inspire-indiana Chapter 217 The Hawk Accompanied by Qiu Xiaoyin
Chapter 217 The Hawk Accompanied by Qiu Xiaoyin
Qiu Rongmu listened with a smile as Xiao Si recounted the little baby they shared in a certain time and space, wondering to herself, "Why did the Arhats, who had already discerned that this tiger cub was a dragon bone and had already stood up, still call it a beggar bone from the emperor's mouth?"
In a humble courtyard on the banks of the Qiantang River, Qiu Xiaoyin, the transformed tiger cub, is fast asleep curled up in a pile of straw!
On the 23rd day of the first month of the seventh year of the Dahe reign of Emperor Wenzong of Tang, this cub, who should have been led back to the mountain by the tiger clan, was transformed into human form after his demon core was sealed due to the calamity of the death of both his parents.
Her biological father, Qiu Rongmu, died on the battlefield to protect the human race. Her mother, Xiao Si, exhausted her strength during childbirth. Before her death, she entrusted her swaddled tiger cub to others three times: a tea merchant from Yuhang, a weaver from Qiantang, and a hunter from Xincheng. However, each time, strange phenomena occurred on the night of the full moon, and the cub was eventually found by Qiu's grandmother.
Eighteen years have passed, and Qiu Xiaoyin, now a handsome young man, stands before the steps of the Prime Minister's residence in Jiangling. Winter snow covers the brocade-patterned swaddling cloth on his shoulders, the only keepsake left by his mother. As the Prime Minister's carriage passes by, he pushes open the window and sees the boy surrounded by faint tiger-striped clouds, startling him so much that he knocks over the gilded brazier.
"This boy must never pass the imperial examination..." the old prime minister muttered to himself, when suddenly the icicles on the eaves broke, narrowly avoiding the boy's head.
On the day the results were announced in Chang'an, Qiu Xiaoyin stared at the unfamiliar names on the yellow silk, her fingertips conjuring sharp claws from her sleeve.
As he turned to head north, the war drums on the walls of Tongzhou sounded without wind, and the bronze bells of the ancient temple in Xiazhou rang out in unison at midnight.
People say that the moonlight in the northern frontier that year was exceptionally cold, casting the boy's shadow long and elongated like a giant beast with glaring eyes and a white forehead.
The most mysterious of all is the old house in Yuhang.
Whenever Xiao Yin walked past the ancestral hall with a book in his hand, the wooden statue of the City God would creak.
Qiu Xiaoyin exclaimed, "Grandma, look! The Arhat has stood up!!"
The grandmother, however, could not see anything and became increasingly worried that her grandson might have suffered a mental breakdown from losing his parents when he was young.
To verify her grandson's destiny, the grandmother secretly placed silver scissors on the knees of the statue. When the boy passed by, there was a "clang," and the scissors fell to the ground and transformed into the shape of a white tiger's fangs.
Grandmother finally believed it; the child hadn't lied!
The thunder on the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month came strangely. When the Kitchen God went to heaven to report, he misheard the poem his grandmother was proud of every day, "After gathering nectar from a hundred flowers to make honey, for whom is the toil and for whom the sweetness?" as "Gathering a thousand fragrant petals, there is only desolation and sorrow."
The Jade Emperor was enraged and unleashed heavenly punishment, with thunderbolts from the nine heavens striking the "tiger bone".
The Thunder God and Lightning Goddess descended to earth to dismantle Qiu Xiaoyin's "tiger bones," and lightning flashed and thunder roared in the sky.
Seeing this, the grandmother hurriedly told Qiu Xiaoyin to bite the toilet seat.
As a result, Lei Gong stripped Qiu Xiaoyin of all his "tiger bones." Only because Lei Gong and Dian Mu were afraid of getting dirty, they spared his jawbone. Therefore, Qiu Xiaoyin was left with only his "imperial decree mouth," meaning whatever he said could come true.
In a panic, the grandmother pressed her grandson into the pickle jar, only to see purple lightning like chains binding the boy's bones.
When the clouds dispersed and the rain stopped, the boy who crawled out of the jar had pale lips, but his green eyes burned even brighter.
This Qiu Xiaoyin was neither as handsome as his father nor as stunning as his mother. Although he was a bit clumsy, he was ugly. Coupled with his arrogant personality and sharp, satirical writings, he offended many people in power. Despite his vast knowledge, he spent his whole life taking exams and never made it onto the list of successful candidates.
During the Xiantong era, the moonlight always seemed to shatter into shimmering tiger stripes on the surface of the Qiantang River.
Qiu Xiaoyin, wearing a worn-out blue robe, walked along the Qujiang River in Chang'an. The bamboo tube hanging from her waist was filled with "Ode to the Peony" composed in response to Luo Ye and "Manuscript of Burning Books" composed in response to Zhang Jiedou's poem.
