Chapter 11: Tree Immortal Temple

Liu Chengzong stood by the roadside and watched Li Hongji leave.

The northwestern man had eaten and drunk his fill; his broad shoulders carried a sentry pole, he mounted that little donkey buckling under his weight, and bellowing old Shaanxi opera tunes with piercing high notes, he vanished into the desolate ancient road choked with yellow sand.

Perhaps it was because Liu Chengzong knew what this man would later do that this scene took on an extraordinary sense of ceremony for him.

In truth, he knew Li Hongji was just braving scornful looks, shamelessly persistent, to borrow a high-interest loan he would never be able to repay.

The border troops set out not long after Li Hongji left; Liu Chengzong was the last to catch up with the column because he had to call the tavern keeper back.

They had military law — no one had touched the tavern's wine — but they had used quite a lot of the man's firewood, and seeing the keeper's lame leg, it didn't look like he had a son to help split wood.

They left the extra five jin of mutton entirely for the keeper.

Firewood isn't expensive, nor was it worth five jin of meat, but this wasn't a matter of cost or worth.

At least in Liu Chengzong's eyes, this too was a ceremony.

With this ceremony, they were soldiers; without it, they were bandits.

Regrettably, to the very end, Liu Chengzong never got to see what the keeper's little daughter actually looked like.

When the border troops passed through Mizhi, they didn't run into Li Hongji on the official road; Liu Chengzong reckoned he was still at Squire Ai's residence, shamelessly persistent in borrowing money.

Later, on the road, his mind kept circling back to this man over and over.

He felt that he, his elder brother, and Cao Yao — even if born in better times — would have struggled to live out their lives in peace; they would either become officials, or generals, or still end up choosing to be bandits.

All high-risk professions.

But if Li Hongji were placed in better times, he might well have been able to live out his life as an ordinary person.

It was a pity that troubled times were approaching; before the famine, war, and plague that would sweep the realm, anyone would be crushed into a pulp of blood, flesh, and bone, smeared across the landscape.

The road south from there was all harder mountain paths; at dusk they passed through Mizhi and reached Suide. The border troops figured they had mutton to eat that night anyway, so they raised torches and marched another stretch into the night.

Unlike the nights four hundred years later in his memory, this era had no light pollution; everyone seemed to have night blindness — some truly did, and even those who didn't could hardly see anything in the dark.

Fortunately, they still had torches to light the way, letting them cross the Wuding River to the Huaining River and advance another twenty-odd li toward Qingjian.

Who would have thought that after passing Suide, they wouldn't find a place to stop for a long while; it wasn't until the second watch of the night that the famished border troops finally found a dilapidated Tree Immortal Temple at the foot of a mountain by the official road.

The Tree Immortal is a subordinate deity in northern Shaanxi folk belief, similar in nature to a Fox Immortal Temple; originally, it was simply a shrine built for a thousand-year-old tree, where people knelt and made offerings.

People believed these deities possessed abilities far beyond their designated offices; usually they worshipped whichever was closest — they were all immortals anyway, surely possessing omnipotent divine power.

Folk belief, after all, generally thrives in poorer, more isolated places, but this has nothing to do with poverty or isolation itself; it's mainly that people born in such places more easily encounter problems that are difficult to solve.

With even fewer means available to resolve them, when truly helpless they can only place their hopes in external things to seek psychological comfort.

Whether it works or not doesn't matter; with chaos looming, no matter what the request, it often all had to be handled in a single temple.

This kept the grassroots township deities of the Great Ming terribly busy.

Solving the most problems with the smallest establishment — townships have faced this dilemma in every era.

To solve this dilemma, larger temples in northern Shaanxi often featured Three Teachings Hermitages.

A so-called Three Teachings Hermitage meant a temple housing a bodhisattva, a monastery containing a god, and a Daoist shrine with a seated Buddha.

Seeking a bountiful harvest from the Child-Sending Goddess, asking Lord Guan to cure an illness, or beseeching the Zhenwu Emperor to grant a son were all perfectly normal operations.

The logic of the internet age — building an ecosystem, striving to catch every sheep and fleece it to death — is nothing new.

As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the religious circles of Shaanxi had already put this into practice.

As for a small temple like this in the desolate mountains with scant incense offerings, its capabilities were even more extraordinary and its scope of business even broader; basically, for the surrounding common folk, the old tree in this temple was an all-powerful, omnipotent great immortal.

