The rain in Jiangnan always carried a touch of melancholy, much like the polished Duan inkstone on Shen Yan's desk, deep within whose ink settled a thousand unutterable words. He was a scholar, lacking even the strength to truss a chicken, wielding only a brush that could dance like dragons and snakes across the mulberry paper. Everyone in the world said young master Shen was talented and could compose prose on the spot, but no one knew that the moment he met Su Wanqing, that brush was used for only one thing—copying the love poems of the world.
"I hear there are ten thousand ways to speak of love, and ten thousand ways to express it." These were the words he heard her say when he first met Wanqing. At the time, she stood at the bow of a painted pleasure boat, her flowing sleeves fluttering in the spring breeze like a white plum blossom about to bloom. He gazed across the hazy veil of rain, feeling as though all the sparkling ripples of the lake had fallen into the depths of her eyes, while his own heartbeat lost its rhythm.
From that day on, Shen Yan kept it in his heart. He rummaged through old scrolls at bookstores, and whenever he found sentences about romance and love, he would copy them neatly onto a plain notebook page. "The ospreys cry out, on the river islet" was too straightforward; he wanted something more subtle. "The mountains have no edges, and the waters of the river run dry" was too fiery; he wanted something gentler. He copied, "The flowers on the path are …
Chapter 123