Reborn As Super Heiress-Chapter 1545 - 1529: The Secret Inside the Lampshade
Upon learning that her husband had overstepped boundaries by getting drunk at Huo Sining’s house, Gan Lijun couldn’t help but scold Xie Daoyuan over the phone. She also apologized to Huo Sining, feeling quite embarrassed.
Huo Sining didn’t think much of it. She’s not the type to fuss over such details.
Plus, Professor Xie is Su Qingqing’s mentor. In Huo Sining’s eyes, Xie Daoyuan was practically like her half-mentor, akin to family, so there was no sense of estrangement.
After finishing up those tasks and making sure Qibao washed up and went to bed, Huo Sining moved the lampstand she bought from Tang Jun’s Dexin Society back to the basement.
Once the item was in the basement, she began to examine the plaques on the lampshade closely, eventually reaching out to touch it.
Under the Heavenly Eye, no issues could be seen with the lampshade. The scenery depicted on the paper inside was very vivid, appearing as if crafted from a complete painting, without any anomalies.
Huo Sining recalled the method of using light and shadow to identify the National Treasure Jin Kui Zhi Wan at Tang Jun’s house earlier that day. She thought maybe she should try it on this antique lampstand.
She found two thick candles in the basement, lit them, placed them inside the lampshade, and then turned off the lights.
Once the lights were off, the basement was pitch dark, yet the candles gradually brightened.
The landscapes on the two lampshades became more prominent under the candlelight. As the lampshade turned, the shadows of the trees seemed to sway, almost as if they were alive.
The lampstand was indeed beautiful, and even Huo Sining couldn’t help but marvel at it in her heart.
However, using candlelight didn’t reveal anything to Huo Sining.
Seemingly, this method was incorrect.
Huo Sining speculated repeatedly in her mind. Although the light and shadow method didn’t unlock the secret, she still trusted her intuition. She believed there was something odd about the plaques inside the lampshade being divided into several segments, as she had seen antique lamps before and never encountered such strange segmentation of the paper sheets.
The antique business was quite consistent. Although Huo Sining wasn’t familiar with lamplight antiques, she had a strong intuition that there was something wrong with this lampshade.
With this in mind, Huo Sining didn’t bother thinking too much, and she directly pulled the two lampshades off roughly.
She found tools and disassembled the lampshades, carefully extracting the paper sheets inside.
These paper sheets were made of raw xuan paper. While inside the lampshade, Huo Sining didn’t notice anything. However, once she removed the sheets, her expression changed instantly.
There were more than a dozen sheets between the two lampshades. Initially, Huo Sining didn’t notice anything peculiar. But when she unintentionally combined the sheets from the two lampshades, she was startled to discover that the edges of the two paper sheets matched perfectly.
This surprised Huo Sining greatly. A sudden flash of insight hit her mind: could it be that the sheets from both lampshades were originally one piece?!
With this thought, Huo Sining’s breath caught. She hurried to gather all the paper sheets and carefully pieced them together. It took her more than ten minutes to finally match-well all the pieces together.
Over a dozen paper sheets turned into a square xuan paper less than a meter by meter wide, forming a complete landscape painting puzzle right before Huo Sining’s eyes.
At first glance, it might have seemed normal. Perhaps the owner simply segmented the painting to embed it within the lampstand. However, the two poems present on the original lampstands had now been scattered, with some verses being rearranged and randomly pieced together.
The autumn wind emerges briskly, the holidays and the Chongyang Festival are here again;
The green shirt is tear-soaked, the vast river reflects the moon;
The grass and trees turn yellow, drinking gets delayed at the eastern fence.
These poems were haphazardly pieced together. Once the sheets formed a single piece of xuan paper, the verses were arranged in vertical order side by side.
Huo Sining stared at these verses, reciting them several times, and found them completely nonsensical.
Ancient poems emphasized rhyme and meter, but this hodgepodge of poems neither rhymed nor carried any poetic imagery, lacking any logical structure. Huo Sining felt confused, wondering if she had made a mistake.
Her face filled with confusion as she wondered if she was overthinking. Was this paper truly without any secrets, just something she got stuck on momentarily?
As she was preparing to scatter the papers and restore them, she suddenly paused.
The poems were written vertically. Previously, Huo Sining read them from left to right, but she suddenly remembered that the ancient writing convention was from right to left. Therefore, these verses should be read as:
The grass and trees turn yellow, drinking gets delayed at the eastern fence, the green shirt is tear-soaked, the vast river reflects the moon, the autumn wind emerges briskly, the holidays and the Chongyang Festival are here again.
At this moment, several words appeared in front of Huo Sining:
Yellow wine reveals the past.
Huo Sining was dumbfounded, her mouth gaping open uncontrollably.
It was...
For a moment, Huo Sining felt bewildered. She had seen many TV dramas and movies, such as in "Young Bao Qingtian," where Ling Chuchu’s half-swaddling cloth would show characters when soaked in wine.
The principle utilized is actually quite simple chemistry; starch-written characters turn blue when exposed to iodine liquor.
She recalled the water painting she brought previously, that demon illustration which would reveal a three-dimensional drawing when submerged in water, with the figures moving inside.
That water painting puzzled Huo Sining for quite some time. She never thought another similar one would surface.
The xuan paper before her likely employed the same principle, yet she still didn’t know what secret the paper held.
Huo Sining fetched a bottle of yellow wine from the kitchen, then used a sprayer to carefully spray the yellow wine onto the xuan paper. As the xuan paper slowly got damp, after a few seconds, it began to change.
The landscape painting on the xuan paper started to fade, and as more yellow wine was sprayed, the paper evoked boundless mists and waves, with swirling clouds and fog, revealing a mountain slowly emerging from within the mist.
What shocked Huo Sining even more was that after the mountain emerged, a string of text identical to what she had seen earlier on Shen Wansan’s nautical chart appeared on the side of the xuan paper.
Yes, it was the exact same string of words!
Huo Sining had a good memory, but upon seeing this line, she was still a bit unsure. So, she frantically retrieved the nautical chart from her storage ring and compared it with the writing on the xuan paper. She found that the words on the two sheets matched perfectly, even down to the punctuation!
