For a long time, System 888 said nothing.
Then his voice appeared again.
[Wanqing.]
Mu Wanqing froze.
System 888 rarely called her by her name in such a serious tone.
[You keep asking why they killed you, what happened in your previous life.
But, have you ever asked yourself another question?
Why are you still allowing dead people to control your heart?
Your previous life is over.
The girl who died in that life is gone.
The girl who spent fifteen years suffering is gone, she has already completed her journey.
But now you are here.]
[You are not standing in that cold place where you died.
You are sitting in the presidential suite of Shanghai’s one of the most luxurious hotel.
You have a future now and bright one at that, and this time, you are not alone.]
Mu Wanqing’s lips parted slightly.
System 888’s voice became warmer.
[Do not misunderstand me.
I am not telling you to forgive them.
You do not have to forgive people who destroyed your life.
Forgiveness is not an obligation.
If one day they must pay for their actions, then they will pay and if they commit crimes in this life, you will make sure the law deals with them properly.
But revenge should not become the reason you live.
You have already spent one lifetime trapped by them.
Will you spend your second lifetime trapped by them as well?]
Her heart trembled.
[Child, there is a difference between remembering the past and living inside it.
Remember what happened so that you do not make the same mistakes.
Remember who hurt you so that you do not foolishly hand them another knife.
Remember your suffering so that you can understand the pain of others.
But do not build a home inside your hatred.]
Mu Wanqing’s breathing slowly became calmer.
System 888 continued.
[Ghosts are frightening because we keep looking behind us.
But when the sun rises and you begin walking forward, eventually you will realize something.
The ghosts cannot follow you into a future you have already left them behind in.]
A tear finally rolled down Mu Wanqing’s cheek.
She quickly wiped it away.
System 888 noticed.
[You regret being weak, then become strong.
You regret being helpless, then gain the power to protect yourself.
You regret dying without understanding why, then live long enough to discover the truth.]
Mu Wanqing’s eyes slowly widened.
System 888’s voice became increasingly powerful.
[Your enemies may have taken fifteen years from your previous life.
Do not give them another fifteen years from this one.]
That sentence broke through something inside her.
Mu Wanqing lowered her head.
Her tears fell silently onto the back of her hand.
For several minutes, she did not speak.
System 888 remained with her.
Quietly and patiently.
Like a father sitting beside his daughter after she had finally become too tired to pretend she was strong.
Eventually, Mu Wanqing took a deep breath.
Got up and was about to walk towards her bedroom her foot stuck the tote bag she brought it to City planning bureau.
Mu Wanqing’s fingers suddenly stopped.
For a moment, she simply stared at it as she remembered her grandmother’s letter.
A smile suddenly spread across her face as she remembered that kind looking old lady in her memory.
Mu Wanqing reached for the bag and opened it.
Beneath several documents and the folder containing the compensation papers, her fingers found a carefully preserved envelope and her movements gradually slowed.
She had read this letter countless times in her previous life.
There had once been a time when she kept it safely inside the drawer beside her bed, taking it out whenever she missed her grandmother too much.
Whenever she felt lonely, frightened, or overwhelmed, she would read those familiar words again and again, as though the faint traces of her grandmother’s handwriting could somehow bring her comfort.
Then, one day, the letter had disappeared.
At the time, she had searched everywhere.
She had turned her entire room upside down.
But she had never found it, only to learn that Mu Qinglan had taken it.
Mu Wanqing lowered her eyes.
A faint, complicated smile appeared on her lips.
She carefully unfolded the letter, as she sat back on the sofa.
The handwriting upon it remained unmistakable.
Weak, slightly uneven, yet bold.
Each stroke carried the unmistakable character of the woman who had raised her.
Her fingers gently moved across the familiar handwriting, tracing the faded ink as though she could still feel the warmth of her grandmother’s hand lingering upon the page.
The first page contained nothing more than a formal statement.
It was like a legal document through which her grandmother had transferred Mu Wanqing’s guardianship to Mu Qinglan.
Mu Wanqing’s gaze lingered on the official wording for a moment before she slowly turned the page and began to read.
Wanwan, my child,
The mountain does not ask the river where it is going, but you must learn to notice how the water bends before it ever reaches the turn.
A stalk of bamboo bows in the wind not because it is weak, but because it has already decided where it wishes to stand when the wind has passed.
Study diligently.
