This is easily one of the most relatable chapter of the manhua. Yes, hello, I’ve been to that torture chamber. In fact, I still make regular visits. Poor Chen Shi. Now beware, wall of text with notes.

If you remember, Taihe Lou was the restaurant where they got food in chapter 10 and the name literally means “restaurant Calm and Peaceful”.

Honest with all customers - literally “cheat neither old nor young”, it’s a common shop sign.

Spring Lantern Love Story - that’s a fictional book, and what I assume to be a rather cheesy romance novel. Spring lanterns are an important part of the Lunar New Year celebrations, culminating in the Lantern festival. The Spring Lantern festival usually involves many, many different lanterns, some complicated and elaborate, all creating a magical atmosphere. It was also one of the few nights when even the most sheltered young women would be allowed to leave their households, allowing for a perfect opportunity to meet a romantic partner… There’re also the wishing lanterns - what can be more romantic than sending a lantern to the sky with your sweetheart while making a wish? That’s probably the reason why spring lanterns seem to be a rather common romantic trope.

You know it… - I’m not fully sure I translated it right. The writing is quite a bit smudged, and it’s hard to make out - I’m going with “you know” because it’s the only thing that seemed to make sense. If I’m right, this phrase means something that cannot be said out loud, like an “I can’t say it, but oh, you know what I mean”. That leads me to believe that the novel Chen Shi unknowingly brought to Li Bing was a little… spicy. Oops?

Polysyllabic words - while it might seem that in Chinese one character = one word, that’s not actually true. A lot of words comprise of two or more characters. In some situations it can be difficult to distinguish between a polysyllabic word and two monosyllabic words that just happen to be near each other…

The “dictionary” Alibaba is holding is Shuowen Jiezi - literally “discussing writing and explaining characters”. It’s one of the first Chinese dictionaries, and the first one that made effort to categorize characters by their shared components known as radicals. It’s how a lot of modern dictionaries are organized - since in Chinese it’s impossible to use any kind of alphabetic order due to the lack of, well, alphabet.

One of the fun things of translating a manhua set in historical China is the amount of types of characters used. The dialogue is written in modern, simplified Chinese. However, at the time of the story most of those simplifications didn’t even exist, and those that did weren’t usually official, so any text that’s supposed to exist within the story has to be written in traditional characters. And finally, we have the ancient seal script that was outdated in the story timeline, but remained in some places - like the word “Prison” in this chapter. Add to this the fact that Alibaba speaks a lot in this chapter (in his usual wrong-toned manner), and you can imagine just how frustrating this chapter was to translate and typeset…