Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa Volume 1: Chapter 2: The Treasure Hunt

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa Volume 1: Chapter 2: The Treasure Hunt

Sima Hui found the behavior of this Zhao Laobie increasingly extraordinary that the man would willingly trade valuable cigarettes and canned goods for a dirty and rotten butcher chopping board made the whole thing feel deeply out of the ordinary.

The ruins of the Black House were full of ownerless things, finders keepers. The chopping block in the shed had once been a section of thoroughly decayed tree stump, about as wide around as a man could embrace, bound with three loops of hemp rope. Years of blood and grease had long since changed the wood’s color entirely. Someone had salvaged it and used it as a cutting board ever since. Nobody knew its exact origins, but beyond its obvious age, there seemed nothing remarkable about it. So why on earth would anyone want it?

Sima Hui thought it over: This block must be some kind of treasure. If I let myself be tempted by a little gain and hand it over to Zhao Laobie too easily, I’ll come out the loser no matter what I get in return. Better to stall and make it seem like a rare commodity.

So he started spinning a story on the spot: “Old Master Zhao, you don’t know the half of it. My family ran a butcher shop in Beijing, slaughtering pigs and sheep for a living. This rotted old block may look ordinary, but it’s a family heirloom passed down through generations. Not only am I completely used to working with it, it’s one of those things where you see the saddle and think of the horse, you know? Every time I look at it, I think of my grandfather, God rest his soul. You’d have to go back to the Guangxu years to understand when the Boxers besieged the Legation Quarter and brought the Eight-Nation Alliance marching into Beijing. Those foreign devils came from savage lands beyond civilization, not a decent one among them. Once they got into China, naturally it was burning, killing, looting every manner of wickedness. Beating the blind, cursing the deaf, kicking in widows’ doors, digging up the graves of men with no descendants, beating ownerless dogs you name it, if it was rotten, they’d do it. Well, they came looting right to our door. A few foreign soldiers spotted our big calico cat and wanted to take it back as a gift for their queen. That sent my grandfather into a fury. He said: back in the day, the Empress Dowager Cixi herself wanted that cat, offered three imperial princesses in trade, and we still wouldn’t give it to her so who does your foreign queen think she is? In his rage, he ran out into the street to resist the foreigners, swinging a butcher’s block at every foreign soldier and officer he could find. Who knows how many he knocked flat with that very plank of wood. Later it passed to my father’s generation, and he carried it with him all the way to Jiangxi when he joined the Red Army, and it’s been kept safe ever since. To anyone else this old wooden lump might be worthless, but to me it’s a witness to my family’s journey through China’s modern revolutionary history. It’s something I can’t let go of. I do my morning and evening devotions in front of it every day if I can’t see it, I lose my bearings completely, can’t even tell which way is north. A day without it feels like three seasons apart. And three days without it? Don’t even talk about anxiousness and heartburn that’s the least of it. Not a single false word in what I’m saying, I swear it on my life. If you don’t believe me, bring me a block of tofu and I’ll headbutt it hard enough to show you my brains.”

Luo Dashetou stood nearby laughing, and seized the chance to pile on, goading Zhao Laobie to put up at least three more cartons of premium cigarettes before the thing could be traded away.

Zhao Laobie was dumbfounded. He thought he must have misjudged the item. He stared at the block again for a long while, then shook his head in disbelief and opened his burlap sack to show the two of them there was nothing of value left inside. “There’s no way I’m adding more to the offer.”

Seeing things had reached this point, Sima Hui decided to speak plainly: “We’re thieves who’ve run into a safecracker no point in either of us playing dumb. Let’s stop pretending. We know your game, we’ve seen it plenty of times before. No need to keep dancing around it. We figured out long ago that you, Zhao Laobie, are a treasure-hunter otherwise, what living person goes around hanging a string of dog-repellent cakes around their own neck?”

The “dog-repellent cake” was a medicinal tablet used to drive away cats and dogs. In the old days, when someone in the countryside died, such a string was often hung around the corpse’s neck while it lay in state, to prevent starving dogs from gnawing at the body or wild cats from leaping over it and causing the corpse to reanimate. Treasure-hunters who frequented deep mountains, old forests, and desolate grave sites had a habit of carrying these cakes to ward off venomous snakes and wild animals.

