My cousin’s classmate Xin Xin once told her that he worked as a lightning-protection engineer for an engineering technology company. Back when he was a student, he had majored in lightning protection at a certain university of information engineering. Because the specialty was so obscure, he had once worried deeply about finding employment. Yet as graduation drew near, Xin Xin began receiving one recruitment call after another from engineering companies and meteorological centers. After much hesitation, he chose the position he now holds. His grades had not been especially distinguished, but none of his classmates in the same year received any attention at all. Most of them later switched into other lines of work.

Xin Xin’s company was located in an enclosed compound halfway up a hill in the outer suburbs of Shuangpang City, shaded by trees and bordered by clear ponds. It did not take him long after starting work to notice that all his colleagues bore only four surnames: Deng, Xin, Qiao, and Tian, though their professional backgrounds varied. At first, his job was simply to review and reply to emails. These messages came from anonymous addresses and consisted of prayerful wishes for things like the safety of livestock or favorable wind and rain, matters with nothing at all to do with his specialty. Yet he was required to use an unfamiliar software package called Agave potatorum to evaluate the credibility of those anonymous addresses and issue standardized replies of different star ratings. Every day Xin Xin had to process an enormous volume of email. For a time he thought the company might be nothing more than an internet scam operating under a shell-company name, but the generous salary and his colleagues’ meticulous warmth eventually persuaded him to stay.

After a year, Xin Xin gradually mastered the work, and the supervisor surnamed Tian transferred him to the technical department, where he began taking part in maintenance assignments on site. The company really did undertake certain lightning-protection engineering projects, most of them for units responsible for the preservation of cultural relics. At last Xin Xin was able to put his training to use, repairing lightning rods and surge protectors with practiced ease. One time, while checking and repairing a side hall in a Daoist temple, the engineering team leader called Xin Xin aside and opened a UMPC for him to test the circuitry. On a strange software interface, Xin Xin saw a list of anonymous addresses constantly connecting to the server, together with message windows popping up one after another, all of them much like the prayer emails he had previously handled in his work. Xin Xin raised his head in confusion and looked toward the side hall before him, only to realize that the deity enshrined there was the Thunder God, and that the emails he had been receiving were in fact the silently mouthed prayers of worshippers kneeling before the statue. Astonished, he went to ask the engineering team leader, but the man merely nodded and walked away.

Because my younger cousin had once been rather close to Xin Xin, she was able to hear these things from him. What later became of him at that company, however, no one knows. All I know is that he remains there still and now holds no low position. By coincidence, when I was once at Mount Lao, I saw the same company doing work at the Palace of Three Purities. On the collars of those workers was a red emblem depicting a human-headed dragon body. A search with the Bi’an engine is enough to show that this is a well-known domestic guild of thunder masters, and the company is merely the form by which it survives under modern social conditions. Since ancient times, the forebears of China have held a natural reverence for thunder and lightning. From the Classic of Mountains and Seas to the Comprehensive Mirror of Immortals Through the Ages to the Complete Origins and Transmission of the Gods of the Three Teachings, religious histories and strange anecdotal records of every era contain accounts of thunder deities. Folk religion has always preserved a whole set of methods for warding off lightning and avoiding thunderbolts, the heart of which lies in devout worship of the many gods of thunder and lightning. Those who mastered this body of knowledge were honored as thunder masters. Since Deng Zhong, Xin Xing, Pang Qiao, and Tian Hua are the celestial officials of the Thunder Ministry in legend, thunder-master lineages in every region and school have historically been passed down generation after generation among these four surnames. Xin Xin was probably chosen by this guild as much because of bloodline as for any other reason.

I am not surprised that the thunder-master guild to which Xin Xin belongs possesses so many up-to-date high-tech means. What interests me is something else: how is it that a deity who, though well known, is hardly one of the most illustrious, can still command so many believers today, and that this devotion has been so carefully maintained through the centuries without interruption? What force is it that sustains such spiritual dependence? And out in the villages and wild country, how many other objects of worship still live on in the hearts of ordinary people?