Zhang Sui put down the "Historical Records of the Past Dynasties" in his hand, rubbed his swollen forehead, turned around and walked from the cubicle to the lobby of the library. The waiter who was entertaining several scholars greeted him with a smile: "Second Master, today's meeting
Have you finished reading the book?”
Zhang Sui waved as he walked out, but did not answer. He did not pay attention to the rest of the hall, and continued to entertain several scholars to choose books. Zhang Sui walked out of the library and squinted at the sky. The sky was bigger than the impression in his mind.
The two-circle sun is slowly setting towards the west.
Sighing, Zhang Sui slowly walked along the street towards the courtyard he remembered. Shopkeepers on both sides of the road kept saying hello to him, and the greetings of "Second Master, Second Master" were heard constantly. He just nodded slightly.
respond.
The courtyard where Zhang Sui lived was at the east end of Fangshi, separated from Fangshi by a very wide road. One side was where the market was, and the other side was where the nobles lived.
The courtyard is not big, it can be regarded as a courtyard for a mistress to enter. When he walked to the door, the lame Lao Lu who was basking in the sun quickly got up, bent down and said: "Second Master, you are back. The third lady is waiting for you in the inner courtyard. I want to find you."
, and she didn’t let..."
Zhang Sui was startled and didn't have time to pay attention to him, and walked quickly towards the inner courtyard.
Walking into the inner courtyard, I saw a thin girl with yellowish hair holding a box of unknown pastries. Her cheeks were bulging high. She was eating happily when she saw Zhang Sui walking in.
, his eyes widened in shock, he jumped up from the stool, hid the cakes behind his back with both hands, and wanted to speak, but his mouth was full, and he was at a loss for the moment.
Zhang Sui glanced at the desk and saw the stack of papers under the paperweight. He found that it had not been touched and secretly breathed a sigh of relief. He picked up the water glass on the coffee table and poured a glass of water for the little girl. He handed it over to the little girl carefully.
He took it, turned sideways and took a sip, smoothing the cake in his mouth.
Zhang Sui smiled and said, "Are you here to steal food from me again?"
The little girl rolled her eyes, swallowed the pastries with her tea, and breathed a sigh of relief before speaking: "You think I'm willing to come? My aunt asked me to come over and ask you to come over for dinner. I came all the way here. I'm hungry."
No, what's wrong with eating some of your pastries?"
After saying that, he took two bites of the pastry in his hand and said: "The family is very boring. Daxiong was sent to the farm again. Several girls didn't dare to play with me. They wanted to come over early to find the second brother. As a result,
You’re not here either, it’s annoying!”
Zhang Sui raised his eyebrows, walked to the desk and sat down, opened a small drawer, took out a box of dried fish and handed it to the little girl with shining eyes, and asked: "It's not a special day today, why did you think of asking me to go?"
Have a meal."
The little girl's eyes were full of the small dried fish in her hands, and she said casually: "It seems that a big shopkeeper has come. I heard that he came back from Jiannan Road and is a relative of my mother's side."
Zhang Sui thought about it. Jiannan Road is to the west of Kunzhou, almost two thousand miles away. The big shopkeeper in charge of Jiannan Road seems to be the aunt's mother-in-law. In his memory, he seemed to have met him at a family gathering two years ago.
Once, the reason I had an impression was that the big shopkeeper was very skinny but tall. It was hard to forget him after seeing him once.
Zhang Suixiao asked: "Just call a boy to come over and say something. Why do you still have to work for you, the third lady?"
The little girl was struggling with the small fish in her hand and replied casually: "Second brother can always find delicious food here. At home, we can't eat this or touch that. We eat the same food every day.
I've long been tired of it."
Zhang Sui knew that this third sister had been weak since she was a child and suffered from a strange disease. She was forbidden to touch many foods. Except for fish and buckwheat, she would be covered in rashes when eating other foods. She had some symptoms of malnutrition since she was a child.
He made buckwheat into cakes and fish into various flavors of dried fish based on some recipes in his memory. He occasionally adjusted the taste for her, so he was relatively close to him. There were probably few people in the family who dared to get close.
His person.
Zhang Sui's family is engaged in book business. In the early years, it was just a small workshop. Later, a Tanhuaman came into the family, and the bookshop was changed into Tanhua Pavilion.
After several generations of management, it is now the largest bookseller in the southwest of Yan State, with bookstores all over the southwest, and it still has a little influence among the officials.
Zhang Sui's father was the patriarch of the previous generation. He fell ill and died while inspecting the bookstores in various regions. He died before he was sixty years old.
The current patriarch of the family is Zhang Sui's half-brother Zhang Tian. Zhang Sui was born to his second wife and is nearly ten years younger than his eldest brother.
After Zhang Tian took charge of the family, Zhang Sui moved to this courtyard next to Fangshi. He received a monthly salary of one hundred taels, and the clan assigned him a lame coachman.
Some of them are regarded as marginalized people in the clan.
Zhang Sui also knew the general reason from his memory. Zhang Sui's biological mother was the only daughter of the chief storekeeper of Suijiang Road Bookstore. She was very beautiful. In addition, she had run the bookstore with her father since she was a child.
Bookish atmosphere.
