"Hello, hello, hello." The director shook Shang Luo's arm, "Your Excellency Shijun is really as radiant as rumored, and I can see you by the light of my surname." ”

"Hello." Shang Luo found that everyone who came from Lan Fang seemed to have one thing in common - they liked to shake hands. But unlike the Roman handshake, the wrist is held here, and there is no hand-to-hand contact. This kind of handshake has a rule in the Kinai area: those who don't know don't shake it. The two of them will only hold each other if they really know each other, but Shang Luo doesn't know the director in front of him now.

There seem to be some subtle differences in etiquette between the two sides, due to the physical distance between regions and differences in other living habits. Considering that it is almost 4,000 kilometers from Pontianak to Yingtian, and it is almost as long as the Heihe Tengchong Line, the two sides can still maintain smooth exchanges, thanks to the absolute hegemony brought by the Mingluo Mutual Emperor system. As a result, the exchange between Kinai and Nanyang has never been interrupted, and there has been no estrangement.

But Shang Luo also perceived some details that were more wonderful than the "estrangement".

"This director, aren't you a qi practitioner?"

When he shook hands, he felt that there was no real qi flowing in the hands of the director in front of him. But he seems to know a lot about the news between Qi practitioners.

After a brief photo, the director left the script, and then hurried to help Yunqiu audition first.

"It's a bit of a rush right now." Zheng Shijie explained, "It was supposed that the casting director should have come to talk to you about it slowly. However, we transferred this camera team overnight, and there was only one director. You take a look first, and I'll tell you if you don't understand, after all, this script is also written according to my meaning. ”

"I do have a problem." He put down the script first and expressed his doubts - how much ordinary people in Nanyang know about immortal arts.

This is important. Because the "curtain" of immortal art will be lowered in recent years, and the slowest will only be a few decades, or a few years if it is fast. If something happens, the curtain may fall tomorrow.

He wanted to ask Zheng Shijie to predict what the general public would think about this.

"You ask this, this is indeed different from Kinai. If you want to ask Nanyang, you must first define what Nanyang is. Broadly speaking, it is not only the land under the territory of Lan Fang, but also many real earth guards that are not part of Nanyang, including countless princely states, and tributary states such as Siam, Burma, and Laos. The situation in the South Seas is complicated, and Lan Fang is only a part of the South Seas. Of course, I am also the Minister of Nanyang. ”

"Minister of the South Seas? So, what is the Minister of Nanyang probably in charge of? ”

"It's hard to say what to do, it's a troublesome errand. Theoretically, we are not their superiors, but we are responsible for the liaison between them and the imperial court, and specific problems have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. For example, Siam is a Xia monarch and a people - in other words, the king and most of the upper echelons of Siam are Chinese, and we have to treat them with the same attitude as the people. But they are still theoretically 'toasts' and can't really participate in the affairs of the imperial court. Generally speaking, it is similar to those Han Tusi in Myanmar, except that Siam is particularly large. But when it is so special, it creates special problems. For example, when the King of Siam came back to visit his relatives, how to calculate his visa. ”

"And how is this calculated?"

"The Siamese family is counted according to the people of Jinai, so they go through the customs passage to return to their homeland, not the border control channel. But his excess entourage had to go separately and the border inspection separately, which was generally arranged in this way. What's even more troublesome for me is that the King of Siam is also surnamed Zheng for some reason, and the King of Cham next door is still surnamed Zheng, and I have the same surname, and those who don't know still think that I have any relationship with them. In fact, it doesn't matter at all, their family is from Chaoshan, Guangdong, and I am from Quanzhou, Fujian, but I can't stand some people guessing randomly, and they also come to have a relationship with me. ”

"Ah, then, the scope of your family name is actually quite small?"

"So herein lies the problem. The essence of Lanfang is that it is an 'administrative service company'. Although we actually have only three cities, Pontianak in Borneo, Sin Chau in Malacca, and Shengzhou in Java and their surrounding areas, the people of the Nanyang countries I mentioned above are living in the country. The official title is 'Hakka Chinese', because all of us are Hakka in the household department. Most of them will pick a permanent residence in Sin Chau or Pontianak and then go out when necessary. So we have a very dense population there, and the exchange of information is very fast. In recent decades, we have also begun to develop industries related to the cultivation of immortals, with hundreds of thousands of employees. ”

"Do they all know that there are immortals?"

"I don't really know. For example, the main industry in a certain village is the cultivation of medicinal herbs, but this does not mean that everyone knows medical skills. What do you say about everyone's perception of immortal arts?"

He rubbed his head: "I think it's easier for you to understand from your point of view: the same as the perception of superpowers in the 20th century." Science is prosperous, but not so prosperous, and not every corner of the field of common sense has been thoroughly explored. So you go out on the street and ask, 'Do you believe in superpowers?' Do you believe that the potential of the human body can be stimulated? It's hard for most people to say 'don't believe it' in absolute terms. The same is true of our perception of immortal arts here, everyone knows that there is such a thing, but so far there has not been a miracle of immortal magic in front of the world, so the general mentality is 'maybe', 'maybe', 'maybe there is', 'if only there was'. ”

"So that's the case" In this way, the cognition shown by the director just now makes sense. On top of the common cognition, he took a step closer and directly connected with Zheng Shijie to work, and most of them were on the phone yesterday, so it was normal to know about Shang Luo.

"You seem to be interested in this?"

"Because if you look at it according to Dao Ancestor's plan, I will decide when to bring down the curtain of immortal arts, and this switch is in my hands. The director of this play, not surprisingly, also wanted me to be it. It's a tough question. Because it's going to change everyone's lives forever. But there is another thing I want to ask more than that: how much do you know about 'my family'? ”

"It's completely based on the knowledge that Brother Ye shared with me, I don't know at all. He would occasionally talk to me, and I had also talked to him about the topic of 'the public's perception of immortals' that you just asked. He also told me the analogy of 'superpowers'. ”

(End of chapter)