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ough this is delicious, but is that bottom left right-up stroke possible? liek are there other examples

Possible insofar as it existed enough to inspire a one-off modern regularized form, but its even more made-up than most — I don’t think you’ll find it anywhere today outside the obsolete Japanese paleography research tool the author was using

What does it say? Did it exist in the wild, or only in vitro at Xu Shen's institute? Most importantly: does it have a code point in the new Unicode 18.0 xiaozhuan which came out last week?

Haven’t dug deeper - I’m getting John Cikoski’s old ‘Lexicon of Classical Chinese” into machine-readable form from PDF; this shows up in a section of the intro where he talks about hapax graphs in the 淮南子, where received text has 惑. (Also mentions received 高 instead of 嵩, but that one was boring.)

Ok, so Taixue lab-leak theory has legs.

I feel like this is like xor but like, just a super or

i tried reading this as <waak> followed by an attempt to pronounce it backwards <kaaw> before realizing that <waakkaaw> is just reinventing 哇靠 from first principles

it also works if you imagine Keanu Reeves giving the modern Mandarin reading and sounding very impressed