Chapter 27: The Fourth Stroke
247 Words
After Lu Jiuyuan left, Shen Moyan kept practicing charms.
The fourth stroke was called the "Illusion-Breaking Stroke," specifically for dispelling illusions. Zhu Quan said once mastered, any maze of confusion, any illusion, any trick of the eye would be useless against you.
But the price was that you had to break through your own illusions first.
Shen Moyan drew it two hundred times. Failed two hundred times. Each failure, he saw things he shouldn't see—not others' memories, but his own.
He saw himself as a child, first seeing "the grandpa who walked through walls," being taken by his parents to doctors, made to take supplements.
He saw himself after failing his graduate exams, hiding in his rented room, not leaving for three days.
He saw that woman in red standing at his shop door, asking: "Are you afraid of me?"
He saw his own hands, the black at his fingertips, creeping upward bit by bit.
On the two hundred and first try, he succeeded.
The moment the charm completed, what he saw was no longer illusion, but truth—the person standing at his shop door wasn't the woman in red. It was someone else.
Zhang Shouyi.
"You see it now?" Zhang Shouyi asked.
Shen Moyan nodded.
"What do you see?"
"I see you." Shen Moyan said. "Thirty years ago, when you went down that well, you weren't alone. Your senior fellow apprentice didn't die."
Zhang Shouyi's face changed.
"He was pushed down by you."
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