Chapter 2182 The Battle of Flowers (Ninety)

   On the way back to Fuzhou, Nick and his group rested in the villages and towns near Yanping House. The weather was fine that evening. He walked around aimlessly, just wanting to enjoy the walk.

At this time he saw five people coming from a distance, their appearance caught Nick's attention, because they did not walk along the mountain path, but randomly wandered, suddenly climbed a small hill, and then ran down immediately, During the stop-and-go process, I sometimes looked at the ground, as if detecting something, and sometimes looked around, as if I was studying the scenery.

Nick has been thinking about what they are doing, but he can't figure it out. They walk around aimlessly and accidentally come to Nick and them, but no one is looking at them, so Nick follows them, wanting to see an end.

   There were two people walking behind all the time, carrying baskets in their hands, which contained food and incense candles. They looked younger, as if they were apprentices.

   The third person is older, he looks anxious, showing a breathless look, his eyes are always fixed on the compass in his hand.

   One of the two people in front was holding a small gong and a bell, and the other was holding a stick. From time to time, they pushed the grass away from the ground, as if they were looking for hidden treasures.

  The two elderly people walked and communicated, unable to hear what they were saying, and finally they sat down in a pavilion for people to rest and shared the food in the basket.

   Could it be that they are "walking by candles at night"?

  Nick also entered the pavilion. It happened to be raining at this time, and sheltering from the rain was a good excuse, so through "small talk", Nick asked what they were doing?

  Man's predicament is largely caused by his inability to retrace his life, or, in other words, because his tool for retracing his life, memory itself, is seriously flawed.

   This is not what Nick said, but was recorded by the two old men from an ancient tome they saw.

First of all, we need to explain the meaning of the forty-seventh hexagram of Zhouyi. The rise is a good thing for the vast majority of people. No one hopes that their life will get worse and worse, and they all hope that they will get better and better. Limit, if you want to rise again, you will encounter difficulties. This is the "sleepy hexagram".

   There is also a type of people who want to get rid of their current life, such as those coolies, they don’t want to keep doing it, but how to get out of this predicament? They need more money, so they keep going up in price, and after accumulating wealth, they have the foundation to change careers, or go to other places.

The previous hexagram of the sleepy hexagram is the ascending hexagram, and the latter hexagram is the well hexagram. No one wants to be like Jia Baoyu written by Cao Xueqin, and his family has experienced a sudden change. .

But when things are extreme, they will be reversed, and when they are extremely high, they will decline. There is water in the well. People put down the wooden bucket and then lift the bucket up. .

The way of the well cannot but change, so the next is the revolution, that is to say, if you want to get out of trouble, you must change. Change is the inevitable law of the change of all things. All things in the world are constantly improving themselves in the process of change, so as to survive in the change. Development, to reach the realm of "according to the heaven and the people".

Adults change into tigers, gentlemen change into leopards, and villains change their faces, but the most terrifying thing in getting into trouble is "doing not believe what you say", or trusting the wrong person, whether it is stubborn and unwilling to change, or impetuous, and random reforms are possible was attacked.

In the Turkish writings written by the Macedonians, there is mentioned a race called the yin, they are very good at labyrinths, and they call the labyrinth "kadim", which means "ghost-bound knot", they think that the straight line and the The kaleidoscopic transitions and intersections between curves can trap ghosts and their natural enemies, mandrills.

There was once a scholar who came to Wuyi Mountain to look for clues. He found this book by chance in the Istanbul library. Ptolemy was originally a general under Alexander the Great of the Macedonian Empire, because he was a Greek. He was particularly envious of the Aristotelian Library in Athens, so he built the Library of Alexandria.

  In the heyday of the Abbasid Empire, Alexandria, Egypt, was occupied, and some books were also transferred to the "Palace of Wisdom" in Baghdad.

  In alchemy, there is a very ancient symbol of ouroboros, but the Yin people understand it as "snake rings".

Their understanding of darkness is also different from that of modern people. People think that the eyes of the blind cannot see anything. In fact, the opposite is true. The eyes of the blind contain the greatest darkness. People think that darkness is dead silence. This is another absurd misunderstanding. Not only did it not disappear in the dark, but in the spectrum, only black cannot be attributed to one color. It is a huge theater that lacks all the characters, but includes all the plots.

  There are only three things in the gray pupils of the blind: night, poetry, and secrets.

The Huan Yin people believe that hair is like coral, and every night there are countless bugs carrying the mines mined from the dream, advancing along the hair, and when they reach the end, there is no way to go, so they have to stop, dormant here, acting as a The next section of paving masonry.

The predicament of    is to a large extent caused by the inability to trace back his life, or, in other words, due to the serious flaws in the memory itself, the tool used to trace his life.

The war between them and mandrills lasted for many years. The Yin clan and mandrills are like the relationship between hunters and prey. The way of hunting mandrills depends on the weather. In rainy days, you can cast spells, in sunny days, you can poison them, and when the clouds are scales It can be burnt with fire, and the tail of a horse can be smoked. If you want to draw a moving wind, you can cut it with a fluttering knife cast with the fragrance of flowers. If you start a wood wind, you can stab it with the roaring spear trained after the horse's death. If you start a stone wind, Desirable tears quenched sand as arrows.

Nick thought he might be talking about something like a woman's beard, a cat's footsteps or something, but the old man said that the most useful thing to hunt for mandrills is the labyrinth, and in the time created by the yin, there was an empty seat, and it was in the center, Where the snake rings meet end to end, it represents the ecstasy array.

There was a gardener in Tabriz who walked among marigolds, musk, and lilies, his hands covered with soil, and his lips uttered the teachings of the ancient scriptures: "Each flower is dedicated to a god. "

  A Shia maiden, a young victim, fell unconscious in the garden he managed, and he rescued her.

   It was the time of the Crusades, the gardener may have died in war, or a shadow backlash, and maidens with their children lived in the garden he planted.

   "What is Shadow Backlash?" Nick asked.

   "You can read it yourself." The old man gave Nick a book. "We're looking for mandrills."

  Nick thinks it's amazing, and also very suspicious, who would say such a secret when they meet for the first time.

   Then the old man told Nick another story.

  There is a painter, he has extraordinary talent, he became famous early, and won a lot of attention in the local area, some of which were bought by several influential collectors. So this arrogant but good-natured young man wandered around in salons and alcoholics, and soon contracted syphilis.

He captured a few ladies, a few young ladies, and a few maids, and passed the disease to the wife of one of the benefactors, and he was infused with a mixture of dung beetles, hornbill droppings, white rosin, and With a small amount of medicine prepared by Pistachio, his hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows have all fallen off, and his hearing has degenerated into a low-level buzzing sound, his eyes have no color, only darkness is left, and his sense of smell cannot determine the attributes of a smell. , but it was his only consciousness.

He smelled the cold and pain, and smelled another outline of who he was. He was lying on a dirty little bed, experiencing the unbearable cold and dampness alone, like a fermented apple, exuding a little sweetness.

   He died alone, like a fallen autumn leaf, lying still in the dark.

  Nick felt familiar with the second story the old man told, but the way he died at the end was horrible.

   For everyone, there is only one choice. If you choose one, you cannot choose the other. Nick chose to escape. He took the book and left after the rain stopped.

   After returning to the village where he stayed, he asked Captain Yao if it was raining. Captain Yao said that it had not rained at all, as if everything he had just experienced was just a dream.

   (end of this chapter)