A mind left idle grows moss, and moss, however soft, will never hold a house upright.
Honor your elders, for old trees have weathered storms that the young have not yet seen, and their roots, though quiet, still remember where the earth once cracked.
Your uncle loves you as the pine loves the cliffside, steady and plain, asking nothing in return, content simply to remain where he has always stood.
When the wind is unkind, look there first.
As for your aunt Qinglan, she is not a bad woman.
I have watched her long enough to know this.
But a house has many rooms, child, and not every room is swept every day.
Even a good heart may hold, in some forgotten corner, a guest it never invited and has since forgotten to send away.
You are young, and warmth is easily mistaken for shelter.
But remember, the fisherman does not scatter grain upon the water out of love for the fish.
Every kindness this world offers has already been weighed upon some scale before it reaches your hand, whether the giver knows it or not.
Take what is given.
Be grateful where gratitude is owed.
But never rest your entire weight upon it.
Keep one hand always upon the door.
The winter plum blossoms alone, child, in the season when no other flower dares to bloom.
Let that be your example, not because you must live without companionship, but because you must first learn to survive the cold through your own strength before allowing yourself to lean upon another person’s warmth.
Your grandmother, who may not always stand beside you, but will never stop watching over you, wherever she may be.
Mu Wanqing read the letter once.
Then, almost without realizing it, she began reading it again.
This time, she read slowly.
Her eyes lingered upon sentences she had passed over countless times before.
Words she had once considered nothing more than the gentle, slightly old-fashioned advice of an elderly woman who loved classical sayings and beautiful phrases.
Her breathing gradually slowed, something was wrong.
As she read the letter third time something she had never noticed before was suddenly becoming painfully clear.
Mu Wanqing’s fingers tightened around the edge of the paper.
She had read this letter dozens of times in her previous life.
She had cried whenever she read the passage about her uncle.
She had always found comfort in the image of the winter plum blossoming alone in the snow.
But she had never, understood what her grandmother had truly been trying to tell her.
So she was telling her to build her strengths alone?
Her heart skipped a beat.
Suddenly, she remembered the old man from the Virtual Mastery Room .
Reading is not decoration.
Sentences do not sit flat upon the page like dead things.
They rise and breathe.
At the time, Mu Wanqing had thought the old man was simply being eccentric.
She had considered his words unnecessarily profound.
Structure was structure Words were words and phrases were phrases.
What was there to understand beyond their literal meaning?
But now, Mu Wanqing stared at the letter in her hands and for the first time, she understood, or perhaps, more accurately, she had finally taken the first step toward understanding.
Structure is not a rule you memorize.
Her grandmother had never written the words like Mu Qinglan cannot be trusted.
She had never openly accused her.
She hadn’t needed to.
The letter itself had already said everything.
Mu Wanqing’s gaze slowly returned to the paragraph about her uncle.
‘Your uncle loves you as the pine loves the cliffside, steady and plain, asking nothing in return.’
The words were direct, with no hesitation, qualification or hidden turn in the sentence.
Her grandmother’s trust in her uncle stood openly upon the page, firm and uncomplicated.
But then came Mu Qinglan.
‘Qinglan is not a bad woman.
At first glance, it sounded reassuring, almost comforting.
But what followed?
‘A house has many rooms, and not every room is swept every day.
Even a good heart may hold, in some forgotten corner, a guest it never invited.’
Mu Wanqing’s breath caught.
The warning had been there all along.
Her grandmother had softened the words.
She had wrapped the truth inside metaphor.
She had avoided direct accusations.
Yet the meaning was unmistakable once one understood where to look.
The words surrounding Mu Qinglan were curved inward.
They reassured before withdrawing that reassurance.
The very rhythm of the passage had changed.
Mu Wanqing slowly lowered the letter.
Her heart felt strangely heavy.
Her grandmother had known.
Somehow, she had known.
Perhaps not everything.
Perhaps she had never imagined just how far Mu Qinglan and the Shen family would eventually go.
But she had seen something.
She had noticed the shadows that Mu Wanqing had been too young and too trusting to see.
And because she could not or perhaps dared not, say it directly, she had hidden her warning inside the words.
A warning meant only for someone willing to understand it.
Mu Wanqing’s fingers trembled slightly, “Grandmother…” Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.
She had missed the warning for an entire lifetime.
System 888’s voice sounded quietly in her mind.
[Your grandmother was a wise woman.]
