank the innkeeper's treasured tea on the pleasure boat last time.
Some glittering fragments of time still clung to the hems of their clothes, like embers that hadn't been extinguished, swaying with their footsteps.
Xin Ziming's teeth were practically grinding to dust between her lips and teeth, her molars grinding together with a "crunching" sound.
The anger in his chest surged up and burned through his veins to his limbs and bones, even making the light pink downy hair behind his ears stand up straight, making him look like a fox whose tail had been stepped on.
She wished she could rush up right now, grab these two troublemakers by the collar, pack them up, and throw them into the deepest, coldest pool of the Samsara Pool.
Let them experience what it's like to "learn the rules from scratch"—after all, I've followed them through thousands of years, spending most of my time cleaning up their messes.
In Chang'an, he coaxed a musician who had been driven mad by modern folk tunes by making up a lie about "celestial music entering a dream" and stuffing him with spiritual fruit to shut him up.
He stole back the glass mirror that was being worshipped as a divine object in Bianjing, transformed into a Taoist priest and chanted the "Heart-Cleansing Mantra" for half the night before convincing the owner of the pleasure boat that "the divine mirror must return to heaven."
In a teahouse in Jiangnan during the Qing Dynasty, I compensated the gentlemen who had quarreled over "Zhuge Liang's roasted chicken wings" with two catties of pre-Qingming Longjing tea, and secretly replaced the storyteller's original script...
Because of all these things, she lost several tufts of fur from her fox tail, and even the old folks joked that she was "almost a bald-tailed fox."
However, Qin Qianluo and Su Jinyun seemed to have nails in their feet, standing steadily in the light mist in front of the Cycle of Reincarnation, showing no sign of "guilt for causing trouble".
Qin Qianluo gazed absently at the drifting clouds in the sky, her plain white dress fluttering gently in the wind, revealing a half-fallen peach petal still clinging to her ankle.
Her fingertips unconsciously twirled the lotus embroidery pattern on her skirt—a pattern she had painstakingly learned from an old embroiderer at a Suzhou embroidery workshop, a pattern she had spent ages learning before she finally mastered it.
The stitches are crooked and uneven, but I cherish it dearly.
Her gaze drifted far away, perhaps thinking of the Hu women dancing in the taverns of Chang'an, or the old man selling sugar paintings on the Rainbow Bridge of the Bian River.
Su Jinyun stared blankly at the light spots spinning around her feet. The light spots were reflected from fragments of spacetime, flickering on and off.
It was just like the lantern shadows flickering outside the window when they were secretly exchanging storybooks in a Qing Dynasty teahouse.
She twirled a white jade pendant between her fingers. The character "安" (peace) carved on the jade shone from being rubbed, and the edges were covered with a patina.
This jade pendant was obtained by the two of them from a jade shop in Bianjing (Kaifeng) during the Northern Song Dynasty, after they had pestered the owner.
The shopkeeper called it "Peace Jade," so Su Jinyun always carried it with her, even when she got into trouble, saying it "could calm her guilty conscience."
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