Poor but talented scholar

Chapter 42 Rhythm

This lesson completely ignited the students' passion for words.

After class, instead of chasing and playing around, students gathered in small groups to play matching games.

"I'll play a pair of 'main roads'!"

"My feelings about 'Long Sky'"

"I'll give you a tough one: 'Red Flower'."

"Hey, then I'll play the 'green leaf,' isn't that easy?"

Lu Chuan sat by the window, listening to the innocent responses, but his pen remained steady.

He opened the book "Primer of Prosody" and began studying it page by page, starting with "clouds against rain, snow against wind".

He discovered that these seemingly simple couplets actually encompassed all the names of astronomy, geography, flowers and trees, birds and animals.

The willow trees outside the study swayed in the wind, and occasionally a few willow catkins flew into the window.

Lu Chuan reached out and caught a piece, the tonal patterns the teacher had just taught him flashing through his mind, and muttered to himself:

"Willow catkins fly, pear blossoms fall." The tones and rhymes match, and the parts of speech are correct.

The willow catkins twirled slightly on my fingertips before drifting with the wind onto the still-wet ink on the writing paper.

Looking at the tiny white fluff, Lu Chuan gained a deeper understanding of the word "belonging" and "pair".

Master Zhao taught not just the juxtaposition of two words, but an aesthetic appreciation of symmetry.

In this small schoolhouse, these children experienced the beauty of words for the first time through "heaven against earth" and "rain against wind".

Lu Chuan lowered his head and continued to dissect the sentences in "The Primer of Prosody" on the paper.

"A single word in a couplet forms the skeleton; two words form the flesh and blood; three words form the spirit."

He recited it silently while quickly scribbling down tones and rhymes on the paper.

The excitement behind them continued.

Some people shouted at their deskmates, "I'll give you a four-character 'Spring Mountains are Like a Painting'!"

The classmate scratched his head for a long time before finally managing to utter, "Summer water...summer water is like soup."

Another burst of laughter erupted in the schoolhouse.

Master Zhao appeared at the back door at some point. Listening to the somewhat naive and even comical exchange, he stroked his beard, his eyes filled with satisfaction.

He didn't go inside to disturb them, but quietly watched for a while before turning and heading towards the library.

That night, the lights in the dormitories of the school gradually went out.

Lu Chuan, however, still used the dim oil lamp in the corridor to spread his book on his lap.

He discovered that "The Primer of Prosody" was not just a reference book, but more like a set of rules.

"The river faces the Han River, green faces red. Rain-bathed, the rouge is full, and the fragrance is heavy with butterfly powder."

Lu Chuan recited this line repeatedly, and he began to try to imitate this structure.

Before, he saw mountains as mountains and water as water. But now, when he looks at the overlapping shadows of trees outside the window, the phrase "slanting shadows of trees" automatically comes to mind, and he subconsciously tries to find a matching phrase like "shallow moonlight".

The next morning, Lu Chuan was the first to arrive at the study, as usual.

Instead of immediately copying the calligraphy, he wrote down several couplets he had come up with the day before on the sand table.

Just then, Master Zhao walked in carrying a thick stack of documents and saw the words on the sand table.

"The morning bell tolls against the moon's shadow, the evening drum calls forth the starlight." Master Zhao recited softly, a hint of amazement flashing in his eyes. "Chuan'er, is this what you were thinking last night?"

Lu Chuan quickly stood up and bowed: "Teacher, I just heard the school bell last night and made up this random sound. Please forgive me."

"No, it's perfectly matched." Master Zhao walked to the sand table and examined it carefully. "'Morning' matches 'dusk,' the flow of time; 'bell' matches 'drum,' the echo of metal and stone. The most wonderful thing is the verbs 'knock' and 'call,' which give life to inanimate objects. It seems that your understanding of the principles of phonetics far surpasses that of your peers."

Master Zhao put down the dossier, took out a slightly worn booklet from his bosom, and handed it to Lu Chuan.