Zhao Laobie could see that this Sima Hui, though no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, was a sharp-minded little fox who knew a great deal and wouldn’t be easily fooled. But he had never imagined the boy could see through his disguise, and was quietly taken aback. He said with genuine admiration: “This young chief has sharp eyes. I didn’t think anyone in this day and age would still recognize the trade of a treasure-hunter.”

With things having come to this, Zhao Laobie had no choice but to come clean, admitting that he was indeed a treasure-hunter and that today was a stroke of pure luck he had stumbled across this butcher’s block quite by chance among the Black House ruins. Truly, as the saying goes: you search for it on worn-out shoes and find it without even trying.

He then told Sima Hui and Luo Dahai straight: “I won’t mince words with real men. That old rotted wooden block of yours is genuinely a rare thing but vast as this world is, there isn’t a second person alive besides me who could recognize it for what it is. It’s getting late. Let’s part for now, you two think it over. Since we’ve already said this much, I won’t let you come out badly. I’ve got something good hidden in town I’ll bring it tomorrow. If you take a look and still won’t trade, I’ll say no more I’ll turn and walk away and never come back. There’s an old saying, isn’t there? Miss this village and there’s no inn like it down the road. Don’t come to me regretting it later.”

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai nodded their agreement and watched Zhao Laobie leave the Black House. They immediately returned to the shed, held a kerosene lamp over the grimy, decayed block, and turned it over and around for a long while but no matter how they examined it, they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. They went to bed that night turning it over in their minds, and neither slept a wink.

Early the very next morning, Zhao Laobie showed up again as promised. This time, his burlap sack contained a fur robe, sleek and lustrous, the pelt black with a reddish sheen, somewhat resembling sable but noticeably lighter and thinner. Not that Sima Hui or Luo Dahai would have known sable from anything else they’d never seen so much as a sable hair in their lives. So they put on a knowing air and asked Zhao Laobie: “What kind of pelt is this? Looks pretty fine, all smooth and gleaming what, ox hide?”

Zhao Laobie was rather pleased with himself, and with a certain showman’s flair he said: “The story behind this fur robe of mine is no ordinary one.” He then proceeded to tell them its origins.

Before Liberation, he had gone to the Changbai Mountains to dig for ginseng and spent his nights lodging at a logger’s camp in the forest. The camp kept an old cat striped like a tiger, fat and hearty, and remarkably nimble: it could climb trees to raid bird nests and come down again to catch mice.

After staying at the camp long enough, Zhao Laobie grew familiar with the creature and often fed it scraps. But after a while, every morning when he headed into the mountains, he would find the cat sprawled in a tree, panting and utterly spent, too tired to so much as flick its tail. This went on for several days in a row.

Zhao Laobie thought something was very strange. A treasure-hunter’s eyes are sharp, and one look told him this cat must have had some remarkable encounter. He resolved to find out what was happening, and began secretly following and watching it. He discovered that as soon as dusk fell each evening, the old cat would make its way to the mountain god’s shrine, slip in through a crack in the door, and crouch motionless in the dark shadows of a corner, lying in wait.

Then, deep in the night when all was still, a commotion would start in the rafters of the shrine. Down from the beams would come an enormous rat as big as a dog, its eyes gleaming like torches and it would creep up before the altar, dip its tail into the oil lamp to drink the offering oil, and gnaw at the tallow candles with a scritch-scratch sound.

At this point the old cat would burst from its corner, and the two would fall into fierce battle. But the giant rat, for all its size, was no fool it was ferocious and utterly fearless of its natural enemy. The cat was agile but could not gain the upper hand. They tumbled and wrestled without end, a fight to the death with each pulling out every trick it had, and neither could prevail.

Zhao Laobie watched from the moonlight with perfect clarity, and now understood why the cat came every night to fight this giant rat and was exhausted by dawn. He became so absorbed watching these ancient enemies do battle that his whole body grew tense and then, without meaning to, he knocked over a broken door plank.

