Esports. A youth abandoned his studies and sank into esports. His parents could not dissuade him. On the summer solstice he played through the night, and by morning both legs had broken out in more than a dozen nameless swellings, each as large as a game piece, with pain that ran to the marrow when touched. He sought treatment from my teacher. The master pierced them with silver needles and drew out several keycaps, all keys commonly used in games. After that, his parents no longer dared indulge him, and the boy himself grew afraid.
E-venom. On the harbor coast, beneath the reefs, there is an insect called the e, one inch long, with a pale poisonous head and a hundred legs. Fishermen fry it to go with drink; it wards off rheumatism, though all ten fingers turn blue. There was once a champion swimmer surnamed Cui, much afflicted by rheumatism, who used e as a medicinal catalyst and improved astonishingly. Over the next two years he ate several thousand of them. At last the poison in their heads struck his heart, and all four limbs were ruined.
Kiev. I once owned a Soviet-made Kiev camera, whose images came out with exquisite delicacy. A visitor dropped it by accident and damaged the lens, so I sought someone skilled to repair it. We tested it on a certain man. He wore a white shirt, yet in the developed picture he appeared in red, which someone said had been what he wore the day before. We shot more than a dozen rolls after that. In every one, the people in the pictures appeared from a time earlier than the moment they were taken, though by varying lengths. Later this Kiev got mixed in among other cameras and was sold off through China Camera Net. I regret it still.
Poison Pill. A certain academy published books and prepared poison pills against piracy. Before long, scanned editions appeared exactly as expected, and there was no way to ban them. The academy also released e-books of its own, mingled with the pirated copies so that none could tell them apart. Whoever read a poison-pill edition forgot more than half the Chinese characters he knew, precisely those used in the book. Within ten days the afflicted numbered in the thousands, and there was no cure.
Lightning Ants. One night in the wuzi year, before a violent rainstorm, thunder crashed with terrible force. In Yulin an old tree caught fire, its branches and leaves falling away and turning into countless fiery insects that scattered in all directions. For ten li around, breakers tripped and every power source was destroyed. A child with milk teeth caught several of the fire insects in a jar, looked at them, and said: these are lightning ants.
Pocket Zongzi. In an old house in central Shanxi there was a neighbor named Zhao Honghu who could make five-cornered pocket zongzi, five cun long and weighing five liang and five qian, with reed leaves for clothing, milfoil for belts, glutinous rice for flesh, millet for bone, little dates for organs, and ash broth for blood. They tasted sweet without cloying, warded off the five poisons, and were made by an old Tang-dynasty method now lost. Zhao Honghu’s father knew how to make horn millet dumplings; his grandfather knew how to make owl soup.
Corpse Turtle. The corpse turtle lives in marshland, jade-bodied and green-shelled. Whenever it appears, decline is near. Before every match of the Chinese national football team, one can often find it lurking within five chi of the head coach.
Sleight of Hand. A shut-in named Liang Liang loved to live coiled up indoors, downloading beyond count. His hard drive had so many bad sectors it was nearly unusable. He took the drive, tucked it into a bag, went to the computer market, and came back a short while later. When he looked again, it had become a brand-new hard drive. This was merely the art of the empty hand and not worth wonder. What cannot be explained is that all the data stored on the drive was still there.
Wordsmith. The wordsmith Chi excelled at writing and became famous for phantom prose, producing seven thousand characters a day and gathering a million admirers. On his birthday a visitor presented him with a keyboard carved from Kunlun jade, worth a fortune. Chi refused it, saying: when the network is broad, the thinking is broad. So the visitor had fiber optic lines installed at Chi’s place, and the wordsmith accepted that instead.
Gua Sha. Gua sha is a therapy of Chinese medicine. In the Ming, Guo Zhisui wrote the Yuheng of Sha Distention, recording one hundred and forty-two kinds of sha disorders. A scholar who spent all year before a screen developed a pain in the back and sought treatment. The healer used two GeIL memory sticks as gua sha boards. It hurt terribly. When asked why, he replied: if a craftsman would do good work, he must first sharpen his tools. At the time, this seemed acceptable.