Chapter 5: Is the Person You Speak of the Lord Chancellor? Part 2

Xie’s companion chuckled with a hint of mischief, clapping his hands. “I remember your opening line was: ‘Holding the remnant chess pieces to shift the sun and moon; once the stone falls, the landscape transforms.’ His match is quite magnificent—even more grand than yours!”

Xie Shaoling silently repeated the line, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Interesting. I’ll go meet him.”

***

In the Eastern Pavilion, tea smoke curled amidst the swaying shadows of green bamboo. The usual bustle was absent; instead, the candidates were gathered silently at the door, some whispering with flushed faces.

When they saw Xie Shaoling approaching, they parted to make a path.

A slender figure in snow-white stood by the window. A frost-colored fox-fur cloak trailed on the floor. His back was lean and upright, resembling a winter plum blossom braving the frost and snow.

Beside him stood a man in green robes, looking scholarly and refined, who was currently instructing a waiter to paint over the wall and erase Xie Shaoling’s poem.

Xie Shaoling cupped his hands in a polite gesture. “I am Xie Shaoling. May I ask your name, sir?”

The man in green smiled at him. “My surname is Shen. This is my Young Master. He entered the capital last month for the examinations and arrived at this establishment today.”

The Young Master turned around. The silver-white fur on his shoulders seemed to shimmer like ice crystals, and his ink-black hair was bound in a jade crown.

His face was excessively fair, with a sickly lack of color. The bright lamps on the ceiling played across his brow, and his dark, moist lashes cast shadows like the wings of a winter crow. Yet, his lips were a morbidly vibrant shade of vermilion—such a ghostly, seductive beauty that one could not blame the candidates for staring blankly.

The Young Master appraised Xie Shaoling, arching an eyebrow. “You wrote the poem on the wall?”

Xie Shaoling did not lose his composure like the others. After a brief stare, he retracted his gaze. “Merely a playful scribble.”

He spoke dismissively, as if it were worth nothing, yet that poem on the wall had torn the Lord Chancellor to shreds. It mocked Chancellor Gu as a man who rose through his sister’s petticoat strings, a man with no literary merit, narrow-minded and intolerant of any dissent.

The Young Master spoke slowly and deliberately. “To dare mock the Lord Chancellor of the dynasty… you have quite the nerve.”

Xie Shaoling dodged the topic, asking provocatively, “I wonder if you, sir, would dare to compose a poem to break my spirit?”

The heaven-sent talent seemed unwilling to admit defeat, waiting for the stranger to provide an opening line so he could compete with him.

However, the Young Master shook his head slightly. “I have no interest.”

The waiter was efficient. In a few quick strokes, Xie Shaoling’s poem was completely erased, leaving only a fresh, blank wall.

Xie Shaoling tapped his fan against his palm, thinking for a moment. “If you won’t write a poem, why erase mine?”

Before the Young Master could answer, the man named Shen said expressionlessly, “What if we erase it? Who is Chancellor Gu to you? If you truly intended to offer counsel for the sake of the country, why write it on a wall?”

The scholars of the world only dared to play with ink and paper, fighting wars on the page. How many in the world truly dared to point at the Lord Chancellor’s nose and call him a traitor?

Xie Shaoling happened to be the boldest among them. He nodded. “Brother Shen has a point. Writing poetry is indeed useless.”

Hearing this, the Young Master’s gaze turned intrigued. “Since poetry is useless for rooting out evil, what is useful?”

Xie Shaoling did not answer immediately. His tone remained measured. “If you wish to know, I must first see if you are worthy of hearing it.”

The Young Master raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

A sharp light glinted in Xie Shaoling’s eyes. “Answer one question first.”

“What question?”

“Do you recognize whose calligraphy I am emulating?”

Xie Shaoling paused, adding mockingly, “If you do not recognize it, then you are blind.”

All the candidates present knew that Xie Shaoling admired Qin Zijin, the Minister of State Ceremonies, and that he emulated Qin’s Yan Style calligraphy to near perfection.

The Young Master pulled his fox-fur collar tighter and commented indifferently, “An utterly clumsy Yan Style.”

The room fell into a dead silence.

“Good!”

Xie Shaoling let out a cold laugh, pressing forward. “Since you have such high standards, why not grace the South Wall with a poem of your own and make me yield in true admiration?”

“There is no need for a poem.”

The Young Master reached out and brushed his hand over a brush rack. He selected a worn wolf-hair brush, hesitated, then switched the brush to his left hand. With an unconventional flair, he dipped it into some leftover tea and began to write across the table with fluid ease.

The tea stains shifted between dry and moist following the strength of his wrist. In his fingers, the brush was like a sword leaving its sheath. The horizontal strokes were like smoke over a desolate desert; the vertical ones like an avalanche on a celestial mountain. When the final hook was flicked upward, the table actually let out a dull clung sound.