Chapter 24 Cracks in the Pottery
It was two o'clock in the morning in the emergency room, and drizzling. Lin Xiaoman was dozing on the duty desk, and the tip of her nose was still stained with the sugar cane residue that Li Chengqian brought yesterday. The pottery shard in her pocket suddenly felt like it was thrown into a fire, and it burned her so much that she jumped up, and her white coat was almost burned with a hole. "What's wrong with you again?" She rubbed her hot palms and found that fine cracks appeared on the surface of the pottery shard, crawling like a spider web all over the three words "Xiaoman Shou".
In a flash of light and shadow, Li Chengqian fell to the ground. This time he didn't bring a carving knife, but he was holding half a burnt bamboo slip. "Jingyuan... Jingyuan is leaking!" He spoke with a gasp, and the Beidou birthmark on the side of his neck was three times brighter than usual. "The remaining pages of the "Time and Space Medical Classics" of the Imperial Hospital spontaneously combusted last night, and the ashes were full of these cracks!" He spread out his hands, and the lines in his palms were exactly the same as the cracks on the pottery shards.
Lin Xiaoman's heart skipped a beat, remembering the broken pottery jar she found at the Daming Palace site last week, which also had similar patterns on the inside. "Don't worry," she flipped through the archaeological photos on her phone, "Look, the group of 'Xiao Man Tang' pottery jars unearthed in modern times have all had this kind of cracks recently. Experts say it looks like they were burned by high temperatures." When Li Chengqian came closer, she smelled a strange herbal scent on him, not the wormwood scent of the Imperial Hospital, but rather the smell of rotten soil seeping out of the cracks in Jingyuan.
The door of the emergency room was pushed open, and intern Xiao Chen helped a trembling old lady in, the old lady holding a pottery jar wrapped in red cloth in her arms. "Doctor, this jar was left by my ancestors," the old lady's hands were shaking badly, "I always hear someone talking inside at night, like calling 'Xiao Man'..." Lin Xiaoman lifted the red cloth, her pupils suddenly shrank - the cracks on the surface of the pottery jar matched the palm prints of Li Chengqian and the pottery fragments in her pocket, and there was a half double spiral pattern engraved on the mouth of the jar, which was the pattern of the Persian silver ring.
"Grandma, where did you get this jar?" Her voice trembled. The old lady pointed to the silver bracelet on her wrist, which was very similar to Lin Xiaoman's: "My ancestors said that this was left by a doctor named Lin during the Zhenguan period, and that someone would come to take it one day..." Before she finished speaking, the pottery jar suddenly buzzed, and blue light seeped out of the cracks, casting a distorted figure on the wall - it was clearly Li Tai who had disappeared for a long time!
Li Chengqian stood up suddenly, knocking over the medical record rack next to him: "It's the residual soul of Jingyuan! He is attached to the pottery jar!" He wanted to grab the pottery jar, but the blue light burned his arm, and the birthmark on the side of his neck dimmed instantly. Lin Xiaoman didn't care about being afraid, and took out a silver needle and stabbed it into the Hegu point on the old lady's wrist: "Grandma, you look at my silver needle, don't look at the jar!"
The blue light suddenly exploded, and the pottery jar fell to the ground. Lin Xiaoman picked up the fragments and found a line of very small words engraved on the inside: "Seven jars cracked, Jingyuan opened, twin blood, change time and space." This is Li Chengqian's handwriting, but it is three times more neat than usual, as if he carved it with all his strength. Her heart sank, and she remembered the "seven-hole pottery jar" mentioned by the Persian old man before his death. Could it be that the crack in front of her is the key to open Jingyuan?
