Chapter 117

The light ribbons of the Karmic Record were still surging across the firmament, looking like gold silk crumpled by a giant hand. Pi Yanlin raised his head. The wind caught his loose hair, brushing it against his collarbone—a sensation of clarity he had never experienced in his hundred years of lying flat. Those afternoons spent curled up in the Xuan'an Bureau’s servant quarters basking in the sun, the sunflower seeds shelled while listening to case reports at the teahouse, the wolf-hair brushes worn down to stubs while drafting petitions for old women—all of it was now burning in his veins. "From this day forth," he said, addressing the vibrating Karmic Record, his voice torn apart by the wind only to be knit back together, "the diligent shall no longer suffer, and the kind shall no longer be deceived."