The giant rat was completely focused on fighting the cat when it heard the sudden noise behind it. Startled, it lost concentration for just an instant just enough to expose a weakness. The cat pounced, and bit through its throat. Blood gushed like a spring, staining the stone floor of the shrine. The rat thrashed for a good while before its eyes rolled white and it breathed its last. As the saying goes: in the end a winner must emerge, a victor must be decided.

Zhao Laobie was a connoisseur who recognized rare things. He knew that this rat had spent years eating oil and gnawing wax, had cultivated a considerable store of essence, and had developed real inner power. He drew out his knife, skinned the rat, and with the addition of certain materials back at camp, fashioned it into a fur jacket. In the depths of winter, when outside the Pass water freezes where it falls, a man who wore this rat-skin jacket even bare-skinned underneath would break a sweat on his forehead in the coldest depths of the season. To outsiders, though, he never admitted it was century-old rat skin; instead he called it a Fire Dragon Foal pelt.

Zhao Laobie told Sima Hui and Luo Dahai: never mind the blazing heat now when the autumn winds come, the leaves turn yellow, and wild geese call gah-gah overhead flying south, you’ll still be living in this broken shed in the Black House, and the cold, damp air will seep into your bones before long. Mark my words, you’ll come to need this Fire Dragon Foal robe of mine.

Sima Hui knew this fur robe was Zhao Laobie’s final card. In any case, his own eye couldn’t tell what made that old wooden stump a treasure. He might as well make the trade. He agreed on the spot but then said to Zhao Laobie: “I’ll do this deal with you, fair enough. But you’ve got to be straight with us, Master. Don’t let us be fools who don’t know what hit them. You need to explain the whole story of this butcher’s block where it came from, how you noticed something strange about it, and what you plan to do with it once you have it. Leave a single thing unexplained, and I, Sima Hui, would sooner take an axe and split the thing to firewood than let you walk off with a windfall at our expense.”

Zhao Laobie looked deeply uncomfortable: “Young Chief Sima, you’re being unreasonable. There’s an old saying stitch the mandarin ducks for others to admire, but never pass on the golden needle. We’re making a straight trade here, item for item. I haven’t shortchanged you by a hair. How can you demand I give away all my trade secrets?”

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai, for all their time running wild in society, were still boys at heart with an overpowering curiosity they couldn’t let anything rest until they’d gotten to the bottom of it. They couldn’t even sleep properly without knowing the full story. The two of them pestered and pleaded, soft and hard by turns, absolutely insisting that Zhao Laobie come fully clean. They swore an oath that afterward they’d never go back on the deal or betray him to anyone.

Zhao Laobie, having run into these two, had to count himself unlucky, and surrendered a measure of the truth.

Everyone said treasure-hunters had sharp eyes, and it was quite true. Yesterday at midday, passing by the Black House ruins, his glance had swept across and caught something unusual about one particular shed.

The eye for treasure is a skill more than that, it is experience. How to put it? Once you really break it down, it isn’t nearly as mystical as common folk imagine. It’s not that from a great distance you can already see golden light blazing from inside a shed. Rather, the treasure-hunter is extraordinarily observant, capable of noticing tiny details that ordinary people simply overlook.

As Zhao Laobie walked past, he noticed many abnormal signs around the shed. In such scorching weather, with the Black House area knee-deep in refuse and Luo Dahai having just dressed a wild boar leaving blood and offal everywhere, the place ought by rights to be thick with swarming flies and buzzing mosquitoes. Yet around the shed behind Sima Hui and Luo Dahai there was not a single fly to be seen. Was that not strange?

Zhao Laobie guessed that something valuable might be nearby. He stopped at once, made up an excuse about wanting a drink of water, sat down outside the shed’s entrance, and carefully studied his surroundings until his gaze settled on the decaying wooden chopping block. That block was a section of old tree stump, bound around with hemp rope, and on top of it sat a pig’s head with its dead eyes wide open. Fresh blood dripped onto the surface of the block yet not a drop ran off. It was all slowly seeping into the crevices of the wood.

