Since Zhou Yu had already given Le Le some water earlier, Le Le refused to drink when Jing Lin tried to give him more after they returned home. 

At noon, Jing Lin cooked a packet of instant noodles with the water spinach Zhou Yu had given him, making do with a simple meal. Afterwards, he unpacked and organized everything he had brought back. 

Returning to his room, Jing Lin took out a notebook and the three books. He then searched through his grandfather’s room and found the brush, ink, and inkstone that his grandfather had carefully maintained during his lifetime. He carried everything to the tea table in the main hall. 

After grinding the ink, Jing Lin opened the notebook and turned the Heavenly Talisman Arts to its first page. Holding the brush above the paper, he mentally reviewed the strokes of the most basic and simplest talisman. Once he felt ready, he calmed himself and began drawing carefully on the blank sheet. 

The brush moved across the paper, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, following a natural rhythm of beginning, progression, transition, and completion. In less than a minute, the talisman was finished. In the past, under Grandpa Zhang’s supervision, he had drawn countless talismans, but they had always been nothing more than ordinary symbols on paper, discarded after completion. This time, however, the moment he lifted his brush, he heard a faint pop in the air, as though something had suddenly burst beside his ear. 

As a child, Jing Lin had drawn thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of talismans, yet he had never heard such a sound. Today, however, he immediately understood what it was: the sound of spiritual qi dissipating. Grandpa Zhang had once explained that a talisman served as a medium through which people communicated with spiritual qi. The act of drawing one was essentially the process of gathering spiritual power and storing it within the paper. Since a talisman contained spiritual power, the paper used to hold it could not be ordinary paper. The sheet Jing Lin had just used was nothing more than common white paper, incapable of containing that power. Therefore, the moment the talisman was completed, the spiritual power that should have been stored within it immediately dispersed. 

Afterward, he drew several more talismans in succession. Each time, the same faint pop sounded the instant he finished the final stroke. It seemed he would need to buy proper yellow talisman paper after all, Jing Lin thought to himself. 

Setting down the brush, Jing Lin leaned back against the sofa and opened Lesser Vast Heaven Heart Method.

The book was written in traditional Chinese and classical prose. Jing Lin found it difficult to understand. After reading only a few lines, he felt dizzy. Yet he had a strong intuition that the book would be extremely important to him. Rather than becoming impatient, he studied it even more carefully, examining every word and sentence repeatedly. 

Jing Lin spent the entire afternoon sitting in the living room researching the cultivation manual. By evening, Zhao Zhiwen came to find him and told him that the village leader was calling a meeting. 

“A meeting? What kind of meeting?” Jing Lin asked. Rubbing his aching forehead, he picked up Le Le and followed Zhao Zhiwen toward the leader’s house.