Snow falling on cinnabar turns to blood.
When I knelt in front of the sapphire desk and adjusted the ink, the ice edges on the corners of the eaves were piercing the first snowfall of the first year of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Master's pine smoke ink was mixed with bone powder, and a subtle whine could be heard oozing out from the bottom of the inkstone while grinding. The grain of palace sand on the wrist glowed a strange red under the candlelight, like a wound that would never heal.
"Wrong."
The bamboo ruler was wrapped with the sound of wind and struck on the wrist, and ink was splashed on the plain silk, winding into the woman's graceful waist. Xie Xuechen's silver fox cloak swept across the broken ice on the floor, and when he tapped his jade finger on the desk, I smelled the scent of agarwood mixed with the scent of blood coming out of his sleeves.
"Yong Hui Nian's pine smoke ink should be melted with three-shift snow water." He picked up my hanging hair with his fingertips and pressed the sandalwood penholder against the carotid artery. "Did you mix tears in it?"
The sound of Jin Wuwei's boots was heard outside the hall, causing jackdaws to fly across the glazed tiles. I stared at the looming scar on the collar of Master's official robe. The scar looked very much like the cracks on the "Red Jade Guanyin" scroll. Last night when he taught me how to trace the pleats of Guanyin's clothes, this scar rubbed against the back of my hand and was as hot as the embers of the fire in Xie's Mansion fifteen years ago.
"Master said that when painting a person, you need to gouge out the heart first." I dipped in cinnabar to paint the ends of the eyes of the person in the painting. "But if the painting is a Bodhisattva, whose Buddha nature should be gouged out?"
Xie Xuechen suddenly grabbed my writing hand. The pine smoke ink dripped on the palace sand, and green smoke actually rose up. His left eye was illuminated by the candlelight, and a bloody mantra floated deep in his iris: "When they gouged out my sister's eyes, they used this Fang Taohe inkstone."