Zhao Laobie concluded at a glance that something extraordinary must lie within this grimy, grease-soaked wooden block. The stump that served as a cutting board had in its living days been taken from a large tree. Before that tree was felled, a crack and a wormhole had already formed in its trunk, and a small centipede had crawled inside. Having lived within the tree for so long, it gradually grew too large to exit through the hole it had entered, and became trapped inside. Wood is yin in nature, its grain filled with sap, and this had sustained the centipede for years without it dying.

Later, when people felled the tree and shaped the timber, the section containing the centipede was fashioned into the blood-draining butcher’s block of a meat stall. The centipede within was then able to feed continuously on pig’s blood, and over the long years had formed a pearl within itself a Wind-Calming Pearl, so named because centipede pearls were said to treat gout, though with no connection to the pearl used to subdue the Banana Fan in Journey to the West. Eventually this section of butcher’s block was discarded by the butcher, and somehow ended up in the Black House ruins. The old centipede inside had long since starved to death, but the pearl should still be there. This Wind-Calming Pearl essence condensed from yin decay and old blood was what kept mosquitoes and flies from approaching. And it was this pearl that Zhao Laobie was after.

Sima Hui didn’t quite dare believe it could it really be so certain? He immediately found an axe and split the block open. Inside, sure enough, lay a large centipede, red all over its body, now cut in two by the axe blade. Dead, yet not decomposed its legs and feelers still looked alive. And held in the centipede’s jaws was a pearl, white and round, entirely without luster, looking for all the world like a fish-eye bead, the kind you’d use to pass off as a genuine pearl.

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai looked at each other in speechless astonishment. Only now did they truly, fully concede defeat. The fault lay entirely with their own dull eyes  they had lived alongside a treasure for so long and seen nothing at all. Regretting it now was useless. Tonight they’d just have to lie there and feed the mosquitoes.

Zhao Laobie gave a smug chuckle. He was delighted inside, but put on a show of consoling them: “There’s that old saying, isn’t there what fate gives you is eight feet; you can’t beg a full yard. Both of you are young heroes with your whole lives ahead. Perhaps this pearl wasn’t meant for you, but the road is long, and besides you’ve gotten a fur robe, cigarettes, plenty of good food besides. What’s there to be unsatisfied about? This is two parties each getting what they need; nobody’s come out the worse. Mountains don’t move but rivers flow we’ll meet again.” With that, he pinched the Wind-Calming Pearl in his fingers and turned to go.

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai, their curiosity at full pitch, were absolutely not ready to leave it there. They rushed to block him: “You still haven’t told us everything how can you just walk away? What’s so special about this fish-eye pearl? What are you going to do with it?”

Zhao Laobie hesitated slightly. He hadn’t intended to say more. But looking at Sima Hui and Luo Dahai two bold, reckless young men who feared neither ghosts nor gods he reflected that he was about to venture into the mountains alone, and could use a pair of capable hands at his side. If these two could be persuaded to help, wouldn’t that considerably improve his odds? Thinking this over, Zhao Laobie narrowed his eyes, glanced at the sky, and said in a low voice:

“Look at the layout of this Black House ancient town it ought by rights to be a prime piece of fengshui, a place where the phoenix spreads its wings and the jade belt emerges from its case. So why has the land been barren and the people poor for so many years?”

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai were completely puzzled. “We don’t understand fengshui and ancient geography. But they say the Black House has has always been poor overgrown with thorns and weeds, cracked barren earth where almost nothing grows. By any measure it looks nothing like a treasure land.”

Zhao Laobie said “That’s exactly what I was getting at that’s the strangeness of it. Although the geography here is good, something is missing from these mountains and rivers: that vital energy unique to a true fengshui land. So I’m certain at the far end of the earth’s veins, deep in some wilderness there must be buried an ancient object buried untouched for a thousand years, dark and yin-soaked, and it has been drinking up all the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, draining the life from this entire stretch of land. But as the saying goes, seeing is believing just what lies inside those mountains, we cannot yet guess lightly..”