Inlaid With Jade - Chapter 5

Chapter 5 
Yanzhi Jade 
 
Lingyun Temple was on Lingyun Mountain. The road was steep and rugged, and it took carriages more than half a day to get there. The sky darkened when Lin Yu and her party settled in the temple. A thin mist rose from the mountains, and dark clouds gathered overhead as if to collapse this magnificent and ancient temple.
  
Mother Lin and Lin Yu did not live in the same room. After Zelan made the bed, she went out to fetch water and looked up at the sky. She said to Lin Yu, who was also looking at the sky in front of the corridor: “Miss, it looks like it’s going to rain.”
  
Lin Yu hummed and said with worry: “If the road is wet, we will not be able to go down the mountain in the next few days.” 
  
However, Lin Yu could not control whether it would be sunny or rainy. She had a bland vegetarian meal with Mother Lin and knelt in the hall with a group of monks and guests to listen to the old monk talk about Buddhism.
  
The old monk’s name was ‘Jingxu.’ His beard and eyebrows were white. He even couldn’t open his eyes when talking to others, and Lin Yu wondered how he had the energy to travel around at such an age. 
  
The warm scent of sandalwood and the dim candlelight, accompanied by the old monk’s low and hoarse voice, filled the hall, making one extremely sleepy. Lin Yu knelt in the hall and saw a young monk who started to tilt his head while listening. His eyelids seemed glued with rice paste, and he couldn’t open them. But after a while, his senior brother pulled him straight.
  
The cold autumn wind rushed into the hall. Outside the door, the rain gradually rose, rattling on the high eaves of the window lattice. The temple emphasized hard work in body and mind; therefore, charcoal was not burning. Lin Yu was weaker than ordinary people, and after kneeling for half an hour, she began to feel uncomfortable. She had a cushion under her knees, but it couldn’t stop the cold from entering her body. Soon, her hands and feet became cold. Mother Lin wanted to wait for the old monk to finish and ask him to check Lin Yu’s body, but seeing that Lin Yu’s face was not good, she whispered, “Are you feeling uncomfortable? If you are, ask Zelan to accompany you back to your room to rest. Don’t force yourself.”
  
Mother Lin held her hand while saying, and after noticing the chilliness, she worriedly said: “Qiqi, go back to rest.” 
  
With Mother Lin’s two maids waiting outside the hall, Lin Yu was not worried about her, so she nodded. Without making a sound to disturb the others listening to the preacher in the hall, she softly stood up and left. Outside the hall, she did not see Zelan, and Mother Lin’s maid told her Zelan was getting a cloak for her and that she would be back soon. 
  
Lin Yu did not wait. She took the umbrella on the wall and slowly walked back by herself. The mountains were quiet; even without the sound of prayer, the sound of rain made people feel at ease. Lin Yu walked to a place where her mother’s maid could not see her and stretched out her hand to catch the cool rain.

Lin Yu was rarely caught in the rain, and she had to avoid people when grabbing a handful of rain like this so as not to be scolded for a long time. The last time she was caught in the rain was when she was a child. Incidentally, it was related to Li Heming. Although Li Heming was born into a general family, Lin Yu knew he had a bad childhood. 
  
At that time, the northern tribes were rampant, and Li Heming’s father was ordered to lead troops to defeat them. However, he was shot and fell off his horse, suffering a defeat. His father was a fierce general with outstanding military achievements, so no one had thought he would die and lose. For a while, countless dark speculations and vicious insults weighed on the Li family, and Li Heming, who was studying in the school, was also bullied a lot. 
  
Lin Yu still remembered that it was also such a rainy day. She estimated she was only eight or nine years old; with a maid accompanying her, she wanted to give an umbrella to Lin Jing, who was studying in school. Walking into the school, she didn’t see Lin Jing but Li Heming, who was pushed down in the courtyard by everyone. The people who bullied him were only about the same age as him. They didn’t even understand the books of sages, but they already knew how to vent their anger at the son of the defeated general. 
  
Li Heming already had a cold face at that time. He didn’t smile much, nor did he like to cry. He fell and got wet in the mud, but he got up silently, picking up his books that the rain and mud soiled. 
  
Other students in the school called him ‘useless or coward,’ but they couldn’t say precisely how ‘useless’ and ‘coward’ he was because they couldn’t say, ‘Although your father died fighting for the country, he failed to subdue the northern tribes, and as his son, you are useless.’
  
Those sage books always planted a seed of wisdom in their hearts, knowing that although it was not an absolute glory for a general to die fighting for the country, it was definitely not a shame. But at that moment, this obvious truth was drowned out by the resentment of defeat. 
  
Lin Yu didn’t know what happened then, and her family would not tell her about the war. She stood at the door holding an umbrella and watched Li Heming picking up books in the yard. Feeling pitiful for him to be bullied, she ran over and had the umbrella over his head. She wore a piece of Yanzhi jade. The jade was mainly white but with a streak of red in the middle. The jade collided and made a ‘ding-dong’ sound when she ran. 
  
Li Heming squatted on the ground and heard the sound of the jade pendant stopping behind him. He turned his head to look at her. The rain had soaked his face, and his eyes were as black as a deep pool. He already had the handsome appearance of a young man. He didn’t seem to expect that someone would help him. He stared at her face for a long time and said, “Go away.” Then, he turned around. 
  
His tone was cold, and his words were not pleasant. Lin Yu was young at the time, and she was obviously helping him, but he treated her like this, so she was inevitably confused. But she heard him whispering with his back to her: “I am now a street rat. If you help me, they will hate you too.” 
  
That was the first time Li Heming and Lin Yu met and the first sentence he said to her. His tone was so calm that he didn’t sound like a teenager. Perhaps because of that plain and indifferent tone of ‘street rat’ deeply engraved in her mind, she had not forgotten it until now.