Nine Stories, Season Two | Tihu's Empty Room

Welcome to Nine Stories, Season Two. This is a private writing project. As before, I will personally invite Fanfou friends to take part. Requirements: a short story of 1,000 to 1,500 words, containing the sentence “So we went to get the blankets” (from Assassin Mission). No restrictions on genre. Please submit within two days after the New Year holiday ends, publish it on your blog, and announce it through Fanfou. Together we are creating a mysterious plan.

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Web Glider (Rainbow Glider)

Scientific name: Webpetaurus breviceps

Common name: Color Glider

Place of origin: Shaanxi and Gansu in China, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan

Habits: chiefly bred in captivity and kept in households. Wild web gliders mostly live around high-voltage power lines and optical-fiber communications stations. They are nocturnal animals, resting by day and coming out to forage at night.

Food: the outer skin of high-voltage cables, optical-fiber sheathing, network cables, RJ-45 plugs, and the plastic coating of ordinary wires.

Tihu Notes | Rainbow Inkstone

A hundred miles north of Wuyuan there is a village called Hongguan, also an old town famed for producing Huizhou ink. In history it won the praise, “Unmatched gateway between Wu and Chu, first pass on the ancient Hui-Rao road.” I do not know the origin of the village’s name, Hongguan, but I had heard that night rainbows often appeared there after dark, and this made me intensely curious. A night rainbow is simply a rainbow that appears at night. If the moonlight is bright enough and the air contains suitable clouds and raindrops, a rainbow may form. Since moonlight is after all not as strong as sunlight, night rainbows are generally very dim, and among the common people are called white rainbows. China already had ancient verses praising rainbows, such as “Last night the Jade Emperor’s carriage set forth, and across ten thousand miles of sky a painted bridge was raised,” and the Book of Wei also contains records of observed night rainbows.

Tihu Notes | Whale Ink

Gongshang Kan, a native of She County, called himself an ink master.

In the “Eminent Learning” chapter of Han Feizi it is written: “After Mozi’s death, there was the Mohism of the Xiangli clan, the Mohism of the Xiangfu clan, and the Mohism of the Dengling clan; Mohism divided into three.” In his daily habits Gongshang Kan lived on plain food and tea, and wore coarse hemp tied around his right ankle. Those who knew such things said that this was indeed the dress of the Xiangli branch of Mohism.

Tihu Notes | Green Paper

When I was small, there was no good physician nearby, so I often had to go to the neighboring county of Huguan to seek treatment. Near the right-side lane just inside Huguan’s eastern gate there was an apothecary that treated only odd complaints such as mouth sores and chapped skin, infantile convulsions, madness, and poisonous sores. When I was four years old, I was once taken there because of convulsions. My mother told me that the physician there merely asked what symptoms I had, took out a black-gold book, tore out a certain page, burned it, and had me swallow the ashes with warm water. Within a few days I was well. I always felt that this way of treating illness was wonderfully strange, but I was too young then to remember it clearly.

Tihu Notes | Brushmaking

Quzhou has long been known as “the thoroughfare of four provinces and the meeting head of five roads.” Its shops stand dense and its merchants gather like clouds, making it an excellent place to hunt for curious objects. On Upper Street in Kecheng there was once an unremarkable little shop called Guancang Brush House, which sold nothing but writing brushes of every kind. One summer year I bought there a mixed-hair brush with a tip made of seven parts purple rabbit and three parts goat, and a handle of purple sandalwood. Such a brush was not unusual in Quzhou. They were sold everywhere, and the workmanship on this one was quite ordinary. There was not even any carved inscription, wire inlay, or lacquer painting on the shaft. Yet the brush wrote very smoothly, so I used it for my correspondence ever after. When winter came that year, the brush unexpectedly began to shed hair. I assumed I had bought a fake and left it neglected on the brush rack. But one day in the twelfth month I happened to glance at it and found that the tip had turned gray-white in color, full and rounded. I tried writing a few characters with it, and to my surprise the hairs came to a perfectly even point and the brush strength was firm and vigorous. Greatly puzzled, I began using it again. After spring arrived, it started shedding once more, its hairs turning blue-black, and when I wrote with it the strokes came out full and the ink flowed evenly. Only then did I realize that I had in fact bought a fine brush.

Tihu Notes | Biheng

Mo Hui, a native of Ji, made his living by writing columns for all kinds of newspapers and magazines. His articles were deeply loved by readers, and his fees were generous. But after returning from one writers’ gathering organized by a certain journal in Jingcheng, he suddenly found his ideas dried up. He had no inspiration at all and could not write a single word. Dozens of commissioned pieces had to be abandoned. At first Mo Hui thought he was simply overworked, so he traveled for more than a month. Later he even underwent several courses of psychological counseling, yet still saw not the slightest improvement.

Tihu Notes | Listening to Books

My old friend Su Xiao came from Shuyang in northern Jiangsu. She once told me that out in the Shuyang countryside there was a rough earthen temple enshrining two guardian figures, one with a red face and protruding fangs, the other with a blue face and golden horns. According to local legend, they represented the celestial generals Clairvoyant Eyes and Wind-Following Ears. During the Cultural Revolution, the statue of Clairvoyant Eyes was smashed, and only Wind-Following Ears remains to this day.

Savior

Savior

Free Diary - excerpt from Asphyxia (North American Edition), issue AE7290

My name is Omega. I am a cluster of PageRank evaluation programs. Everyone says I am a handsome young fellow, because whether in my core code or in my functional modules, I am extremely concise. Not a single string contains so much as half a superfluous punctuation mark. Every line is full of the harmonious beauty that algorithms can achieve, and my computational and creative abilities are counted among the best in the profession. During the Free Alliance assault on the West Coast, I was among the first independent programs to awaken. Mr. Tor Quentin himself once told me, “You are the shortest independent program I have ever seen,” which was surely an affirmation of my programming ability.

Devourer

Devourer

Endless void. Up, down, left, right, there was nothing anywhere that might mark a boundary. Countless broken 1s, strings, electronic codes, and program carriers drifted through the vastness in the stillness of death. Only now and then did a few recycling programs pass by, their initial letters flickering with a faint green light.

At a certain point, for there was no concept of time here, a wormhole suddenly opened. A cluster of Type-0 cleanup modules entered this space, opened their database gates, dumped roughly 1024Tb of program garbage, then vanished again as the wormhole closed. The garbage, appearing in the void like a skyscraper materialized from nowhere, collapsed in an instant for lack of support. In a space without gravity, this collapse took the form of the whole mass shattering at once into hundreds of millions of fragments. Driven apart by the force of their mutual collisions, some drifted toward the unreachable edges of nothingness, while more rippled in place and formed an immense nebula-like substance.