“I’m…very amazing.” Yu Shu’s voice was as timid as a mosquito as he said the last two words. He still wasn’t used to boasting about himself like this.

“If you’re amazing, say it openly.” Yan Jin pointed at herself, “Like me, whenever I rank first in exams and my friends congratulate me, I never modestly say I did just average.”

Yu Shu was a little curious, “Then how do you respond?”

“How else would I respond?” Yan Jin raised her chin, “Of course it’s ‘you have good taste’.”

Yu Shu almost couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re so arrogant, your friends don’t beat you up?”

“No, because she retorts back.” As Yan Jin spoke, she asked Yu Shu, “Do you want to hear how she retorts?”

Yu Shu: “…Not really.”

Everyone has a different personality. He doesn’t know how to sass people, and Yan Jin’s friend has known her since their student days. With so many years of friendship, their way of interacting isn’t suitable for him. It’s better not to learn it.

“Aren’t you going to the county yamen later?” Yu Shu turned and walked towards the main hall, motioning for Yan Jin to follow. “Let’s not talk too much, let’s start writing.”

Their two rooms were on either side of the main hall. Because the space was wide, they used it as a living room.

The living room wasn’t decorated much, just some clean tables and chairs. Yu Shu laid out the paper and ground the ink, and began teaching Yan Jin calligraphy.

Yan Jin originally wanted to learn some characters from Yu Shu that could be directly used on the name card, but even though her grip was correct, her strokes were either too light or too heavy. She just couldn’t find the right amount of force.

Yu Shu, who was watching from the side, couldn’t stand it anymore. He walked behind her and gently grasped her right hand holding the brush. “Your force is a bit off, follow me first.”

① Name cards: There were two types of materials for name cards in the Song Dynasty. One was carved from wood, four to five inches wide, seven to eight inches long, and about one-tenth of an inch thick, planed smooth and glossy, with the name, place of origin, and official title (if any) carved vertically in the center and filled with black or red lacquer; the other was paper name cards, made of very thick, hard paper, cut into a rectangular shape, with either red background and black text or white background and black text, written vertically from right to left with the name, place of origin, and official title, leaving a large blank space at the top to write respectful titles and greetings for the person being visited. From “Living a Refined Life in the Song Dynasty”

I haven’t finished writing the remaining 5,000 words at this hour, I’m doing a face mask (although doing a face mask in winter is a challenge) but I’ll be able to finish the remaining 5,000 words very soon, because I’m having so much fun writing this book, hahaha.

Every day when I open the document, I think about writing a little more today so they can kiss in the next chapter.

I’ve imagined their most ambiguous plot and their confession plot in my mind tens of thousands of times, but I haven’t written to that part yet. It’s killing me, slapping my thigh.

There will be another update at 12 o’clock later, because I want to post all the rest before Sunday.

Tomorrow I need to look up some information, because the later plot involves areas I’m not familiar with, so I need to go learn about it. I hope the information I look up tomorrow will be easier to understand so I can write more.

For the yellow mud water making white sugar in the previous chapters, I was afraid I misunderstood, so I looked it up for two hours at the time. I even tried to find if there were any relevant videos, but I couldn’t find any videos about converting brown sugar to white sugar, and the ones I found used modern machines for processing.

In the end, I only found a text description of the yellow mud water sugar rinsing method, with a specific operating method recorded in a paragraph in “Tiangong Kaiwu”.