30 A Cunning, Idiot Young Miss 6 (1/2)

Xia above, Heavens below. Shatter the crest of Jing and sunder the Palace of Divine to enter the Sanctum.

That was listed in the book left behind by An Xiang Yang as the declared method of re-entering the mysterious crystal palace. As she recalled that statement, An Fei couldn't help but think that within the seemly arbitrary statement was a more profound meaning, one hidden from the eyes of others until a specific time or need.

It was just that to the current An Fei, the phrase was nothing more than a phrase to be written down on paper and agonized over.

”Fourth Sister, the ink's dripping onto the paper, hurry up!” Wei Yan Yue's voice could be heard from her right. ”If the ink stains cover the words later on, First Madam would become very angry at me…”

Observing from the side, Xiao Wen couldn't help but sigh. What assisting the Fourth Young Miss with practicing calligraphy, when the person herself didn't even know the meanings of the words she was copying?

Besides, could she even replicate the characters in a straight line as the First Madam Sheng Miaolan strictly mandated from the children of the Wei manor?

Thus, the maidservant diligently rolled up her sleeves, placing the tray onto the bed. Pulling up a stool next to An Fei, the maidservant began to assist the young girl delicately copy the phrase onto a new sheet of paper, rolling her eyes at Wei Yan Yue each time the former's grip on the brush began to loosen.

”This Fifth Young Miss of Wei, how bold!” the maidservant grumbled to herself in a low murmur.

”Blatantly disobeying the Master's decree and even forcing her older and bedridden sister to assist her with a punishment, how blind towards propriety and benevolence!”

Although, her words were promptly ignored by both Wei Yan Yue and An Fei. One was hurriedly copying down Mencius' phrase whilst glancing at the hourglass from time to time, and the other was daydreaming in her thoughts.

An Fei had practically given up attempting to write calligraphy in the posture dictated by Wei Yan Yue. Each time she attempted to hold on to the ebony practice brush, her fingers would immediately jump to her old posture of writing characters with either an ink pen or a pencil, sliding down to the base of the writing implement within seconds.

As a mix between embarrassment of her overpowering habit as well as being lost in her thoughts, the girl had delegated the entire writing task to the maidservant next to her. However, the person in question was similarly lost in her own thoughts of righteous anger towards the 'mistreatment' of her Fourth Young Miss and unable to realize that the Fourth Young Miss was simply far too lazy to correct her own habits.

…simply put, all were struggling in their own mental worlds.

An Fei was far too busy envisioning a mental projection of the phrase she had seen within the aged, black book.

Xia over Heaven. The 'xia' for governance, and 'min' for heaven. If the characters were to be read side-by-side, the closest interpretation An Fei could confidently acquire from the resulting statement was to 'govern over heaven'.

However, if they were to be placed in a format in which the two characters overlapped vertically, a rather interesting symbol that made no comprehensive sense, yet was pretty to look at.

Shattering the crest of Jing and sundering the Palace of Divine. An Fei couldn't help but wonder what 'shattering the crest of vitality' could mean. What counted as a 'crest of vitality' anyways?

...Youth? The diverging point in the method a mind processed information when a person crossed youth into maturity?

…And what did it mean to sunder the Palace of Divine? What was being referenced as 'Divine'?

An Fei felt that she had far too many questions, and not a single answer that could solve any of them.

In her frustration, the mental image of the diagram overlapping 'xia' and 'min' became distorted, gradually fading into a messy haze of information. With only the vestiges of the diagram remaining in her mental projection, the girl deeply wished to sigh and felt the urge to experiment on paper.

Furthermore, her head was throbbing in pain, her mind exhausted from envisioning a phrase of characters, then manipulating them without any assistance from physical diagrams.

”Hu…”

Slowly releasing a pent-up breath, An Fei closed her eyes for a few moments before blankly observing Xiao Wen manipulate her hand into copying the characters on the book in the middle of the drawing table.

Once her mind no longer felt like it was being ground to pieces, the girl began to cautiously move the brush grasped in her hand, only paying attention to her grip and not what the maidservant was printing onto the stationary paper.

What she had just used was nothing more than an ordinary memorization technique every student in China was once forced to learn if they had any inclination towards learning. Imprinting information as a mental visualization and recalling the image instead of blindly reciting content until it was burned into memory, this technique could assist a person recall massive quantities of information in a short period of time.