It was a peculiar sensation. How did slumbering souls discern their dream state? Anji typically traversed dreams unaware until rousing from slumber. Yet, this day unfolded differently. The young princess held firm knowledge of her dream-bound state. Certainty enveloped her awareness.
"Where am I?" she tried to recall what she was doing before falling asleep but could not remember anything.
The dream world Anji found herself in was a vast expanse of darkness, like an endless pool of ink. It was disorienting, like being blindfolded in a pitch-black room. She couldn't tell if she was standing or floating, up or down. Everything was the same, and yet, everything was different.
Was this what Zhuangzi, the philosopher, meant in his poem of the Butterfly Dream?
Anji furrowed her brow, delving deep into the recesses of her memory in search of a poem her scholarly second brother once recited. Initially, she dismissed it as useless nonsense. Zhao Mingshen's discourse often veered into the realm of profundity, leaving practicality behind. He would do many strange things that martial artists and cultivators thought were excessive and unnecessary. After all, no cultivator was interested in writing poems. If they had to write, it would be a letter, report or cultivation manual.
Yet, Mingshen was a beacon of wisdom and sagacity in her eyes. He was the only person who took a two-year-old's request to study seriously and introduced Anji to the world of brushstrokes and characters. It was Mingshen who patiently guided her hand with a brush to teach her how to write her name. To teach Anji how to read, he spent many nights under the candlelight drawing pictures with their correlated words, binding them into a picture book so she could study easily when he was busy training during the day. Although they only had about an hour each day for a year, Mingshen taught Anji everything she knew about books. Unbeknownst to their parents, Mingshen was her first calligraphy and etiquette teacher, a bond as strong as the ink on the pages of their books.
While many children would falter at characters exceeding five strokes, Anji proved to be a quick study. After a good night's rest, she etched every word taught by Mingshen into her mind. After a year, she amassed enough knowledge to navigate the pages of a dictionary. Her brother was proud of her and deemed that Anji no longer needed his help. She was later permitted to spend most of her time alone in the library, which was exactly what Anji did.
In The Butterfly Dream, Anji recalls Mingshen explaining how fickle the line between reality and illusion is. On top of that, it was easy for many people to lose sight of who they were. Without a strong and clear identity, breaking out of an illusion was impossible. The word 'identity' originated from the phrase "I define my entity." Was this a trial?
Bored and miserable in this empty space without a sense of time, Anji decided to experiment. Perhaps she would wake up if she screamed loud enough or wriggled with all her might.
However, it did not matter how loudly she shouted or how vigorously she moved. Nothing changed. Anji had no idea how feeling tired while in a dream was still possible. However, she was exhausted from trying. The only thing left was waiting for her mother or someone else to rouse her from this strange dream world.
Relaxing utterly, Anji gave up and waited. She felt as if she was going crazy. However, after she stopped struggling in that silence, Anji finally picked up on something she had missed before while she was distracted by trying to find a way out.
There was a low humming sound coming from somewhere distant. At the same time, Anji felt sensations tingling all around her body. They were less itchy than when Yan Ping was checking her pulse. However, the places that tingled were similar to the places that itched. Finding something more interesting to do than wait around for someone to wake her up from this strange dream, Anji focused her attention on these minute sensations.
At first, nothing happened. The tingling sensations merely tickled. However, when Anji shifted her mind to pay attention to the tingling sensation in the middle of her forehead, the inky world of darkness suddenly burst into a world of lights.
Instead of getting blinded by the flashing colours of the rainbow that swirled together, Anji felt as if she were watching the coloured lights from at least three different angles. Her brain felt as if it would explode as it failed to keep up with the amount of information her eyes were capturing. The colours were familiar to Anji. They were the colours she normally saw around cultivators with her Heavenly Eyes.
This time, the colours were moving freely instead of surrounding a person. They sometimes mixed and turned into a different hue. Other times, a stronger colour would eat a fainter colour, replacing it entirely. There were no boundaries between these moving masses of colours.
Anji reached out to touch a sluggish ribbon of blue, but it quickly slithered around her arm, avoiding contact. Although there were finally lights in her world, Anji still could not grasp anything. There was nothing else she could do but watch these confusing colours do their thing, as she could not shut her eyes even if she wanted to.
"…ji", a familiar voice called out.
"Anji…" that sounded like a lady.
"Anji, wake up!"
Immediately, the colours vanished, and Anji screamed as she felt the sudden drop of gravity pull her downwards at the speed of light.
Snapping her eyes wide open with a strangled gasp, the young princess was finally back to the world of the living.
"Is Anji alright?" Zhao Wanting asked nervously, peering at her daughter, who was finally awake.
Confused about the situation, Anji looked at her mother. Then, she shifted her eyes to see Yan Ping sitting on her bed, checking her pulse again. Her father had knotted brows as he scanned her from head to toe.
"Her soul was spirited away," Yan Ping concluded after giving Anji a clean bill of health. "Has this happened before?"
Shaking her head, Wanting gently approached her daughter while Yan Ping talked to her father. Anji let her mother fuss over her for a while, still confused. She finally remembered what she had done earlier. After sitting still while the blind sect leader checked her pulse for an hour, they were going to have lunch and then nap. However, she must have fallen asleep before lunch because she was overly exhausted.
"Mother, I'm fine. Did we miss lunch?"
Judging by how the servants had lit the candles, Anji estimated that it was already past seven in the evening. However, when Wanting told her it was closer to ten at night, Anji baulked.
Grrr…
Before Anji could ask any questions, her stomach interrupted them.
"Let's get you some food first," Wanting smiled and hugged her daughter briefly before finding the servants.
Reeling from shock, Anji wondered if Yan Ping knew what was happening. If the Mystical Qilin sect leader was still awake after dinner, Anji had many questions to ask her.