So how many strokes in the Meng character?
And who's right Lei Chun or Bai Choufei?
The scene with testing heaven's will confused me at first. It's obvious, that Bai Choufei tried to cheat fate, but even after i rewatched it, i still couldn't understand, where and how exactly he did it.
"I'll point to a character randomly. If it's an even number, I'll kill him. If it's an odd number, I'll spare his life, considering he was once my brother."
Let's take a closer look at this character:
Bai Choufei: "Meng? It seems our fate is intertwined."
Bai Choufei points at ε€’ (dream, in traditional style), which is the first character in Su Mengzhen's name.
Lei Chun: "There are 13 strokes in this character. You've gone through a painstaking effort to take his life, but it seems heaven thinks otherwise."
If you know how to count strokes, you can check it, there are really 13 strokes. And if you don't there is an explanatory pic at the end.
Bai Choufei after thinking for a while: "I don't believe in heaven's will. I believe only in myself."
And he is writing top radical θΉ in a different way than in the book: with 4 strokes instead of 3
"Fourteen. That's heaven's will. In the past people must go through me to get to him. But now, only I can take his life."
I just like how precisely he puts the final point:
The thing is that both ways of writing are acceptable. For example in yellow bridge you can find Bai Choufei's with 14 strokes. There are even more of them but I'm certainly not ready to dive into this hole. But Bai Choufei points at ε€’ in the book with 13 strokes.
And explanatory pictures: the left one is Lei Chun's, and the right one is Bai Choufei's
So they are both right, but Bai Choufei still has cheated. And personally I think it was a clever way of cheating π but thankfully heaven did not appreciate it anyway π
