Chapter 1085.1: Start to Finish (III) - Part 1

Ying Prefecture, Changshi Commandery, Rainfront County.

In that little teahouse, the aged old man opened his cloudy eyes and rummaged around behind the counter. The counter itself was not large, yet it seemed to be piled with all sorts of things. After searching for a long while without finding what he wanted, he had already grown somewhat irritable.

He then began pushing piles of things beneath the cabinets. In an instant, the little teahouse was filled with dust, while the rumbling sound rang out without end.

A middle-aged man dressed like a scholar stood in the distance. He waved a hand in front of his nose, then crouched down and picked up a porcelain jar that had rolled to his feet.

He opened it and took a sniff, then teased with a smile, “Just this one jar of tea could have been exchanged for a fairly sizable residence, two hundred years ago in Divine Capital, in the most prosperous part of the city. And that was with the tea being practically impossible to buy even at a price. Who knows how many tea lovers would have considered it a lifelong regret if they could not drink even a single cup of it. How did it come to this, with you treating it like trash?”

The gray-haired old man continued rummaging through things without looking up, but still replied, “This tea was only average to begin with. At best, it could be considered second-rate. It was so expensive back then only because that woman surnamed Su liked it. A craze sprang up overnight, and with the limited production, the price naturally kept rising.”

Mentioning the woman surnamed Su, the scholar also smiled. “The number-one courtesan of Divine Capital back then, and the object of so many people’s longing. I still remember that year in Divine Capital, beneath Spring Courtyard Tower, gold and silver were scattered everywhere, with extravagant revelry and revelry beyond compare.”

“It was precisely because they had people like that in power that they collapsed at the first touch. Faced with the demon race in the north, what other option did they have besides suing for peace and ceding territory?”

The old man snorted coldly, as though the scholar’s words had greatly angered him.

The scholar smiled faintly and said no more. There were many things that had long since changed with the passage of time. In the blink of an eye, they had already become matters from several hundred years ago.

He merely looked at the bottles and jars scattered across the floor and sighed repeatedly.

There were both porcelain jars and iron jars here. They all looked utterly unremarkable, but in reality, every jar contained extraordinarily precious tea. Much of the tea could be found not only in the old man’s own Classic of Tea, but had long since become extinct. They were genuine one-of-a-kind treasures.

Every jar of tea here, if brought out, would certainly provoke a frenzy among tea lovers of the present age. Yet now, all of it lay scattered across the floor, truly being treated like trash.

That was not even the strangest part. What was strangest of all was that the person who treated these teas as worthless happened to be the number-one tea lover in all of history, a title no one who looked through the historical records would ever question.

“What exactly are you looking for?”

The scholar rubbed his forehead helplessly and said, “After all these years, is there really some tea that you still yearn for day and night?”

The old man loved tea, knew how to drink it, and had drunk countless varieties of it. As for the old man before him, his attitude toward tea had probably reached the point where nothing could excite him anymore.

The old man muttered, “You know nothing. If you want to talk about reading or knowledge, I won’t say a word. But if you want to talk about drinking tea, shut your mouth!”

The scholar put down the tea jar in his hand, found a place for it, then sat down at the table and smiled. “Then let’s see what kind of tea you can find for me to drink.”

This time, the old man did not pay him the slightest attention. He simply continued rummaging through the cabinet.

It was unknown how long had passed.

Even the large iron kettle heating the water had begun to whistle loudly when the old man finally cried out joyfully, “Found it!”

The scholar raised an eyebrow and glanced over at the old man, only to see him standing in the midst of a sea of tea jars, holding a small red-clay jar in his arms, his face filled with delight.

The old man then brought out his finest tea ware and began brewing the tea.

After a while, the tea was finally placed in front of the scholar.

The scholar looked at the teacup before him, then at the tea liquor inside it. He remained silent for a moment before raising his head to look at the old man, wanting to speak but stopping himself.

Although he was not some great master of the tea ceremony, since he had been an old friend of this foremost master of tea for many years, he had been immersed in it by association and was probably more knowledgeable about the tea ceremony than quite a few renowned tea masters. At a single glance, the murky tea liquor and the barely perceptible fragrance of the tea were enough to indicate that the tea leaves should not be very good.

But since the tea had been brewed personally by the old man, the scholar did not dare jump to conclusions too quickly. After all, his old friend before him was simply too authoritative when it came to the tea ceremony.

So the scholar simply picked up the teacup and took a sip.

Yet as soon as the tea entered his throat, even after savoring it carefully, the scholar could not taste anything particularly noteworthy.

All he could taste was bitterness and astringency, with a faint sweetness in the aftertaste that vanished in an instant. In short, this was truly terrible tea!

At least among all the teas he had drunk at his old friend’s place, this was the worst.

“Lu Ji, you old bastard, what exactly are you up to?”

The scholar set the teacup down on the table and raised an eyebrow at his old friend.

Lu Ji casually took a sip of tea and sighed. “Indeed. Some tea leaves, no matter how exquisite your tea-brewing skills are, will still only produce something like this in the end. There’s simply no way to transform them completely.”

“Surnamed Dong, do you know how much these tea leaves cost?”

Lu Ji glanced at the scholar before him, then quickly shook his head. “I reckon you don’t even know what these tea leaves are called, let alone how much they cost.”

The scholar was not annoyed. He merely asked, “How much?”

Lu Ji smiled. “During the Yongqing era, one tael of this tea only cost a single copper coin.”

The scholar smiled bitterly. “Could it possibly taste good?”

Yongqing was one of the era names of Great Jin. At that time, prices had soared dramatically. Even buying a unit of rice cost several dozen strings of copper coins. A single copper coin could not even buy a single candied hawthorn back then.

And this tea only cost a single copper coin. One could imagine just how...

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