In the autumn of the Renchen year, a certain Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a bailiff, and burrowed into the ground to escape, all because his fruit-and-melon cart had been confiscated and his livelihood left with nothing to stand on. His wife and daughter later saw him online on his phone and asked where he was. He replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.
Students of the prefectural school say that on Qintai Road there is a seamstress of extraordinary skill. Her clothwork is so fine that the pencil cases she makes circulate widely through the markets, priced at three hundred in gold; if one carries them, they say one’s brush income rises by thirty percent. By chance I once obtained one of her tablet sleeves: tea-colored cloth, blue cord, and a small character for “rainbow” sewn at one corner. Even without a VPN, it could still post to Twitter.
There was once a beggar by the Jin River who scavenged along Chunxi Road. One day he heard someone whisper into his ear: don’t pick that up. He turned at once to look for the voice and saw a red can, though he could not read the writing on it, and there was still a little liquid left inside. So he picked it up and drank it. For twenty years afterward he never once fell ill.
Luodai has long been a Hakka settlement, and in recent years has become famous for sorrowful liangfen. To the west of town there is a shop called Black Liangfen. The owner’s face is as dark as black jade, and everyone assumes he must be African. He himself says he is descended from the Kunlun slaves. In the kitchen there are no knives to be seen, only a matched pair of double-edged swords.
At the Stone Chamber Academy of Wen Weng there was a boy named Qiao, twelve years old, who made a client-based online game with three hundred thousand users online and angel money behind it. At times he would eat several books in a day, mostly programming manuals and study guides, saying that one comes to know things by eating them.
In Mengjia Alley there lived an old man surnamed Yu, ninety years of age, with three nostrils, the middle one plugged with beeswax. He loved tobacco and sat alone at the mouth of the alley all day long. Once snow fell over Chengdu for three days, yet within three zhang of his body the paving bricks stayed dry as ever.
A certain Gong, a native of Qionglai who made his living as a web editor, was once discussing the Way of Yanhuang Wuxiang when suddenly the screen went black. Then something passed outside the window, scales reversed and blue-black, dozens of zhang in length, with neither head nor tail in sight; only after some moments did it finish passing by. Gong was on the twenty-first floor. The whole room was terrified, but his expression alone did not change.
The post of final proofreader in a newspaper office is perilous work. Men have lost their positions over taboo strokes of the brush, or even landed in prison. Zhou Kai of the Shu Daily kept a gray bird, crow-shaped, that could speak human words. Whenever an issue was about to go to print, Zhou would first let the bird look over the copy. If nothing taboo had been violated, it would make a sound like “proper, proper”; if some forbidden matter had been touched, it would spread its wings as if preparing to fly far away. Later the Classic of Mountains and Seas recorded this creature as the tuo-bird, named for its cry, born of carrion and feeding on decay.
A man surnamed Feng from Bazhong was drinking with companions over a chicken casserole in broth. At a single glance, Feng at once set down his chopsticks, flung them to the ground, and shouted in anger: this is a forbidden bird, how can anyone eat it? His friends doubted him, and Feng said that in the old school days, whenever this bird appeared and made its chattering sound, disaster would follow in the examination halls and one would surely fail. A few days later, a work by his friend Yansheng was indeed banned because the ruling surname had been written one stroke short.
Southeast of Turtle City there is Lion Mountain. Following the official road by Jingju Temple from north to south, one is ascending the mountain, though the slope is gentle. Yet the mountain folk say that on horse days in an intercalary month, at the hour of zi, if one travels from south to north, that too is uphill, and even a bicycle struggles painfully on the grade.
On Shangchi Main Street there is a human market by day and a ghost market by night. In the day market, amid old goods and curious objects, some sell truth, some sell obsessions, some sell medicine for regret, and some sell gu. As for the ghost market, it fences stolen goods; many there have strange and magnificent features. Cards are accepted, delivery is supported, and one may pay on arrival. I once received several books from it, so heavy they were hard to lift. A man brought them to my schoolroom, with half a horn growing from his forehead, and he could speak with beasts.
