A master of both medicine and martial arts, he picked up a beautiful CEO as his wife.

Chapter 250 Jade Balance Gate

A fire was lit at the salt field that night.

The fire was started by the people on the other side of Yuheng Gate. They put away the small lanterns, carried a bundle of dry firewood from the embankment of the salt fields, and set it up to burn by the pit.

Two groups of people sat down around the fire. One group had a dozen or so people, and the other had eight.

All eight of them were women.

They ranged in age from their early twenties to over sixty. They all wore the same clothes—coarse indigo cloth, short jackets, trousers with the cuffs tied, and rubber-soled shoes suitable for swimming. Each person had a rope tied around their waist, with a small gourd hanging from the rope.

Ye Feng later learned what was in the gourd. It wasn't water.

It's a little bit of mud brought up from the seabed every time I look away. I collect a small handful each time, put it in a gourd, and carry it with me.

That's how they keep accounts. "How many times has this gourd been used?" Shen Yu asked, pointing to the gourd on the older woman's waist.

Eleven times.

"Eleven times...that's one hundred and ten years?"

"It's not just mine," the woman said. "This gourd was passed down to me by my master, and to her by her master."

"I've moved three times in my life."

Ye Feng's hands remained hanging at his sides. He felt that the weight he had carried on his back for the past two weeks had doubled—he had used those three moves in a hurry, and the consequences were already incurred.

Shen Yu asked quietly from the side, "Which floor should we talk to them about?"

"Tell me everything."

"Brother Feng—"

"Tell me everything."

The small blackboard sat by the fire all night.

The woman in the indigo dress was surnamed Chi. Her people called her the sect leader, but she herself wrote three characters on the board: Chi Xiu'e.

She cannot speak.

The older woman next to her later explained: In their lineage, the sect leader must "remain silent"—no longer utter a word from the day they take office. Why, she didn't say.

That night's conversation was half written down and half relayed by the older woman. Ye Feng was talking about the year 2000.

He began his story with the twenty-seven pairs of people on Heqi Cliff, then talked about how the nails were pulled out, how the twenty-seven people held up their hands at the bottom of the well for two thousand years, and how the nails were returned to their original place on that day.

He was halfway through his speech when Chi Xiu'e raised her hand to interrupt him.

She wrote on the board: "Nail?"

"One foot and one inch long, four-sided, and entirely black."

She erased those two words and wrote: "We don't have nails."

"Then what do you rely on to seal it?"

She wrote one word: "water".

Then she erased that word and rewrote a long line:

"We don't seal it off. We cover it up and move it every ten years."

Ye Feng was stunned for a long time. "Move what?"

The older woman spoke up. "The Eye of the Sea."

"What we're guarding isn't a well, it's an eye," she said. "There are three eyes along the southeast coast, and the largest one is here."

"An eye is not like a well. A well is dead, but an eye is alive; it follows the tide."

"Our method is to move it to a new location every ten years and submerge it underwater."

"Why move it?"

"Because it will leak if it's pressed down for too long," the woman said. "If it's pressed down in one place for ten years, the stuff underneath will start to seep into the water in that area."

"By the eleventh year, the fish in that sea will no longer be edible."

"By the thirteenth year, the people in that area began to fall ill."

"That's why we move every ten years."

Shen Yu, listening nearby, was dumbfounded. "How long does it take to move it once?"

"Three months."

"Three months?"

"Every time we move, someone from our lineage has to go down into the water," the woman said. "The person going down has to lure it out from underwater and guide it to the new place."

"Those who go down, will come out one less."

The fire crackled. "Two thousand years," Ye Feng said.

"Two thousand years, two hundred times."

"Two hundred died."

The older woman nodded. "At its peak, our lineage had over three hundred members."

She turned her head and looked around at the fire. "There are eight of them here today."

"Eleven are still at sea."

Chi Xiu'e wrote four characters on the board and held it up.

How many of you are left?

Ye Feng answered slowly. "Including those on the mountain, those at the foot of the mountain, and the nineteen families, it's over four hundred."

The board remained in Chi Xiu'e's hands for a long time. She lowered her head, erased the four characters, and wrote four new ones.

Her hands trembled as she raised them. "We have nineteen left."

No one spoke around the fire. Later, Shen Yu took out his notebook.

He opened it, turned to the last few pages, and pushed it towards the fire.

"This list contains the names of our group of over four hundred people," he said. "It records their names, where they're from, and what they do."

"If you don't mind, I'll copy it for you later."

Chi Xiu'e took the notebook and, by the firelight, turned the pages one by one. She turned them very slowly.

When she turned to the third page, her hand stopped. She looked up and wrote a line on the board.

"Why are you writing this down?"

"Remember this so we can take attendance," Shen Yu said.

"What's your name?"

"I'm afraid they'll get lost."

Chi Xiu'e stared at those three characters for a long time. She closed the notebook, pushed it back, and then wrote six characters on the board.

"We dare not remember names."

Why?

She erased those six words and rewrote them:

"Once I remembered the name, I could recall who went down there."

That night, they talked until dawn. Finally, Ye Feng asked a question.

"Two thousand years."

"You guard your eyes, we'll guard our well."

"Our two families live more than a thousand miles apart."

"Why didn't we know about each other for two thousand years?"

The older woman gave a wry smile. "Our lineage has an ancestral precept."

"What ancestral precepts?"

"The more people know about it, the more people will want to mess with it."

Ye Feng sat by the fire, silent for a long time. He had seen that sentence on the main wall of the Discipline Hall.

Not a single word was different. As dawn approached, Chi Xiu'e had someone fetch something from their boat.

It is a booklet.

The cover is blue cloth, very old, with copper trim at the corners. The text is arranged vertically, but the first few dozen pages are illegible, the paper a dark black mess.

She flipped to the back of the page and pushed the booklet towards her. On that page was written a line:

"In the autumn of the seventeenth year of the Wanli reign, the third eye was lost. The person was taken away, and the eye was empty."

Ye Feng's hand stopped on that line. "What does 'loss' mean?"

The older woman said, "Someone beat me to it."

Who started it?

"I don't know. It's not recorded in the booklet."

"The person who wrote that down only wrote four characters."

She turned to the next page of the booklet and pointed to the words on it.

"Of unknown origin."

Ye Feng flipped back through the booklet, page by page.

When they turned to page seven, Chi Xiu'e pressed his hand down. She took the booklet, turned to the last page, and wrote three numbers on it.

After you finish writing, hold it up and show it to him. Nine.