"I'm sorry," Li Chengqian suddenly whispered, "Actually, last week in the Tang Dynasty, I found that all the 'Xiao Man Tang' pottery jars were leaking water, and the time and space picture reflected by the well water was getting more and more blurred…" He lifted his sleeves, and a purple scar appeared on his arm at some point, shaped like a crack in Jingyuan. "Doctor Zhang said that this is time and space rejecting outsiders. If this continues, I might…"
Before he finished speaking, the pottery shards became hot again, and this time the projection was not of the Tang Dynasty, but of a modern microbiology laboratory. Xiao Chen was yawning in front of a microscope, and the dysentery bacilli in the culture dish suddenly arranged into the words "Save me", and a figure in a Tang suit flashed in the background – not Li Chengqian, but Li Tai!
"He didn't disappear!" Lin Xiaoman grabbed Li Chengqian's hand, "The remnant of Jingyuan is attached to the modern pottery jar. No wonder there are always strange patients in the emergency room recently!" Li Chengqian's fingertips were cold, but he suddenly smiled: "Luckily you are here. Every time I make a mistake in carving and get into trouble, you can clean up the mess." He took out a newly carved pottery fragment, on which there were two little people holding hands, one holding a silver needle and the other holding a carving knife, and "Don't be afraid" was written crookedly next to it.
At five o'clock in the morning, the old lady finally fell asleep peacefully. The silver bracelet on her wrist was in Lin Xiaoman's hand at some point. She looked closely at the light and found that in addition to the winding branch pattern on the inside, there was also a line of almost invisible carvings: "When the cracks of the seven jars are connected to form the Big Dipper, use the twin blood to sacrifice Jingyuan - Li Chengqian's last words". The handwriting was very new, and it was clearly just carved, but Li Chengqian didn't touch her bracelet at all.
"Are you hiding something from me?" She turned around to ask, but found that Li Chengqian's figure was so transparent that she could see the IV stand behind him. He was still holding the half-burned bamboo slip in his hand, and the words "Twins disappear" could be vaguely seen on the remaining pages of the bamboo slip. "Let's talk about it tomorrow," he smiled and waved his hand, "I'll go back and teach Doctor Zhang how to make sugar toothpaste, so that he won't say that I wasted Persian sugar again..."
The moment the figure disappeared, Lin Xiaoman heard the cracking sound of the pottery. She spread her hands and found that the cracks actually extended into the shape of the Big Dipper, and the pottery fragment left by Li Chengqian, "Don't be afraid", was missing a corner at this moment, as if it was broken off by someone.
The rain outside the window turned into a rainstorm at some point, and the lights in the emergency room flickered in the rain. Lin Xiaoman touched the engraving on the inside of the silver bracelet, and suddenly remembered that Li Chengqian had been staring at her birthmark in a daze recently, that the cracks on the pottery jar he brought were getting deeper and deeper, and that Li Tai's sneer was getting clearer and clearer in the reflection of Jingyuan - these details that she ignored had long been woven into a net, waiting for her and Li Chengqian to drill into it.
The phone popped up a message from the archaeological team: "The latest test shows that the cracks of all the 'Xiao Mantang' pottery jars point to a certain coordinate of the Daming Palace. It is recommended to dig it immediately." In the accompanying picture, the pattern formed by the cracks on the satellite map is exactly the Beidou birthmark on the side of Li Chengqian's neck.
She suddenly realized that the so-called "life spirit" was never a lighthearted engraving joke. Those crooked engravings, hot pottery pieces, and breakfasts across time and space are all the ticking sounds of time and space counting down. And Li Chengqian's silly smile every time he engraved the wrong words might be to cover up the warning from Jingyuan - until today, the pottery pieces cracked into the Beidou, and the silver bracelet showed the last stroke, and he finally couldn't hide it.
At six in the morning, Lin Xiaoman stood in front of the window of the duty room, watching the dawn in the sky. The pottery in her pocket was no longer hot, but like a cold stone. She knew that the next time the pottery glowed, it might not be when Li Chengqian brought sesame cakes to make trouble, but when Jingyuan was completely cracked.
And the only thing she could do was to hold the missing "Don't be afraid" pottery tightly, waiting for the idiot who always carved the words crookedly to come back and chisel open this last and most dangerous crack in time and space with her.