Mu Wanqing nodded slowly, “She was.” Her gaze remained fixed upon the letter, “She was wiser than I ever realized.” Then she smiled faintly, “She even believed that I would grow up to be wise.”
But she didn’t dwell on it for long, she carefully folded her grandmother’s letter and placed it back inside the folder.
She lowered her eyes and smiled faintly, “Dad, I’m going to sleep. Send me to the Virtual Mastery Room.”
System 888 was silent for a moment before responding warmly.
[All right, child.]
Mu Wanqing walked back to her bed and slipped beneath the soft sheets.
The moment her head touched the pillow, her consciousness gradually loosened from the physical world.
When Mu Wanqing opened her eyes again, she was once again standing Infront of the ancient courtyard.
Mu Wanqing did not waste any time.
She walked through the courtyard and entered the inner compound.
The old master was already there.
This time, however, he was not reading, he was painting.
She did not interrupt him.
Instead, she quietly walked toward the table beside her and looked down at the stack of books.
They were the same books she had read before.
Her eyes fell on the first book.
She slowly picked it up.
It was the political philosophy and governance during the Tang Dynasty.
Earlier when she had read it for the first time, Mu Wanqing had approached the book with only one purpose in mind, understand the words on the surface, memorize whatever could be useful, finish it, then move on.
She had treated the text as nothing more than another obstacle standing between herself and her mission.
But this time she wanted to understand the essence of it.
So she opened the book, then began to read.
The first line, she read again and again, once, twice, even ten times.
She did not hurry.
She did not turn the page simply because her eyes had passed over the characters.
Instead, she stopped at every sentence and asked herself what the writer truly meant.
Why had this particular word been chosen?
Why had the sentence been structured in this way?
What was the author trying to say directly?
And what was he trying to imply without saying it openly?
For the first few hours, Mu Wanqing barely managed to read a hundred pages.
Every sentence demanded her attention.
Some passages she read ten times.
Others she read fifteen times.
For particularly difficult sections, she returned to them again and again until the words no longer appeared as a meaningless arrangement of ancient characters.
Slowly, something remarkable began to happen.
At first, she could only understand the literal meaning.
Then she began to recognize the intention behind certain phrases.
After that came something even deeper.
She started to notice patterns, the rhythm of the language, the way one sentence answered another, the deliberate contrast between certain words, the subtle irony hidden behind respectful language and the indirect criticism concealed beneath praise.
Ancient Chinese literature rarely shouted its meaning directly.
Instead, it moved like water.
Mu Wanqing’s reading gradually slowed.
Not because she was becoming tired.
But because she had begun to enjoy it.
The more she understood, the more fascinating it became.
A passage that had appeared dry and complicated earlier now seemed entirely different.
She finally understood, the beauty of Chinese literature wasn’t on reading, it was about exploring deeper and deeper.
For example, in one of the chapter, the Tang minister once advised his emperor not to punish a disloyal general too quickly.
On her first read that morning, that was all it had been, a sentence, a fact, something to memorize and move past.
But now, reading again and again, she noticed something she hadn’t before.
The sentence didn’t say the minister was being kind.
It didn’t say he was being clever, either.
That was strange.
Why not just say it?
She read the next paragraph, where the emperor asked the minister why patience was wiser than punishment.
The minister’s answer was short, barely two lines.
“A wound closed too early festers beneath the skin.” Nothing more.
No explanation of what he meant by wound, or skin, or festering.
The book simply moved on, as if the reader was expected to already understand.
And then, slowly, it came to her, not as an idea, but almost as a feeling.
The minister wasn’t talking about wounds at all.
He meant that if the emperor punished the general too fast, out in the open, other generals loyal to him would panic and rebel before the emperor was ready to deal with them.
Better to let the wound seem healed on the surface, while quietly preparing underneath, than to tear it open too soon and bleed everywhere at once.
The book had never said any of that.
It hadn’t needed to.
The sentence itself was built to be understood only by someone willing to sit with it, turn it over, and ask, why a wise man would compare politics to a wound in the first place.
She thought of old man’s words.
“Sentences do not sit flat on the page like dead things. They rise and breathe.”
For the first time, she understood what that actually meant.
It wasn’t about grammar.
It was about trust, the writer trusted the reader to do half the work.
A weak writer explained everything, spelled it all out, left nothing for the reader to find on their own.