"This is a record of my travels from years ago, titled 'Dialogues at Suiyuan Garden,' which contains some strange and ingenious fragments of couplets. Take it and study it; if you can decipher even one or two of them, it will greatly benefit your future policy writing."

For the next few days, Lu Chuan almost forgot to eat and sleep.

The couplets in that book, *Suiyuan Dialogues*, are indeed tricky. Some emphasize "homophones with different characters," while others emphasize "character splitting and recombination."

For example, one of the incomplete couplets is: "Lonely and cold window, empty and widowed."

Lu Chuan stared at these seven characters for an entire afternoon. All seven characters were composed of the radical for "roof" (宀), conveying a desolate and serene atmosphere while possessing an extremely rigorous structure. He sat on a stone bench in the courtyard, watching the setting sun cast long, thin shadows of the trees, countless words rapidly forming in his mind.

He thought of the plants and trees in the mountains, the stove fire in the farmhouse, and the writing brushes and ink in the school.

Suddenly, a gust of wind blew by, rustling the green willows by the pond.

Lu Chuan had a flash of inspiration and wrote on the paper:

"A handsome young woman and a beautiful girl exchange affections."

All seven characters contain the radical for "person" (亻), and "handsome" (俊俏) is paired with "lonely" (寂寞), "beautiful woman" (佳人) with "cold window" (寒窗), and "to convey affection" (传情) with "widow" (守寡). Although the imagery is somewhat light and ethereal, the structure is perfectly matched.

After he finished writing, he let out a long sigh of relief.

Lu Chuan's skill in parallelism quickly spread throughout Class C.

During lunch break that day, several students who usually considered themselves somewhat talented carried a small wooden board and gathered around Lu Chuan's seat.

"Lu Chuan, everyone says you're unparalleled in your couplets. We came up with a perfect match yesterday. Do you dare to take it?" The leader was a boy from a small, wealthy family in the county town named Zhou Zijing.

Lu Chuan put down his book and smiled slightly: "Brother Zhou, please give us a question so we can discuss it together."

Zhou Zijing proudly wrote five characters on the wooden board: "The moon is like gold in the water".

This question seems simple, but it actually contains metaphors of color and texture, and has excellent tonal patterns and rhymes.

The students around began to whisper among themselves: "'The sun in the sky is like fire'?"

"It's too cliché, there's nothing new about it."

"A flower reflected in a mirror is as beautiful as jade?"

"The tones seem a bit off."

Lu Chuan looked at the five characters, tapped his fingertips lightly on the table, and turned his gaze to a rockery outside the school building.

A sparrow was pecking at food under the artificial hill, stirring up a cloud of dust.

He picked up his pen and wrote at the bottom of the wooden board:

"The clouds on the mountaintop are like cotton wool."

"Excellent!" "'Moon' against 'cloud,' 'gold' against 'floss,' absolutely brilliant!"

Zhou Zijing was taken aback for a moment, then bowed respectfully, saying, "Brother Lu is quick-witted; I have learned a great deal from you."

As Lu Chuan delved deeper into the study of genus pairs, he discovered that this training was subtly changing his thinking habits.

When he writes now, he no longer piles up fancy words, but pays more attention to the balance of sentence structure and the coherence of tone.

After writing each sentence, he would subconsciously review it in his mind: Is the part of speech accurate? Is the tone harmonious? Is the logic sound?

This habit, when reflected in his calligraphy, has made his characters more rigorous and dignified.

Two weeks later, in the ten-day examination, Lu Chuan received "excellent" grades for both his classical texts and his couplets.

When Master Zhao was giving his comments, he specially posted Lu Chuan's paper on the screen wall of his study.

He pointed to Lu Chuan's clever couplets and said to the whole class:

"Look at Lu Chuan's reply; its value lies in the word 'steadiness.' It doesn't seek eccentricity, but rather neatness. This is the attitude towards scholarship. In the art of writing, rules are paramount, followed by embellishment. Once the rules are established, the writing will naturally have its grandeur."

Lu Chuan sat in his seat, tidying up his desk. He knew that this was just the most basic stepping stone on the road to the imperial examinations.