Chapter 2151 Use Of Poetry
Once all the tiles were in the right position, the symbols all made sense.
A few lines of poem could now be understood from it.
'Green hills skirt the northern border,
White waters gird the eastern town;'
Lady Kang read the words, finding them unfamiliar.
~Rumble~
But just as she had finished reading them, the stone wall suddenly sank down into the floor.
~SHUA~
And after that happened, a circle glowed around the spot where the wall once stood.
"One down, four more to go." Lin Mu said as he gazed at the rest of the walls.
Ziran and the others who saw this couldn't help but be impressed.
"Daoist Mu Lin, you dabble in poetry too?" Ziran asked.
"Not particularly, but I have read a few." Lin Mu answered. "One of the methods of encrypting formations is to use poems as ciphers. As such, it becomes important to know them too." He stated.
"I see… Still, for you to know this; I don't think this is a common poem." Ziran replied. "At least I've never read it."
"Neither have I." Lady Kang chimed in.
"It is common, though." Lin Mu said with a slightly confused expression. "It's part of the one million, one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven poems of the Poetry King." He stated.
"The… what?" Ziran was at a loss.
"Yeah, this is poem number eighteen thousand. It's not even that far in." Lin Mu said as he got to working on the second stone wall.
'Eighteen thousand isn't far?' Ziran, Lady Kang, and Min Ju all found it to be a bit absurd.
While Immortals did have good memory, it didn't mean that they were also good at recalling them right away. At the very least, it would take them some time to think and figure it out. Then there was also the fact that, they still needed to read and learn the specific bits of information to know them.
If an immortal did not have an interest in something peculiar like poems, they wouldn't necessarily learn more about them.
Especially not something like the poems Lin Mu was talking about.
~shua~
But by the time the group thought about this, Lin Mu had finished solving the second wall.
'Here we part with each other,
And you set out like a lonesome wisp of grass,'
Lin Mu read it, just to make sure that it sounded correct.
"Yeah, this should be it." He muttered before getting to work on the third wall.
Watching Lin Mu work with confidence, Ziran had a question in his mind.
"How many of those poems did you learn, Daoist Mu Lin?" Ziran asked.
"How many?" Lin Mu looked back. "It wouldn't make sense to just learn a few. I just learned the entire book." He said before finishing the third stone wall too.
"All of them?" Ziran didn't know if that was excessive or impressive.
~shua~
'Floating across the miles, farther and farther away.
You've longed to travel like roaming clouds,'
Min Ju read the third stanza of the poem, finding it to be rather nice.
"Yeah, all of them." Lin Mu answered. "We're lucky that I found the book not long before coming here. I was at the Serene Glass Valley and got it there." He added.
"So you only read it a short time ago?" Ziran found that even more absurd.
"I suppose. Though I didn't have much time to read it, as there were a lot of books I needed to finish." Lin Mu replied as he worked on the fourth wall. "I had to skim through it quickly, so I missed out on some of the footnotes." He said before finishing his work.
~shua~
'But our friendship, unwilling to wane as the sun is to set,
Let it be here to stay.'
"Is this poem about farewell?" Min Ju asked, having read so far.
"It is." Lin Mu nodded. "You'll see once its complete." He said as he worked on the fifth and final wall.
The group watched as Lin Mu finished arranging the symbols accurately.
It wasn't a thing as simple as simply matching the letters, as that was not how Dao Script worked. The same word could be spelled using different characters, thus if one didn't know enough Dao Script they wouldn't even know that the answer was known to them.
As such, one not only needed to know the poem, but also have learned a lot of Dao Script for this to work.
Of course, everyone present here was well educated in terms of Dao Script, but that didn't mean that they knew each and every character that existed. There were always characters that were very obscure or unknown that would stump even celestials.
Also, using those characters in a poem was a matter of another level' as the difficulty could be increased by several times. ~shua~
'As we wave each other good-bye,
Our horses neigh, as if for us they sigh.'
Min Ju read the final stanza, fully understanding the poem.
"So it's about the farewell of two friends…" Min Ju realized.
"Indeed." Lin Mu nodded as he watched all the circles light up.
~HONG~
The flow of immortal Qi in the floor changed, as the five circles linked up. Several lines glowed on the floor before linking up to the other end of the hall.
~HUALA~
Then in the next second, a gate materialized out of thin air, showing them the path that had to be taken.
"That was simpler than I thought." Lin Mu said, seeing that they could already progress to the next area.
"It's only because you were solving it, Daoist Mu Lin." Ziran said. "Yeah, I don't think it would have been easy for us to solve it." Lady Kang replied. "It would probably have taken us a lot of trial and error to figure out the answer." She added.
Since they could still read the Dao Script, they would have to shuffle the symbols around until the right combination was found.
Though the time needed for that could be anywhere from hours to days.