When people refer to "Yin, Qiu, and Ye" as the three sons, they often make a connection—saying that at the Xingyuan banquet on the day Linghu Gao passed the imperial examination, Qiu Xiaoyin wrote "He Xin Liu" with a flourish of his brush, which attracted the swallows that had just built their nest under the eaves of the Prime Minister's mansion to carry the still-wet ink poem straight into the Daming Palace.
"Everyone says it's a joyous occasion that my son has passed the imperial examination," Linghu Tao sighed to the assembled guests, stroking the scroll of poems. "Little do they know that the ink marks on this scroll are worth more than three hundred books of names inscribed in vermilion ink at the Qionglin Banquet." The candlelight in the hall flickered like the low growls of tigers, startling the peony planted by Wen Tingyun on the table, which unexpectedly bloomed with golden stamens in late autumn.
However, the imperial examination was ultimately a broken string hanging in Qiu Xiaoyin's fate.
Before the jade examination table, where he had failed ten times in his examinations, he often gazed in a daze at the mythical beasts crouching on the eaves of the examination hall—those stone dragon sons always seemed to conjure up the image of a striped tiger's tail in the rain and mist. Until one eve of the Frost's Descent, he lost his way home deep in the Zhongnan Mountains, and suddenly saw clouds and mist undulating like the back of a white tiger. Following the tiger-striped mountain path to its end, he found a dilapidated temple breathing in the moonlight of a thousand years ago.
The tiger statue in front of the shrine has an amber inlay in its left eye, but its right eye is as empty as a dry well.
When Qiu Xiaoyin touched the missing eye socket with his fingertips, the entire mountain range suddenly turned transparent. He saw an old woman crying on a cracked field ridge a hundred miles away, saw black mist swirling in the throat of an infant crying from disease, and saw dark currents gurgling deep within the earth's veins like the roar of a tiger and the cry of a dragon. As the amber eyeball rolled into his palm, he heard a crisp sound, like bamboo joints growing, burst from his spine.
That year, a severe drought struck Jiangnan. Qiu Xiaoyin, standing on the cracked riverbed, suddenly spoke: "Three zhang below lies dragon's saliva." When his hoe pierced through the rock, the people saw not a clear spring, but a severed bronze dragon vein—the water seeping from the dragon's horns carried the sweet, pungent scent of tiger milk. During a time of rampant disease, he walked barefoot into the miasma-ridden land, his hair disheveled. Wherever he went, poisonous insects fell to the ground like rain. The herbs he collected, when boiled into a medicinal soup, were said by the patients to smell the scent of a tiger cub sleeping soundly with its head resting on pine needles.
The strangest thing was that on one Ghost Festival night, the Qiantang River tide suddenly transformed into a gigantic beast with piercing eyes and a white forehead, rushing towards the embankment. Qiu Xiaoyin stood alone on the city wall and roared, his voice condensing into a semi-transparent tiger shape that tore at the tide demon. As the moon set, the people saw him standing in the dilapidated Wanghai Pavilion, his robes covered in seaweed, clutching a piece of the tide demon's still-beating heart in his hand, like holding a restless amber chess piece.
From then on, storytellers in teahouses would always strike their gavel: "Speaking of Qiu Xiaolang, he was originally the Green Tiger Attendant of the God of Literature—" And mothers in the deep alleys would softly sing to their children: "Don't cry, don't make a fuss, Qiu Xiaolang is watching." What they didn't know was that every prayer would condense into frost on Qiu Xiaoyin's temples that would never melt away on Zhongnan Mountain.
He said, "The jar is about to break!!" The three-inch-thick earthenware jar shattered into dust in response; then he said, "The rice should be full!!" Suddenly, the fragrance of grains wafted from the empty jar in the corner.
From then on, the people of Qiantang all said: "Qiu Lang's words are like gold, and the law follows his every word."
The little ox missed the tiger cub, and when it transformed into a blue owl, liquid would always seep from its right ear on the night of the full moon.
The old wound pierced by the tiger's tooth was bandaged by Sanlangjun himself. His fingertips were covered with Kunlun snow, but he couldn't stop the demonic poison surging in the little ox's ear cartilage.
At that moment, as the rat demon's throat burst under the silver blade and bat blood splattered onto its eyebrows, the little rhinoceros heard the sound of tearing silk coming from the southeast branch of the thousand-year-old camphor tree.
Sanlangjun is trying to break through the fog barrier I set up again—ever since he was cursed with the bone-corroding curse, he has to drink Zijiao's heart's blood every new moon night to relieve his pain.
"Your falcon-beak dagger is stained with the mist of Yunmeng Marsh," a veiled cultivator in the teahouse suddenly spoke, his cuffs embroidered with the fangs of the Demon King's Palace in gold thread. "Can you smell the subtle fragrance of datura in the rat's blood?"
Xiao Si swiftly plunged the dagger into his throat, but the poisoned hidden arrow froze the moment it was released from the bow.