But a truly skilled one only opened a door partway, and expected the reader to walk through it themselves.
If you couldn’t, the words simply stayed shut to you, page after page, no matter how many times you read them.
She turned the page and kept going.
Further in, she came across a poem quoted inside the political text, just four lines, tucked between two paragraphs of advice, seemingly unrelated.
A poem about geese flying south before winter.
On the surface, it was simply a poem about geese.
But why would a book about court politics quote a poem about geese?
She stopped, closed her eyes, and thought about it the way the old man had told her, not skimming past it, not treating it as decoration, but asking why it had survived, why anyone had bothered to remember it at all.
Geese flew south together, in formation, each one taking its turn at the front where the wind resistance was strongest, so that no single goose grew too exhausted carrying the whole flock.
Then it hit her, this wasn’t a poem about birds.
It was advice, disguised as nature, about how a court should function.
No single official should hold all the burden alone.
Power should rotate, responsibility should be shared, or the whole formation would fall out of the sky together.
Mu Wanqing sat very still for a moment, her fingers resting lightly on the page as she murmured, “Phrases are not collected like trinkets to impress the ignorant. They are inherited.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
She understood now why that image of geese had lasted a thousand years, copied from book to book, quoted by minister after minister.
It wasn’t because it sounded pretty.
It was because it worked, because it let people say something dangerous, something a little too honest to say directly to an emperor’s face, without ever actually saying it.
On the other hand, old master remained seated at his table.
At some point, he stopped painting.
His brush rested silently beside the inkstone.
He slowly lifted his eyes and looked toward Mu Wanqing.
The young girl was completely absorbed in the book before her.
Her brows occasionally furrowed in concentration.
Sometimes her eyes brightened slightly, as if she had discovered something unexpected.
At other times, she would return to an earlier paragraph and read it again, comparing it with the passage before her.
She was no longer reading merely to finish.
She was searching.
And that made the old man’s gaze softened almost imperceptibly.
The old master picked up his brush again.
A faint, almost invisible smile appeared beneath his beard.
At last, the little girl had stopped asking how quickly she could reach the destination.
She had finally begun to look at the road beneath her feet.
Days passed without her noticing.
By the time she reached the last chapter of the last book, something inside her had changed completely.
She no longer needed to read a line twenty times to find its shape.
Ten times became five.
Five became two.
And on some lines, simple ones.
It wasn’t that the words had changed, she had.
She finally found the beauty in the Chinese literature.
A faint smile lingered on Mu Wanqing’s lips as she slowly closed the book.
“How was the experience?”
Mu Wanqing was startled.
She immediately looked up.
At some point, the old man had moved from his previous position and was now seated across from her at the stone table.
A book rested casually in his hand, while his other hand lay beside a small porcelain teapot.
Mu Wanqing had been so absorbed in her reading that she had not even noticed him approaching.
She quickly composed herself and sat upright, “Master,” she said respectfully, a genuine smile appearing on her face, “it was incredible. Thank you very much.”
The old man studied her for a moment before giving a faint nod.
Without saying anything, he placed his book aside and pushed a steaming cup of tea toward her.
The delicate fragrance of the tea immediately drifted through the quiet courtyard.
Mu Wanqing looked at the cup with some hesitation.
Although she had spent considerable time inside the Virtual Mastery Room, one question had never truly occurred to her before.
Could she actually taste something here?
The old man seemed to understand her thoughts immediately, “You may drink it,” he said calmly.
“Although this is a virtual space, your consciousness can still experience what is created within it. Taste, smell, touch, none of them are meaningless here.”
Mu Wanqing’s eyes brightened slightly.
She nodded and carefully accepted the porcelain cup with both hands, “Thank you, Master.”
The old man lifted his own cup and took an unhurried sip.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Finally, the old man placed his cup down, “What have you learned?”
Mu Wanqing lowered her gaze toward the tea in her hands, “I think I finally understand something. Chinese literature rarely tells you everything directly. It trusts the reader to discover the meaning for themselves. The same page may mean nothing to someone who reads carelessly, yet mean everything to someone who has lived long enough to recognize their own life within those words.”
Her voice gradually became steadier, “The writer deliberately leaves spaces behind the words. Spaces for the reader to fill with their own experiences, their scars, their regrets, and the things they have understood but never spoken aloud.”
For the first time, a clear expression of satisfaction appeared in the old man’s eyes.
