Chapter 386 - 260: Cold Cottage Snow-Brew: Spirit Gourd Persimmon Wine to Warm a Clear Winter’s Day
Chapter 386: Chapter 260: Cold Cottage Snow-Brew: Spirit Gourd Persimmon Wine to Warm a Clear Winter’s Day
Around 10:00 in the morning, the hashtag #JinlingCityPlaneTreesComeToLife# shot to the top of the trending charts. The accompanying images showed Wei Jin Bamboo growing wildly along the plane tree avenue of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. Famous quotes from *Records of the World* appeared on the surface of the bamboo stalks. A beautiful influencer, dressed in historical costume, was livestreaming herself picking the bamboo leaves to make tea. But when she poured hot water over them, a miraculous scene unfolded: an Illusion of the soldiers defending Nanjing in 1937 appeared in the tea.
The livestream was instantly shut down.
"Holy shit, this is a real supernatural event! It’s definitely not some cheap special effect."
"Even cheap special effects couldn’t look this real!"
"After Chang’an City and the Imperial Capital City, our Jinling, the Ancient Capital of Six Dynasties, is finally having its own strange phenomenon! Fam! Everyone! What do you think this means?" A lot of people were excited.
The fact that the livestream was shut down proved it definitely wasn’t fake.
Even though the stream was taken down quickly, people had already taken screenshots. Others at the scene had captured firsthand footage and were spreading it everywhere, to the amazement of all who saw it.
The incident was being hotly debated across all social media platforms.
On a popular video platform, a metaphysics influencer known as "@Director of the Zhouyi Research Institute," a well-respected elder, posted a video pointing out that the Illusions of 480 temples appearing over Xuanwu Lake alluded to the classic line, "Four hundred eighty temples of the Southern Dynasties, how many towers are veiled in mist and rain." The video got over two million likes.
A highly upvoted reply appeared in the comments: "The vibration frequency of the Copper Bells at Jiming Temple has been deciphered as Morse code—JAPAN GET OUT!"
"Holy crap, could it really be that wild?" Many people were skeptical. But then, an amateur enthusiast in the field came forward and demonstrated how to decode it. And holy shit, it was true.
On the Jinling Eye Pedestrian Bridge—the first scenic pedestrian bridge over the Yangtze River to win the "Nobel Prize of bridge engineering" (the Arthur G. Hayden Medal)—a typically risqué influencer decided for once to do a proper, non-suggestive livestream. She was giving a scholarly introduction to the seal script from *The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons* inscribed on the steel cables when the script suddenly rearranged itself and formed a QR code. Out of curiosity, someone scanned it with their phone, and it linked to a fragmented page from Wang Jingwei’s prison diary. The video’s view count broke 100 million in just a few days, but unfortunately, it was then forcibly taken down.
According to a research-focused creator on Bilibili, a well-known history vlogger, a comparison between a 1936 aerial photo of Jinling and a declassified Japanese Army secret engineering blueprint showed that the outline of a sinkhole at Xinjie Street perfectly matched the blueprint. The surge in "coin" donations from viewers caused the server to crash.
These strange phenomena became too widespread to ignore, and official bodies inevitably stepped in.
The Jinling Culture and Tourism Bureau issued an urgent notice claiming that a "malfunction in the Xuanwu Lake light show system caused historical projections." However, netizens immediately dug up photos of a reliquary casket belonging to Emperor Wu of Liang that had been salvaged from the bottom of the lake.
A geological institute from the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a paper on social media titled "A Study on the Correlation Between Geomagnetic Anomalies and Collective Illusions." The comment section was spammed with the same question over and over: "Do you believe in the Dragon Vein?"
A private anti-fraud app sent out a special alert: "Beware of illegal fundraising schemes disguised as Dragon Vein investments." The accompanying image, however, was a small ad for "Wang Dao Xie An Virtual Coin" that had manifested on the bamboo at the President’s Mansion.
Netizens as far away as the Imperial Capital were also buzzing, comparing the strange phenomena in the two cities.
Of course, some people didn’t believe any of it. They thought it was just the Culture and Tourism Bureau engaging in cutthroat competition, willing to use any means necessary to attract tourists. It was just ridiculous.
There were also experts in the country who guessed the truth and offered a pertinent suggestion: "We should establish a National Dragon Vein Restoration Team. At this rate, we’ll have a holographic map of the *Classic of Mountains and Seas* before 2035!"
News of the phenomena in the three cities also spread to the international internet.
One Japanese netizen strongly proclaimed: "The Jinling phenomenon is a radiation mutation! We, the Yamato Race, never committed such atrocities. We are being framed! We demand an international inspection. This is caused by nuclear radiation! The Chinese Side is conducting nuclear tests in Jinling City and there’s a leak!"
A YouTuber with millions of subscribers posted a video decoding the events: "The document from the Wang Jingwei puppet regime, scanned from the QR code on the cables, confirms that Chiang Kai-shek secretly suppressed the Dragon Vein. The Dragon Vein was already weak at the time, yet he chose to dig up his own foundation. The height of foolishness."
At the same time, a whole "metaphysics economy" sprang up.
For example, sales of a "Dragon Vein Restoration Edition Cinnabar Bracelet" skyrocketed along the banks of the Qinhuai River, and fortune-tellers at the Confucius Temple all switched to using iPads to display "Visualized Earth Vein Energy Reports."
The Earth Vein Energy reports looked so convincing that even Li Xiang, a true Earth Vein Transcendent, was left dumbfounded.
As for the cinnabar bracelet, it had nothing to do with anything; someone had just slapped that gimmick onto it. There were also fake "phenomena" generated by AI. Though not entirely realistic, they were good enough to fool the average person and cash in on the hype.
A few students from NJU even used AI to reconstruct the seal script of *The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons* from the cables and wrote an SCI paper on it titled "Quantum Classical Chinese Decipherment Based on Deep Learning," which was then shared by a professor at MIT.
Metaphysics experienced a resurgence in popularity across the country. People began to study Ancient Martial Arts, the Zhou Yi, Taoist Cultivation, and other similar fields.
The National Martial Arts Grandmaster who had previously bought the mutated Five Spirit Ointment, a Spiritual Medicine, from Li Xiang began to open a school and take on disciples. This man had been immersed in Traditional Martial Arts and Taoist Cultivation for decades and had already achieved a high level of mastery, making him a true Grandmaster. After taking Li Xiang’s Spiritual Medicine, the legendary True Qi immediately began to grow inside his body, coalescing into a vortex of True Qi.
He thought it was True Qi, but it was actually Spiritual Power. Spiritual Power was a higher Tier than True Qi. The man’s skills advanced by leaps and bounds, allowing him to reach the Innate Realm he had dreamed of day and night. He also became proficient in a minor Magic, the Taoist School’s "Palm Thunder," effectively becoming a Thunder Element Transcendent.
His appearance also immediately became about ten years younger. The change was so obvious because he had been quite old to begin with. People like Li Xiang, Luo Feifei, and Jiang Cai’Er were already handsome and beautiful, their looks at their lifetime peak. This was especially true for Luo Feifei and Jiang Cai’Er, who were only sixteen or seventeen—in the prime of their youth. They couldn’t possibly revert to being six or seven-year-old children, could they? So, it was no surprise that any changes in Li Xiang’s group were unnoticeable.