Painter

Chapter 174 23: Shocked
The girl upstairs overlooks the scene in the garden. In the abandoned garden, the white cat is still chasing the crow.

After the snow stopped, the weather became colder, and it seemed to be keeping warm by this. Sometimes it stepped on the thin snow along the tiles, sometimes it broke the branches of Sophora japonica, and it even crushed the stalk of a freshly transplanted Lingxiao flower in the flower garden.

The white cat has a kind of stubborn curiosity, but it can always advance and retreat. For example, at this time, it made the crow restless, as if it wanted to force this silent guy to cry before it would stop.But when the crow was annoyed and stopped on the branch, and there was a sign of opening, the white cat ran away and watched from a distance. When the crow calmed down, it stuck to it like brown sugar.

After making such a fuss for a while, finally, the crow could not bear the disturbance and flew out of the yard, and the white cat stopped victoriously, and stood on the ridge of the roof, facing the waning moon that had just appeared between the buildings, shaking its white fur, majestic like a lion.

It watched the crow fly over the courtyard wall, and flew to the archway to the east of Guangzhaifang through the gaps among the branches of locust trees. It was about to make fun of it. Looking high up, a distant light was reflected in the green eyes.

Then, it jumped off the roof.

In the room, the rooster stands alone in front of the table, crowned with bright candles, and the young man is wearing a black shirt and narrow shirt. He is drawing on the paper. He is preparing to draw a picture of a new garden with fine snow, but he has not yet finished writing.The drumming of Qiaolou came from outside, startling a few shadows under the moon, but the rooster remained motionless, its eyes rolling, as if thinking about how long it would take before it crowed.

The white cat rushed in through the window with the cold wind, and shouted: "Ah Lang, no, no!"

"how?"

"Come here!"

After the white cat stayed briefly, it left the window and jumped up to the eaves.

The young man put down his pen and walked out of the study.

On the roof, the white cat looked up.

To the west of Guangzhaifang, there are row upon row of Yunqiao Feilou, and the lights are flourishing.

The lights come from residential houses, Goulan cottages and restaurants, separated by paper windows.Outsiders can't see whether it is a wealthy guest with a singing girl, a scholar who reads at night, or a woman who weaves chicken crowing cloth, and the people in the window don't care about the genggu and night walkers outside.

At the beginning of the long night, the stars in the sky seem to be very close to each other, but they hardly meet, and most of the lights between the buildings are the same.

There was a window under the eaves of the tall building in Fengchen General's Mansion, and a girl in white was holding her chin in the window.

The windows on the tall building were open among the lights, and the abandoned garden below was shrouded in the night. They were quite far apart, and the two happened to be looking at each other.

The black-clothed young man downstairs was a little surprised, and the white-clothed girl upstairs was also slightly taken aback.

Immediately afterwards, she closed the window, and he looked at the closed casement for a while before returning to the room.

Chi Chi, the bells and drums stopped at this time, and the startled shadow passed by the lights between the windows and the waning moon, and disappeared into the distant night.

……

The girl closed the window, and there was a sound of footsteps in the building, accompanied by a crisp call.

"Little lady, little lady!"

The maid went upstairs with the wooden box in her arms and saw that the girl happened to put the window rod on the window sill. She asked curiously, "Little lady, how is the abandoned garden? Does it look good?"

In the garden, only four tiled houses with hard hilltops were built, and there were no other additional decorations. The chess pavilion was only cleared of wisteria, and the dry pond was seen again after the weeds were removed, but it was still not filled with water.It's beautiful, but this garden is really impressive, and the people living in it are actually helpers and non-humans.

"Little lady, what do you see?" Seeing the girl's strange expression, the maid asked curiously, and put the wooden box on the table.

"A whole garden of ghosts."

The girl looked dignified.

The servant girl froze and showed a terrified expression, the girl stopped teasing her and smiled slightly: "Probably some wild gods, spirits, spirits, etc."

The maid was relieved now, she heard that the non-humans in this world, the evils are demons and ghosts, most of them are horrifying, cruel and vicious, but those who do not harm others, those who are subdued by the immortal family are wild gods, Essence, spirit.

"Little lady, you know how to scare me." The maid complained, and looked at the window again, "Can I have a look?"

"Look at it if you're not afraid," the girl said.

Fearful and curious, the maid pushed open a window, carefully looked outside with one eye, looked through the night, and saw the abandoned garden, in the faint night mist, the outlines of the walls and houses were faint.She looked hard for a while, but finally saw nothing.

Although she couldn't see those wild gods and spirits, the servant girl did not suspect that the girl had lied to her.The little lady has the blood of the ancient Tianshui clan. Legend has it that the Shui clan's magic power reached the sky that day, and the pair of dragon eyes were bigger than a lantern, and they were astonishingly bright. According to storytellers, they were called "Ming and Sun and Moon".There are also rumors that when Tianshui's eyes are open, the sky is bright, and when they are closed, it is dark.Although the little lady's eyes are not so strange, but when she was eight years old, her eyesight was comparable to that of Liu Xiaowei, who had trained his eyes for ten years in Fengchen Weizhong.Once, at the Yujing Lantern Festival, the little lady was on the Yunqiao, and after a few squares, she saw a Wanyanluo in the street. She said that the poem written on the lantern had some meaning.With this vision, she can naturally see things that ordinary people cannot see.

"I didn't see it." The maid sighed softly and closed the window, "Little lady, look what I brought."

She rummaged through the wooden box and found some items, such as a peach wood dagger, scribbled talismans, embroidered handkerchiefs with messy stitches, immature calligraphy... Among the many sundries, there was a painting of the abandoned garden.

The girl looked over one by one. These childhood things were kept in a silverfish-proof peachwood box blessed with spirituality, and they didn't look like old things.She picked up the painting in the abandoned garden, the workmanship was extremely poor, and the brushstrokes were obedient and simple, so it was a little cute.

She looked at it for a while, thinking about the scenery outside the window just now, called the maidservant to bring a brush and ink painting, spread out a Guling Qingxuan, and drew the cloud bridge and flying tower, and then drew the wall, Dry pools, old locust trees, thin snow, tiled houses, night fog, dark lights, ghost shadows.Finally, under the eaves, paint with thick ink to outline a faint black shadow.

……

Outside the study room in the abandoned garden, the white cat wandered between the beams, preaching how it had done, and finally made the crow, which was hard to open, recognize its elder brother and worshiped the mountain.The crow perched on the locust tree branch and was stared at by all the demons, but unable to argue, it flew into the house angrily and pecked at the back of the white cat's head.The white cat avoids it deftly, and at the same time says that the crow did not do well, attracting outsiders to peep, but he finds out in time, calls out A Lang, and saves the building from falling.

In the study, the rooster holding the candle listened carefully to the bustle outside. Under the candlelight, the young man completed the unfinished picture of the new garden in the snow.

He thought for a while, and then in the blank space left by the jade version, on the east side of the new garden, he painted with ink the Cloud Bridge Flying Tower and the Moonlight Shocking Hong.And use orpiment to light up the prosperous lights.The tallest one among the heavy buildings, the eaves hook the waning moon.He dipped some blended clam powder with a pen, and drew a blurred white shadow.

(End of this chapter)