In the autumn of the renchen year, a man surnamed Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a court runner, and burrowed into the earth. The cause, they said, was that his fruit cart had been confiscated and his livelihood destroyed. His wife and daughter sometimes saw him online on his phone. When they 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 there is a weaving woman on Qintai Road whose clothwork is extraordinarily fine. Pen pouches from her workshop circulate all over the city, three hundred cash apiece, and carrying one is said to increase a writer’s fees by thirty percent. I once happened upon one of her tablet sleeves: tea-colored cloth, blue cords, and a tiny rainbow character hanging from the corner. With it, one could post online even without a VPN.
There is a beggar by the Jin River who scavenges in Chunxi. Once he heard a voice whisper by his ear, “That one should not be taken.” He turned to look and saw a red can. Not recognizing the words on it, and finding some liquid still inside, he picked it up and drank it. In the twenty years since, he has never once fallen ill.
Luodai has long been home to Hakka settlers, and in recent years has become famous for its heartbreak liangfen. West of the town there is a shop called Black Liangfen. The owner’s face is dark as black jade, so everyone takes him for an African. He says he is descended from the Kunlun slaves. There are no kitchen knives in his back room, only a matched pair of double-edged swords.
Qiao, a twelve-year-old student at the Wenweng Stone Chamber, writes mobile games. He has three hundred thousand users online and angel investment besides. He regularly devours several books a day, mostly programming manuals and tutoring guides, saying that he learns by eating them.
Old Yu of Mengjia Lane is ninety years old and has three nostrils, the middle one plugged with beeswax. He loves tobacco and spends all day sitting alone at the mouth of the lane. When Chengdu saw three days of snowfall, the paving stones within a ten-foot radius of him stayed perfectly dry.
Gong Wei of Qiongya makes his living as an online editor. Once, while discoursing online about Yanhuang and Wuxiang, his screen went black. Something then passed outside the window: reverse scales, dark green-black, dozens of yards long, with neither head nor tail in sight. It took quite a while to pass. Gong lived on the twenty-first floor. Everyone in the room was terrified. Gong alone did not change expression.
The final proofreader’s post at a newspaper has always been perilous. One might lose the job over a taboo character, or even be imprisoned. Zhou Kai of the Shu papers kept a gray bird, crow-shaped, that could speak. Before each issue went to press, Zhou would let the bird read the manuscript. If nothing in it offended a taboo, the bird would cry, “All right, all right.” If there was danger, it would flap its wings as though flying off. The Classic of Mountains and Seas says this is a tuo-bird, named for its voice, born from feeding on carrion.
A man surnamed Feng from Bazhong was drinking with friends when a chicken hotpot was served. He glanced at it, set down his chopsticks, hurled them to the ground, and shouted, “This is a forbidden bird. How can anyone eat it?” His friends doubted him. Feng said that in the old school days, whenever this bird appeared and made its chattering cry, it foretold disaster in the examination hall. A few days later, a book by one of his friends was indeed banned for omitting a stroke from the national surname.
Southeast of Turtle City there is Lion Mountain. If you take the old Jingju Temple road and ride from north to south, the climb is gentle enough. Yet mountain folk say that on leap-month horse days, at midnight, if you travel from south to north, you are still going uphill, and even bicycles struggle against the slope.
Shangchi Main Street has a day market and a ghost market by night. The day market sells curios and secondhand things: truth, obsessions, regret medicine, gu poison. The ghost market fences stolen goods. Its merchants are often magnificent in face and form. They take bank cards, support delivery, and even allow cash on arrival. I once ordered several books from there, very heavy ones. A man delivered them to my study with half a horn growing from his forehead and the ability to speak with beasts.
My colleague Qiu Xin loves online games, especially League of Legends. He bought a Razer keyboard and mouse for the edge they gave him in matches. Two days later he said there was a tiny phosphorescent green snake on his mouse. If it coiled on the right side, he always lost; if on the left, he always won. I did not believe him and tried the mouse myself. Five minutes into the game, the mouse failed. I looked down. The green snake had vanished. Several days later it reappeared, looking larger than before.