The scar on his right ear throbbed, and the mournful cry of a young tiger came from three hundred miles away—it was the same cry that Qiu Rongmu made three years ago when he shielded Xiao Si from the heavenly lightning, through the rain.
This tiger cub was none other than Qiu Xiaoyin. He was precocious and literate, and with lofty aspirations, concern for current affairs, eloquence, and debating skills, he was truly "a man of letters at a young age, who could hear the cries of deer in this place."
However, his period of free life without his parents fostered his unrestrained and wild personality.
His distinctive features included "using emotions to satirize the times and observing things to offer advice and remonstrance."
Xiao Si only just discovered that if Qiu Xiaoyin lived in modern times, she would definitely be the undisputed queen of stand-up comedy.
His unique "three-piece set of thorny literature" emphasizes that emotions must be expressed through thorns. In the context of that time and space, it means: Today everyone is emo, but I not only want everyone to be emo, but I also want to create a wave of public opinion with the awareness of keyboard warriors!
While others write poetry with lines like "Ah, the ocean, it's all water," he brings his own built-in commentary: "The higher-ups have made another mistake today!"
Xiao Si discovered that even the reporters from Han Yuefu who covered social news were impressed by this tiger cub. This guy had turned the poem into an ancient version of "1818 Golden Eye," with the aim of "focusing on people's livelihood and serving the people." He looked at the people through the eyes of the people and had zero-distance contact with them. He was just short of typing "Qiu Xiaohu is moved only by you" on the bamboo slips.
While others were still in the early stages of "expressing one's aspirations through objects," Qiu Xiaoyin went straight to eight-times magnification mode. The peonies he wrote about weren't peonies, but rather receipts for lavish meals paid for with public funds; the hunting grounds he depicted weren't hunting grounds, but rather the overtime work scenes of modern-day corporate slaves.
This Qiu Xiaolang can be described as a master of sarcasm in this time and space. On the surface, he writes "The Imperial Garden is really beautiful," but the subtext is "Your Majesty, do these flowers look like the tax silver that has been plundered is burning?"
Little Si's friendly reminder to Brother Wood: Qiu Xiaoyin's poetry has a sharp edge; it's recommended to eat it with avocado. And please don't drink tomato juice while watching, to avoid spitting out laughter. After all, our Little Tiger is putting his life on the line—writing the harshest advice and getting the most hair transplants!
Looking again at the seventh branch of the ancient camphor tree, Sanlangjun's white robes were soaked in blood.
The demon-binding lock on his wrist had been broken, and the purple lines of the Bone-Corroding Curse climbed up his neck to the corners of his eyes, reflecting the cinnabar mole on Xiao Si's forehead. It turned into a faded red thread that suddenly straightened and cut into the wound left when Xiao Si had his core removed three years ago.
“Qingxiao.” His bloodstained fingertips traced the little tiger’s trembling earlobe, the golden water incantation flowing in his palm. “You hunt demonic beasts every night for their blood, truly only to subdue that little tiger cub?”
At that moment, the thunderstorm cleaved through the fog, and the sound of an eggshell cracking came from the third locust wood coffin.
The three blue eggs simultaneously emitted a ghostly light, illuminating the tiger-striped infant curled up inside the coffin—their golden eyes on their foreheads were exactly like those of the little rhinoceros that had carried Qiu Xiaoyin by the scruff of her neck and run under the moonlight years ago.
"Back then, you sacrificed your life force to save the tiger cub, and now the tiger demon has transformed into a hawk." He coughed up blood as he pushed the little rhinoceros into the seventh-level tree hollow, frost forming on his brows and eyelashes. "This time, it's my turn to pay the debt."
The torrential rain lashed the treetops, but the little rhinoceros remained curled up in the cave, clutching the last green egg.
Fine ice crystals floated in the cold mist surrounding Sanlangjun, each one reflecting the past—the rhinoceros horn that exploded when Xiaosi shielded me from the heavenly tribulation three hundred years ago, and the heart of the hundredth ox that I personally dug out three days ago to feed this hawk!
The red rope suddenly snapped into the shape of a tiger's tooth and fell into the crack of the green egg. A baby's hand emerged from the eggshell, and a young tiger's clear roar echoed amidst the thunder, piercing through three hundred years of time, finally resonating with the old wound in the little rhinoceros's ear to complete the cycle of reincarnation.
"Chili sauce?? Chili sauce is so delicious!!"
You mean Jiang Jiao?
"Well, it's not like he went out hunting and was stopped by a monk begging for alms. He was kind and gave him some food he had prepared for hunting. After the monk thanked him, he left a piece of silk with a few words on it..."
"The real one?"
"Yes, meeting the real person brings wealth and honor!"
Sanlangjun simply shook his head and smiled.
Because he was also hunting, the hawk on his shoulder was so cool—its iris was golden yellow; its upper beak was black with a leaden blue base, its cere was yellowish-green, and its tarsi were covered with shield-like scales…