My colleague Qiu Xin was fond of online games, and especially good at League of Legends. He bought a Razer keyboard and mouse to aid him in battle. Two days later he told people that there was a tiny phosphorescent green snake on the mouse: if its head pointed right, he would certainly lose, and if it pointed left, he would certainly win. It never failed. I did not believe him and tried a match myself. Barely five minutes in, the mouse stopped responding. I lowered my head to look, and the green snake had disappeared without a trace. Several days later it showed itself again, seeming larger than before.
My fellow townsman Deng Xiao was born with a doubled left foot and walked with a slight limp. He always bought shoes in pairs but wore only the two left ones. When Deng ate or wrote letters, he used his right hand; when he carried water or played basketball, he used his left; even his mouse and his League controls were set to left-handed mode.
A web editor named Fu Yang had been on night duty every other day for nearly three years, and his face bore the look of illness. One day he fainted. After waking and returning for examination, he was thought to be anemic. Yet from that day on Fu became strikingly alert, especially at night: he could spot sick sentences and wrong words, and judge them in an instant. Only he no longer understood shapes, and could not tell square from round or flat from raised. Such was the lingering damage of his affliction.
Our company had wireless internet. One day the connection suddenly slowed, leaving only a single bar of signal, and even restarting the router did no good. The assistant manager investigated and found a bracket-leaf ironwood tree standing in the hall, newly put there by the property management. He ordered it removed. Once it was taken out of the hall, the signal recovered by twenty percent; once it was moved out of the building, the bars returned full.
At Lotus Pond there was a King of Beggars, replaced once every five years: sometimes a young wife dragging children behind her, sometimes a beautiful scholarly youth. Such a one could summon wealth and ward off disaster. The merchants all treated the beggar with respect, and so none dared harbor thoughts of harm; the beggar too was content in the place. Later the city inspectors drove the King away, and Lotus Pond declined.
At Liulichang they bridged the thoroughfare, felled trees, and filled in the lake. Earlier an imperial inspector had come to Chengdu on tour and met an old woman, who said to him: Chengdu’s old name was Turtle City; this place is the turtle’s tail, and it should not be built high, lest it sink into the earth. The inspector summoned geologists and relayed her words in full. In the end the bridge was abandoned and the place turned into a cut through which the Chengdu-Chongqing line now passes.
Under the jurisdiction of Qingyang there were the Qingyang Guards: in the temples they were Daoists, outside them they served as overseers. All wore black garments inset with bronze chips. Whenever they came upon a merchant whose chip glowed red, there would surely be tax fraud involved. The overdue payments they collected were used by the Guards to support widows, widowers, orphans, and the solitary elderly, and the merchants bowed to them in admiration.
In a certain year, four floors of a Grade-A office tower by the Jin River were sold, and soon renovation crews entered, while a telecom operator came in to build a server room. Yet the owner never once showed up in person, claiming only to be named Caiwei and that the company did work in networking. Another year, a bank in Luzhou retired an old server during an upgrade cycle. That server’s codename was also Caiwei.
In the seventh year of Jinbao, a man from Jiangyou named Gan Du built a website with a group-buying section, and each day he brought in gold by the thousand. Two months later the goods grew steadily worse, and when customers sought refunds or returns, Gan Du refused them. From then on, whenever users opened his site, white maggots would crawl out from the top and bottom of the screen, no matter how thoroughly the code was examined. Within days, the site was dead.
A director surnamed Fan from a certain intermediary company was posted to Chengdu. He believed in feng shui, and mirrors stood everywhere in his residence. When winter came, he met one ill omen after another: office mice snapping, cola spilled into the computer case, his surname arriving on a fax with a stroke missing. He took it all as prophecy of misfortune. The next year he was indeed dismissed.
Yuan Miao was fifty-eight years old and had a tail growing from his left hip, a full foot long. He had once been a worker, but after losing his job he made a living sweeping streets. When his mother lay gravely ill and dying in their poor room, Miao cut off his tail inch by inch, braised it into soup, and fed it to her. Once she had eaten it, her spirits greatly revived, and she lived on to ninety-six.
Product manager Wang Kui held a night banquet for plain folk, serving ten black fish, long-whiskered and patterned like snakes. Some were eaten raw, some grilled over charcoal, some cooked in oil. To each guest the flesh tasted different. When the feast was over, those who had eaten the raw fish became skilled in design; those who had eaten the grilled fish understood development; those who had eaten the fried fish excelled in testing.