The cave abode of the Great Tree Immortal was also a Three Teachings Hermitage: a Daoist cap hung on the branches, Confucian shoes were placed at the roots, and a kasaya was wrapped around the trunk.

On the courtyard's western wall there were still ink traces from some unknown year or month; Liu Chengzong raised a torch to illuminate it and saw written there: "If you dream an unlucky dream at night, write it on the western wall; when the sun shines upon it, it will turn into good fortune."

It made him chuckle to himself, thinking that if you had an auspicious dream at night, there'd be no need to write it on the western wall.

This gave him a much stronger sense of belonging to that other set of memories — four hundred years of vicissitudes, and it was still the same: left eye twitching means great wealth is coming, right eye twitching means to hell with your feudal superstition.

The ancestral spirit was still just the same.

The boiled mutton in the pot smelled incredibly fragrant; large chunks of coarse salt were thrown in, nothing else added, yet the aroma alone made Little Zuanfeng lift his face, narrow his eyes, stretch his long legs, and follow the scent toward the big pot, sniffing as he walked.

Even Mei Dianmei had settled down; when there was food to be had, even if you let her out of the cage she wouldn't run around, dozing on Liu Chengzong's foot, pillowed against the rawhide boot upper — utterly docile.

After a full day of marching, the border troops were all exhausted; except for the cook soldiers who had to light the fire and prepare the meal, the others leaned against the walls and didn't want to move.

A few of the fastidious ones removed their helmets and head-cloths, sat by the campfire discussing getting some sulfur powder to bathe with later, and used fine-toothed combs to pick lice from each other's hair, crushing any they caught between their fingers and tossing them into the fire.

His elder brother and Cao Yao were inside the Tree Immortal Temple, sketching terrain by torchlight, while squad leaders Tian Shoujing and Gao Xian each led a few men, circling outside the temple and digging traps beyond the courtyard wall.

At times like this, Liu Chengzong was very idle; everyone else was assigned to the smallest military units, but he alone had no attachment — he just ate without working.

All day long he wore a saber and carried arrows, had Red Flag carry his armor, and looked the part well enough, yet he had nothing to do and was bored out of his mind.

He had originally thought that since he had a warhorse anyway, he could go hunting during marches to supplement the unit's provisions; who would have guessed that beyond forty li from Yuhe Fort, the farther south they went the more desolate it became, with all vegetation stripped from both sides of the official road — where was there any place for him to hunt?

Moreover, the farther south they went, the more chaotic it became, and the less he dared to separate from the unit, so he naturally abandoned the idea.

At this moment, Liu Chengzong sat down on the front steps of the Tree Immortal Temple, holding a volume of The Plum in the Golden Vase as his paper, using the torchlight at the doorway to sketch a map from memory on the book pages with a charcoal pencil.

This book was Liu Chengzong's treasured possession; he had gotten it through a merchant traveling from the south back when he was training in martial arts with the bailiffs in Mizhi — a banned book, a real big deal.

The pages were nearly worn to tatters from his flipping.

As for the charcoal pencil in his hand, it wasn't some novel object; he had simply clamped a piece of charcoal into an empty pencil shaft to make do. Hard-tipped writing instruments had always existed in ancient times, they just weren't considered refined objects and weren't presentable in polite company.

They were only forty li from Qingjian now; this was also why they were camping at the Tree Immortal Temple and digging traps outside the courtyard wall. Qingjian was practically the birthplace of the rebel armies that rose in northern Shaanxi — there had always been plenty of bandits there before, and now those bandits had all become rebel troops.

Just among those Liu Chengzong could name — characters like Yi Zi Wang, Guo Tianxing, Hun Tianxing, Ba Dawang, and others — all were from Qingjian.

This bunch had names each more outrageous than the last; the reason they didn't use their real names was simply to hide their identities — some were former border troops, some were from prominent local families, and all had successively taken up banditry in these mountains.

Returning to his hometown of Yan'an — only a hundred li left.

Note:

Pencil — ancient name: qian qian, a tool for writing characters. Qian: lead powder; qian: wooden slip.

Han dynasty Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital, Volume 3: "Yang Ziyun was fond of such matters; he always carried lead powder and wooden slips, following various record-keeping officials to inquire about the languages of distant regions and far-flung lands."