After my brother left, I pulled the book I had found the day before in a niche in my room out of my sleeve and opened it.

Yesterday, the rabbits had been relatively unruly! They kept chasing each other. One of them kept jumping on a stone that was sticking out of the wall in one of the corners of the cave. He was squealing so much, that I finally went to see him. When he saw me coming, he sat down on his stone and the other one ran away. I bent down to pick him up. As I did so, I noticed that the stone was moving. I pressed on it and a wall swung around my chest, revealing a niche well hidden by the darkness.

I put the rabbit on my bed and with a candle, I leaned inside the niche. I discovered various objects including a book, a sword and a Qiankun purse. These items must have belonged to Lan Yi. Did I have the right to take them? I decided yes. Lan Yi was my ancestor. I'm sure she wouldn't mind. I went to sit on my bed.

The sword looked like Bichen. Maybe a little shorter. The hilt was made of very light jade with fine golden decorations. The hilt was also gold. The scabbard was made of white leather and translucent stone. I gently pulled it out of its case. Unlike Wei Ying's, it was not sealed. Perhaps I could handle it, if his guardian spirit allowed it. The Qin's had trusted me, so maybe the sword would do the same. Then I took the book and opened it...

In fact, it was not a book, but a diary. Lan Yi had shared in these pages a century of solitude and experience. She had developed the murderous rope. A variable that did not require dismantling the strings of the Qin, but using them on the instrument, together to intensify their power! The process was described with precision. She also mentioned, in detail, her sword training program. This diary was full of unorthodox ideas... quite similar to those of Wei Ying. Perhaps Lan Yi's thoughts would help me to understand why he had done this.

It all started after the cave of Mount Muxi and the turtle of carnage. Shortly after LianHua Wu, the cradle of the Yunmeng Jiang sect had been taken over by Wen Chao and Wen Zhu Liu. The clan leader and his wife had been killed. Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian were separated. Jiang Sheng told him that he and Wei Ying had planned that if they were separated, they should meet in a small town near Yiling. But Wei Ying never came. He had disappeared for three months. When he returned, he was different. What had happened during those three months? Where was he? He joked that he had found a cave with a book left by a great master... Wasn't that what was happening to me? Lan Yi had left a diary full of secrets that could help me become more powerful!

The Wen soldiers had said that they had thrown it into the Burial Ground, the place that would later become his domain! This Master, it could only be the one who had made Yin Iron absorb resentment energy: Xue Chonghai...

But why had Wei Ying abandoned the path of the sword for the path of resentment? Was it because he wanted, as he had said when he was a student at Yunshen Buzhi, to find an alternative to impossible problems? Had he chosen the ease of demonic cultivation over the long apprenticeship of the way of the sword? He had forsaken Siubian for Chenqing. Had he cultivated the flute in the heart of the Burial Ground during these three months of absence? Was she, too, in that cave with that famous book? Questions he would never have the answers to because the only one who knew them was no longer of this world.

He closed the newspaper ? It was getting late. It was time to play the question to the spirits. He put the newspaper, sword, and purse back in the niche and headed for the Guqin. Like every night, no spirit answered. He finally went to bed.

Like every night, dreams and nightmares alternated.

The next day he got up with the firm intention of beginning to study Lan Yi's diary. But first he had to meditate and went to kneel before the stone of the cold pool. This is how his brother found him when he came to bring him his meal.

Xichen had left. Lan Zhan had managed to tell him about his feelings for Wei Ying. Perhaps he would finally understand the torment he was in...

For now, he had to study the diary and tame the spirit of the sword to help him develop his Qi.

The next few years would be very interesting!

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)