My fellow townsman Deng Xiao was born with two left feet and walks with a slight limp. He has always bought shoes in pairs and worn only the left ones. He eats and writes with his right hand, but carries water, plays basketball, and uses a left-handed mouse setup with his left.
An online editor surnamed Fu worked the night shift on every even-numbered day for almost three years, and his face took on a sickly cast. One day he fainted. On waking, he was diagnosed with anemia. Yet from then on Fu became astonishingly sharp, especially at night. He could identify bad grammar and wrong characters at a glance. Only he could no longer understand diagrams, nor tell square from round or flat from raised. That was the lingering damage of the illness.
Our company had wireless internet. One day the speed suddenly slowed to a crawl and the signal dropped to a single bar. Restarting the router changed nothing. The manager investigated and saw a bracketleaf hardwood plant placed in the lobby, newly installed by property management. He had it moved. Once it left the lobby, the signal returned by twenty percent. Once it left the building, the connection sprang back to full strength.
At Lotus Pond there is always a king of beggars, replaced every five years. Sometimes it is a young woman dragging children behind her, sometimes a beautiful scholar. Such a beggar can attract wealth and ward off disaster. The merchants treat them with great respect and do not dare bear them ill will, while the beggars themselves are perfectly content. Later the city inspectors drove the beggar king away, and Lotus Pond declined from that day on.
On the Liulichang thoroughfare they once planned an elevated bridge and felled timber to fill the lake. Earlier, however, an inspector had come on tour of Chengdu and met an old woman who said, “Chengdu was once called Turtle City. This place is the turtle’s tail. It should not be built high, or the ground will cave in.” The inspector summoned geological experts, heard them out, and finally scrapped the bridge in favor of a tunnel. The Chengyu line now passes through there.
Under Qingyang’s jurisdiction there is a Qingyang Guard. In the temple they are Daoists; outside it they serve as inspectors. All wear black, stitched with bronze chips. Whenever they come upon a merchant whose chip glows red, there is certain to be tax evasion. The money they recover is used to support widows, orphans, the elderly, and the solitary poor, and the merchants submit in awe.
One year, four floors in a Grade A office building by the Jin River were sold. Renovation crews came in, and a telecom operator installed a server room. Yet the owner never once showed up. She called herself Caiwei and said the company dealt in networking. A year later, a bank in Luzhou retired and replaced some old servers. One of them bore the codename Caiwei.
In the seventh year of Jinbao, a man from Jiangyou named Gan Du founded a website with group-buying features and was making a thousand gold a day. Two months later the goods declined in quality, and when customers demanded refunds and returns, Gan refused. After that, whenever netizens opened his site, white maggots crawled out of the screen from above and below. The code was thoroughly checked, but nothing could be found. Within days, the site was dead.
A media company’s director, Fan, was stationed in Chengdu. He believed in fengshui and kept bright mirrors all over his residence. When winter came, his office mice kept breaking, cola soaked one computer tower, and even his name was printed missing a stroke on a fax. He took it as a bad omen. The next year he was fired.
Yuan Miao, aged fifty-eight, had a tail growing from his left hip, a foot long. He had once been a factory worker, but after losing his job he survived by sweeping streets. When his mother lay dying in their shabby room, Yuan broke off the tail inch by inch, braised it into a soup, and fed it to her. Her spirits revived at once, and she later lived to ninety-six.
One night Product Manager Wang Kui held a feast for ordinary folk. Ten black fish were served, long-whiskered and snake-patterned. Some were eaten raw, some charcoal-roasted, some fried in oil. Every guest found the flesh tasted different on the tongue. After the meal, those who had eaten the raw fish understood design; those who had eaten the roasted fish understood development; those who had eaten the fried fish excelled at testing.