The Azure Pivot Talisman

In the second month of spring in the year of Xinsi, the family patriarch passed away. At the Virtuous Ink Studio in Weishang, Han Jieji observed the mourning period while organizing generations of herbal texts, and kept watch over a secret chamber behind the rear courtyard’s brick wall. The family injunction said, “Until the time is right, the chamber must not be opened to the public.” Yet he had secretly opened it in defiance of the rule more than a decade ago. Every day at dawn, he went inside to tend to it, then erased all traces upon his return. A lifetime of restraint lay hidden between the lines. His son, Han Liangyu, endured the rigors of his final year of high school while in mourning. In July, he was admitted to Shandong Medical University to study clinical medicine, bringing a modern clinician’s perspective to the family’s herbal tradition. He began university in September and returned home during the National Day holiday. Father and son worked together to verify the volumes on water-scale insects and other invertebrates, as well as those on the central palace. The ten-volume herbal compendium arranged sixteen sections according to the Eight Trigrams, as old learning and new knowledge clashed and converged. The final chapter first unveils the secret beneath the wall. Yet a fragment of a note reads, “The wall is no true wall, the box is no true box, and the future inheritor is not a Han family son.” The true heir is someone else. The flame is passed on, but its mysteries remain unfinished, to be continued in The Nine-Scroll Box Scripture.