Zhang Sui's father fell in love at first sight when he was inspecting the library when he was 30 years old. Later, he married Zhang Sui and became his second wife.
After the marriage, the two of them chatted with each other, ignoring the Liu family of the eldest family. The Liu family also came from a scholarly family. Her father was a third-rank official. Although he was not in the court, he still had a wide network of contacts over the years. The Zhang family's bookstore can dominate the southwest.
It is also due to the strength of the Liu family.
Zhang Sui's mother was so beautiful that she died of dystocia while giving birth to Zhang Sui. Zhang's father was so distraught that he indulged in grief all day long and even ignored Mrs. Liu.
Although Zhang Sui grew up next to Mrs. Liu, Mrs. Liu's attitude towards him was extremely cold. In addition, Zhang's father's death later had a lot to do with Zhang's mother. Zhang's father was apparently inspecting bookstores in various places.
But most of the time, he wandered around the places where Zhang's mother had been before she was alive, and eventually fell ill and died.
Zhang Sui couldn't help but smile bitterly as he recalled the emotional entanglements of his previous generation. Putting himself in Liu's shoes, she was the biggest victim. It was considered very generous to just be indifferent to Zhang Sui instead of suppressing her in various ways.
.
As for letting Zhang Sui move out of his ancestral home and live alone, this is also the ancestral practice of the Zhang family. The legitimate son takes charge of the family, and the common son starts a business. Each common son is decided by the clan elders after he turns eighteen, based on the characteristics of the common son.
To provide some support, those who can study can take the imperial examination, and those who can do business can be given capital. Basically, there are two ways to choose, so that the development of the family can be guaranteed to go further under the protection of power.
Zhang Sui thought for a while, he would be eighteen years old during the Dragon Boat Festival next year, so maybe he would go there this time to make preparations for choosing a path in advance.
He looked at the third sister who was still struggling with the dried fish, smiled, stepped forward and touched her dry yellow hair, and said: "I will go there in the evening, do you want to go back first or wait for me to go there together?"
The third sister tilted her head, got rid of Zhang Sui's clutches, and muttered: "I'll wait for you. Anyway, there's no one to play with when I go back. It's better to watch the second brother paint here." When it comes to painting, the third sister
His eyes lit up.
Zhang Sui smiled, went to the study and took out a few pieces of rice paper, laid out one piece, picked up the paperweight, hesitated for a moment, folded the stack of paper covered with small words that was pressed by the paperweight, and put it at the bottom of the drawer.
grid.
After pressing down the paperweight, he looked up at the third sister who was chewing dried fish and staring at him with her big bright eyes, and gently put down her pen.
Over a cup of tea, a cartoon image of a wide-eyed girl chewing dried fish appeared on the paper. Although it was very different from the common meticulous paintings of ladies, the little girl's expression was expressed just right, making her even more adorable.
The little girl looked at the paintings on the table and muttered: "How can her head be so big? Also, her hands and feet are too small!"
While she was complaining, she could not help but carefully pick up the paper with her hands, gently blow dry the ink, her eyes turned into two crescent moons with a smile, and then she pretended to be serious and said: "Although it doesn't look like this, I still take it away and collect it."
Get up, lest others see and say that you are graffitiing, second brother, and ruin your reputation. Haha."
Zhang Sui looked at her silly and happy at the side, and also smiled knowingly. He went back to the study to get a book, lay down on the lounge chair in the courtyard, and squinted through the book in the afterglow of the sun.
The third sister was looking at the portrait with silly joy. After a while, she ran to find Lao Lu at the door and asked him to comment on the painting. Lao Lu looked at the weird third girl and just stroked his beard, nodded with a smile, and kept saying:
"It looks like, it really looks like!"
The bizarre scenes in his mind were intertwined with his own memories, which gave Zhang Sui a splitting headache. He kept rubbing his forehead with his hands. This situation had lasted for almost three months, and the scenes in his mind seemed to be done.
A long and extremely real dream, intertwined with his original memories, made him a little unclear whether he was Zhang Sui, the second son of the Zhang Family Bookstore, or Zhang Sui who died on the hospital bed in the strange dream.
.
Since Zhang Sui suffered from severe typhoid fever in March, he had a high fever for three whole days. Several famous doctors in the city were helpless and could only use ginseng soup to survive.
Unexpectedly, he recovered inexplicably after three days, but there were many strange scenes in his mind, coupled with the constant interweaving of dreams every night, making it a bit unclear which Zhang Sui he was.
Zhang Sui tilted his head and glanced at the drawer where the rice paper was placed. The stack of paper just placed on the bottom made him a little distracted. It was filled with words that did not belong to this world, although they were different from the words he saw every day.
They are very large, but the overall structure of the fonts is very similar.
Those words were the words he used in his dream, and they were written about a passage he remembered in the dream: "When he opened the jade basket again, the lid of the basket rose up with his hands, and there was a flaming embroidered package inside. When he opened it, it was three inches long.
, three inches thick, a small booklet with three characters on it, called the Ruyi Book; inside it is detailed the one hundred and eight Taoist transformation methods, the thirty-six major transformations, corresponding to the number of Tiangang.
The seventy-two small changes correspond to the number of evil spirits on earth, and have the magical effect of moving the sky and changing the battle, and the magical effect of conquering ghosts and driving away gods."