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Everyone in Wellspring Town knew the Zhou family had a prodigy on their hands.\nHe was recognizing characters by three and reciting poetry by five. When he was seven, Master Zhuge flipped to a random page in the Book of Documents. Zhou Huaimin stood up and recited it flawlessly, word for word. "Just how many books have you read?" Master Zhuge asked. Zhou Huaimin straightened his back. "I have read nearly eighty percent of the entire collection of the Primary Hall," he declared. Master Zhuge chuckled. "It seems you're ready to teach the class yourself." The room erupted into giggles, and his classmates began teasingly calling him "Master Zhou." Standing amidst the laughter with a flushed face, the boy couldn't quite tell if he was feeling proud or embarrassed.\nBut since he was now a "master" in their eyes, he felt obligated to look the part. While the other kids spent their free time chasing butterflies, battling crickets, or running wild in the courtyard, Zhou Huaimin stayed behind. He would sit alone in the pavilion, scroll in hand, swaying his head to a scholarly rhythm as he chanted the classics. "To subdue the self and return to propriety is perfect virtue. The world will recognize it, but the choice to be good belongs entirely to you."\nWhenever a classmate tried to drag him out to play, Zhou would put on a stern face. "Frivolous play saps a man's ambition. Do you even know what book that proverb comes from?" When the boy shook his head, Zhou would smugly recite the original text, breaking it down word by word. Bored to tears, the classmate would quickly slip away. Zhou Huaimin would simply shake his head at their retreating backs and return to his reading. The adults all agreed: Zhou Huaimin was looking more like a proper master every day.\nThen, one day, while organizing the students' coursework, Mr. Mu happened to unroll one of Zhou Huaimin's texts. A loose sheet of paper was tucked inside. On it was a vivid, lifelike sketch of a nine-tailed fox, every single tail drawn with painstaking care. Next to it, written in neat, tiny script, was a line from a book of myths: "Upon the Mountain of Qingqiu, there dwells a beast shaped like a fox, but with nine tails."\nMr. Mu quietly slipped the drawing back between the pages and kept the secret to himself.\nOutside the pavilion, the leaves on the ginkgo tree turned from yellow to green, and back to yellow again. Day after day, Zhou Huaimin still sat there reading, still swaying his head to the rhythm of his chants, and still turning up his nose at the childishness of his peers. But as the seasons passed, the stack of secret drawings hidden inside his scrolls only grew thicker.