He nodded slowly, “You have learned through experience.”
Mu Wanqing froze slightly.
The old man had not asked her a question.
He had made a statement.
It was as though he already knew.
Old man continued, “Literature is ultimately about understanding. It is about catching the meaning hidden within words and connecting it with your own understanding. This principle does not belong only to classical literature. It applies to modern literature, prose, poetry, essays, and even the simplest passages you encounter in your textbooks.”
Mu Wanqing listened attentively.
“When a true scholar asks you a question,” the old man continued, “he is not searching for a lifeless answer copied from a guidebook. In the college entrance examination, when an evaluator reads your answer, there are several things they observe First, whether you possess the presence of mind to understand what the question is truly asking. Second, whether you have genuinely understood the text, and finally your own interpretation. Your interpretation matters. Of course, it must be rooted in the text. You cannot look at a willow tree and insist that the author was writing about the moon merely because you wish it to be so.”
Mu Wanqing could not help but laugh softly.
The old man’s lips curved almost imperceptibly, “But within the boundaries of understanding, literature allows thought. It allows different people to see different things. That is why two students may read the same passage and write entirely different answers, yet both may be correct.”
Mu Wanqing slowly nodded.
She finally understood what he had been trying to teach her from the beginning.
It was not simply about memorizing beautiful phrases.
It was not about stuffing her essays with difficult idioms or reciting model answers until she could reproduce them word for word.
It was about learning how to think.
The old man looked directly at her, “So now, do you understand what you must do?”
Mu Wanqing’s expression became serious, “Yes, Master.”
She finally understood.
She had to stop treating Chinese as a subject that could be conquered through memorization alone.
She needed to read and understand.
After finishing her tea, Mu Wanqing immediately retrieved the Chinese literature textbooks she had brought into the Virtual Mastery Room.
She opened the first book.
This time, however, she was no longer alone.
The old man did not disappear into another corner of the courtyard and leave her to struggle through the books by herself.
Instead, he remained beside her.
Sometimes he would ask her about a particular paragraph.
Sometimes he would deliberately interpret a sentence in an unreasonable manner and wait to see whether she would blindly agree with him.
At other times, he would say nothing at all.
Those silent moments became lessons of their own.
“Master,” Mu Wanqing asked once after reading a passage several times, “I understand what the author is saying, but why do I still feel that my answer is shallow?”
The old man glanced at her, “Because understanding the words and understanding the world are not always the same thing.”
Mu Wanqing frowned.
The old man continued, “A person who has only seen rain from beneath a roof cannot write about a storm in the same way as someone who has crossed a mountain in one.”
Mu Wanqing fell silent.
Then she lowered her head and continued reading.
Slowly, she began discussing the chapters with him.
They would exchange interpretations, question each other’s reasoning, and sometimes arrive at completely different conclusions.
Through those conversations, Mu Wanqing gradually discovered something that both impressed and frustrated her.
Although her understanding had improved dramatically, her perspective was still far from that of a true scholar.
The old man could see ten layers of meaning where she could only see three.
Sometimes, a sentence she considered simple would lead him into an explanation involving history, philosophy, ancient customs, and the author’s social circumstances.
Mu Wanqing did not become discouraged.
On the contrary, the more she realized how much she did not know, the more determined she became.
The old man also began deliberately challenging her.
He would twist his questions, change the context, or ask her to express the same idea using different phrases.
At first, Mu Wanqing frequently fell into his traps.
But after being fooled several times, she finally learned to read every question carefully before answering.
Her training eventually moved beyond reading comprehension.
The old man began teaching her writing.
He explained how handwriting influenced the presentation of an examination paper, particularly in essay-based questions.
Mu Wanqing’s handwriting was already neat and elegant, but several characters lacked consistency.
The old man corrected them one by one.
He then taught her how to analyze essay topics, how to identify the heart of a subject, and how to build an argument that did not wander aimlessly from one idea to another.
He taught her when to use elegant language and when simplicity carried greater strength.
He taught her how to use idioms without making her writing sound like a collection of quotations from an old dictionary.
“Language exists to communicate,” he reminded her.
“If the reader spends more time admiring your vocabulary than understanding your meaning, then you have already failed.”
By the time Mu Wanqing finally completed her Chinese training, another full day and night had passed outside world.
When she returned to the real world, she immediately checked her progress, her eyes widened, 23%.
She was only two percent away from reaching another milestone.