Chapter Seventeen: Passing on the Flame with a Sincere Heart, The Young Pupil’s First Lessons

The life in elementary school was utterly different from that in kindergarten. Gone were the days of games and singing; in their place stood rows of tidy desks and freshly printed textbooks exuding the fragrance of ink. On the first day after school, Yiyi’s face no longer shone with pure excitement, but carried a touch of adorable, gentle worry.

“Father,” she spread out a textbook labeled “Mathematics” on the table, pointing at the twisting symbols, “I know these ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘3’. But... why does ‘1’ plus ‘1’ become ‘2’? Aren’t they just two ‘1’s?”

I gazed at these symbols, known in this era as “Arabic numerals,” and couldn’t help but smile. In my understanding, counting was done with “one, two, three, four...” or with more intricate tally rods. This simple symbolic system was as novel to me as it was to her.

What troubled her even more was “Chinese phonetics.” The combinations of “a, o, e” were utterly mysterious to a child who spoke the pure, stately tongue of the Qin dynasty—a veritable ancient soul.

I realized I could no longer simply be the father waiting by the school gate. I had to become her teacher.

So, whenever night fell and the Anhe Hall closed for the day, the lights in the backyard would burn late into the evening.

I, once a personal guard of the First Emperor and a cultivator of the Golden Elixir stage, embarked on the most arduous practice of my life—studying the first grade curriculum.

I began by reading through all the textbooks myself. With my spiritual sense and memory, absorbing this knowledge posed no problem. The challenge lay in how to teach it in a way a six-year-old could understand.

I couldn’t explain addition to her with “The Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, Three gives birth to the myriad things.”

I went to the kitchen and brought two red dates to the table. “Yiyi, look, this is one red date, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll put another one next to it,” I placed the second date beside the first. “Now, count them. How many are there in total?”

“One, two... Two dates!” She suddenly understood.

“So, one ‘1’, plus another ‘1’, together they become ‘2’.”

“Oh! I get it now!” Her face bloomed with a radiant smile, the joy of solving a puzzle more nourishing to my soul than any miraculous elixir.

Thus, using the most primitive, clumsy methods, I accompanied her as she slowly digested these modern lessons. We learned arithmetic with pebbles, practiced writing with copybooks, and I even used the melodies of Qin opera to teach her the difficult phonetic combinations.

The backyard often echoed with our laughter and the sound of reading.

“B-a-ba, papa!” The first time she used phonetics to spell out her name for me, I was so thrilled that I picked her up and spun her around several times.

This shared learning experience drew our hearts ever closer. She no longer merely relied on me, but regarded me as an omniscient companion and exemplar. And through this process, I truly, systematically came to understand the foundations of this era.

I discovered that although spiritual energy was scarce here, the pursuit of “investigating things to acquire knowledge” had forged a brilliant new path. The knowledge called “science” explained the movements of sun, moon, and stars, the origins of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning. Its intricacy astonished even me, a practitioner of cultivation.

I began to relish this life. By day, I was Doctor Jiang, healing the sick; by night, I was Jiang Yiyi’s first-grade classmate. The warmth of the mundane world seeped into my ancient soul, dissolving and saturating it, bringing a peace and solidity I’d never known.

Yiyi, too, revealed remarkable talent through this new learning. Her intelligence and concentration soon enabled her to catch up with her classmates, even ranking among the top.

Occasionally, there were small “troubles.”

One day in art class, the teacher asked them to draw “My Family.” Yiyi’s drawing showed only a tall man holding the hand of a little girl.

The teacher curiously asked, “Yiyi, where is your mother?”

With utmost seriousness, Yiyi replied, “My mother is in a place very, very far away. She’s in the sky, turned into the brightest star, and she watches me every night.”

This was the story I had taught her. Her mother, who died in childbirth and whom she had never met, lived on in another form within her daughter’s heart.

From that day forward, teacher and classmates showed her more affection and care. And the image of me as a “single father” became deeply imprinted on everyone’s mind.