Footnotes
1. In Chinese mythology, dragons possess an inverted scale on their throats. The scale must not be touched, lest the dragon kill the offender. The inverted scale is also used as a metaphor for a sore spot or weakness that can provoke strong negative reactions.
2. An excerpt from “Poems for Fanye,” by Lu Kai; Jiangnan is a region of China, south of the Yangtze River, known for its beautiful spring scenery.
3. “Xia Sini” is a homonym for the phrase “scare you to death.”
4. Chinese is a highly contextual language, and many characters share pronunciations, so people often specify characters by noting a word they appear in, e.g., “昧 (mei) as in 蒙昧 (meng mei),” as demonstrated by Xue Zhengyong in Volume 1 when giving Shi Mei his courtesy name.
5. 萌萌, Mengmeng, uses a different character from the “meng” in “Xue Meng.” It basically means “super cute,” or “moemoe,” and is a loanword from Japanese. See glossary for definition of “moe.”
6. In China, regional recipes may vastly differ. For example, tofu pudding (豆花) is typically prepared in one of two ways. The savory kind, which Chu Wanning prefers, uses soy sauce, roasted seaweed, and dried shrimp. The sweet kind with which Xue Meng and Mo Ran are familiar is made with sugar. People accustomed to savory tofu pudding often find the sweet variety unpalatable and vice versa.
7. The same Bai Wuchang whom Chu Wanning was mistaken for in Volume 1.
8. In China, mourning clothes are traditionally white.
9. Many literary critics consider Du Fu (杜甫), a Tang dynasty poet, to be one of China’s greatest poets. His works were known for their mastery of classical poetic forms and furthermore touched on the sociopolitical concerns of his time, with an emphasis on compassion for the common people.
10. A domino game.
11. To shoot through a martial artist with a steel chain through their collarbones was said to be the way to rip them of their abilities and subdue them.
12. Traditional jewelry shaped like a lock and worn around the neck. Parents take their one-month-old child to cultivators or a temple to be given an “entrusted name” so that the child can receive the protection of the gods or the Buddha. The lock represents binding the child to life.
13. 清明 Qingming, or the “Pure Brightness Festival” or “tomb-sweeping day,” is a celebration to honor the dead in early April.
14. Based on ancient nursery rhymes in the style of Zhuzhici (Bamboo Branch Poetry), a poetic form popular in the ancient Sichuan area.
15. The character one is a single horizontal line: 一
16. The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety is a classic text of twenty-four stories of Confucian filial piety. It was written by Guo Jujing during the Yuan dynasty and was used to teach Confucian moral values.
17. The art of “refining” in the Husky universe refers to the alchemical art of enhancing spiritual qualities of ingredients (plants, minerals, and such) into pills, elixirs, and medicines that can be used for various purposes, including enhancing cultivation, healing, and more.
18. An ancient Chinese politician, renowned for his virtue, said to have once held a woman in his lap without the slightest impugnation on his moral character.
19. 凌迟, lingchi, also known as “slow slicing” or “death by a thousand cuts” is a form of punishment in which pieces of a person are sliced away until they die.
20. Huainan is a famously unsuitable place to grow oranges.
21. To return.
22. These lines are adapted from Qin Guan’s “Jiangchengzi: Westside Willow Branches Adrift In Gentle Spring.” The characters for “not return” are the same as those used for “Bugui.”
23. A soup dish with thinly sliced tofu threads that melt in your mouth.
24. Elite guards responsible for their master’s safety as well as things like assassination and spying.
25. A class of anti-inflammatory pain killer that also stops bleeding.