At sixteen, Hui Minghe was a nun who lived beside an ancient Buddha and a solitary lamp. After leaving the mountain temple, she met A Luo, a nine-year-old Miao boy covered in wounds, while gathering herbs along the road.
His lapel was stained with an eerie blue medicinal substance, and something rustled inside the bamboo tube at his waist. It was none other than the legendary Miaojiang Gu magic, said to command insects and beasts.
Breaking her vows to save him, Hui Minghe brought the wary child, clutching his Gu pouch, back to the temple. Seeing how helpless he was, she suddenly entertained a fanciful thought: If she guided him into the world and helped him earn an official post through the examinations, could she rewrite his fate?
So she defied her master's instructions and secretly taught him to read and write herself. She accompanied him from the Three Character Classic to the Analects, watching his slight frame stand straight and tall in the academy.
The path to the imperial examinations was full of obstacles. People feared his identity as a “Gu child,” his classmates mocked him coldly, and doubts about his origins followed him everywhere.
But A Luo used Gu magic to relieve the villagers' epidemic, and applied what he had learned to criticize the ills of the age. Step by step, he tore away the labels of prejudice.
He could not help falling in love with the master who had saved him, stayed by his side, and encouraged him to grow. He wore clothes like hers and used things just like hers, cautiously revealing his little feelings.
And as they spent day after day together, Hui Minghe's faith began to waver. From not understanding or accepting him at first, to watching him gather the scattered Buddhist prayer beads around her wrist, to feeling her fingertips brush the calluses in his palm, the wooden fish's beat amid the incense smoke in the meditation room gradually began to sound like a heartbeat.
From evening and morning temple bells to the imperial court, from Miaojiang Gu King to pillar of the court, what they crossed was more than society's judgment and the constraints of propriety.
When the top scholar, clad in a red robe, knelt to receive the emperor's favor, he pointed his vermilion brush toward the pale-robed nun outside the temple gate:
“Every honor this disciple has earned was for the sake of marrying my master.”
