Slender grasses and soft duckweed were carefully parted underfoot, giving off a soft rustling sound.
Xiao Nanhui had no real certainty whether this method would work at all. She could only do her best to discern the lights in the darkness.
The increasingly dense swarms of fireflies formed a natural barrier, delineating a winding, twisting path. She and Zhongli Jing picked their way along this muddy track, step uncertain after step — and after about a quarter of a shichen, they felt the view gradually open up ahead, and the ground underfoot began to be scattered with broken stones and grow firm.
Rounding the last stretch of wetland, a great cavern mouth appeared before them. It seemed to open into a slope of white stone, the cave descending into the earth — dark and fathomless, like the mouth of some enormous beast.
“This is—” Xiao Nanhui carefully made out the ancient script on the stone stele at the cave entrance.
“Bai Yaoguan.”
Zhongli Jing looked at the stele and spoke mildly. “This is Bai Yaoguan — abandoned for several hundred years.”
Sparks drifted upward on the heated air, and Zhongli Jing and Xiao Nanhui sat cross-legged on the broken-stone shingle at the cave entrance, their backs to the dark depths of Bai Yaoguan and their faces toward the marshland plain that stretched empty under the low-hanging night sky.
Xiao Nanhui set her wet boots by the fire to dry. A faint, clean, slightly bitter fragrance drifted to her nostrils, cutting through the damp smell borne by the wind from the marshes, and brought with it, somehow, a sense of calm.
Xiao Nanhui turned her head and looked for a long while at the man sitting a few paces away, her heart quietly curious. What kind of incense could last so long that even without his outer robe the scent still lingered?
“Hey — what exactly is that smell on you? No matter where you go, it’s always there.”
In the night, Zhongli Jing’s profile, perfectly still, resembled the statue of a god enshrined in a temple. A few flecks of mud from the marshlands had not yet been wiped away, and his loose, scattered hair had gone unarranged — and yet it was precisely this that finally lent the statue some trace of human warmth.
“The smell of dead men’s bones.”
“Dead men’s bones?”
Trying to frighten whom, exactly? Xiao Nanhui glanced around, and Zhongli Jing pushed up the sleeve of his left hand a little, baring the Buddhist prayer beads at his wrist.
Xiao Nanhui stared at them for quite a while before she worked out what he meant. Was he saying that the relic of the Buddha’s bone he had given to Hao Bai as a medicinal ingredient was actually from this string of beads? But even a single relic of the Buddha’s bone was extraordinarily rare — how did this man have so many? What was this? A display of wealth?
As though he knew what Xiao Nanhui was thinking, Zhongli Jing looked at her with perfect composure. “I am a man with a deep affinity for the Buddha. Do not be envious, and do not reduce me to something mundane.”
What? Did she look like a mundane person?
Well — all right, she was fairly mundane. But how elevated were you, exactly?
The warm campfire illuminated this stone stele that had not heard human voices for several hundred years, casting its characters into sharp and vivid relief.
Xiao Nanhui raised her head to look at the words on the stele, and felt a mischievous urge to test him. “What does it say?”
Zhongli Jing was leaning against the stone beside the fire, still as a monk in deep meditation. At the sound of her voice he slowly opened his eyes and glanced in the direction of the stele.
“In bright and clear evenings, pass not through Bai Yaoguan. At break of dawn, walk the dark, not the light.”
Whether he truly could read it or was just making something up, Xiao Nanhui was a little surprised despite herself.
Every region of Chizhou had its own dialect, but it was said that in ancient times writing and spoken language were unified. By now the ancient sounds had been lost beyond recovery, but the ancient script could still be read by some — though those who could read it fluently were exceedingly few, and most of them were scholars past the age of fifty or former members of the old aristocracy. Among the young, it was rarely seen.
If any young person could read it, such a person would not be unknown in Chizhou.
“I saw you at Yongye Temple — are you from Quecheng?” Xiao Nanhui finally put the question that had been sitting in her heart. She had vaguely felt for some time that this man’s identity was not simple.
But she had not expected Zhongli Jing to actually answer her. “More or less. I am merely a guest advisor at the Grand Counselor’s residence.”
The Grand Counselor’s residence? Was that not just diagonally across from Yukun Street?
Xiao Nanhui grew suspicious. “But why have I never seen you near the Grand Counselor’s residence before?”
“My health is poor. When I go out I travel by carriage, and you do not spend much time at the Marquis Mansion — naturally you have never seen me.”
Xiao Nanhui found these words unconvincing, but for the moment could not find anything to refute them with. Then she suddenly remembered — the other party had long since known she was from the Qinghuai Marquis Mansion.
That must have been when she had said things at Yongye Temple during her prayer visit that he had overheard.
Thanks to him, Xiao Nanhui had received the worst lot she had ever drawn in her life.
“You impersonated a temple monk, and eavesdropped on someone else’s prayers.”
Zhongli Jing treated this accusation as though he had not heard it, and closed his eyes again.
What Xiao Nanhui hated most was someone pretending to be oblivious. Under other circumstances she might have leapt up and given this man a solid kick, but remembering that not long before this man had just saved her life, she stopped herself, and bent her head to focus on tending the fire.
Time flowed quietly past, yet this night seemed somehow exceptionally long.
Except for the sound of wind, there was nothing else to hear.
When it had gone on long enough and no one spoke, you might think you had gone deaf — unable to distinguish the wind from outside from the sound of blood moving through your own body.
And the air flowing from the direction of the marshland toward the cave brought only a desolate smell. It was the scent of ten thousand years of decaying grass and wood, laced with the raw smell of water, filling the nose and every pore.
Xiao Nanhui did not like this feeling. Those small creatures fluttering among the water grass, struggling out of their chrysalises, then competing for food, the males exhausting themselves in search of females, straining with all their strength to propagate the next generation, and then meeting death — dying each dawn and cycling each dusk, day after day — struck her for no reason at all with a sense of the brevity and early fading of all life.
Xiao Nanhui drew a long breath, pulled on her now-dry boots, and began to hum a little tune as she laced them up, trying to lighten the air of gloom.
It was a melody she had heard the local mountain folk sing several years ago when she was stationed with troops near Xuanmen Ridge — originally a long song, of which she now remembered only a small portion, and hummed it over and over.
The long-silent Zhongli Jing suddenly spoke. “What are you singing?”
“It is a song in which the mountain folk praise the Mountain God. They worship the eternal Mountain God. The legend says that if the Mountain God is moved by a singer’s beautiful melody, he will bestow his blessing on that person, granting them the same immortality he himself possesses.”
When she finished, Xiao Nanhui noticed that the face of the man whose expression rarely changed had actually taken on an emotion — the long, narrow eyes narrowing slightly, the lashes casting a shadow over the black of his pupils.
“Humanity’s pursuit of the word ‘eternal’ is foolish in the extreme. They do not know the terror of a beginning with no end — that years upon years against the span of eternity are no different from a single instant and a single breath, and that feeling is like falling into a void that never reaches its bottom.”
From the moment she had first made his acquaintance until now, Xiao Nanhui had rarely seen any expression on Zhongli Jing’s face. Yet the expression he wore just now as he spoke those words was utterly unguarded — an aversion that rose from the depths of his being, a kind of emotion that frightened even those who had never experienced it.
Xiao Nanhui was startled. She had always thought of the man before her as an ageless mountain, a lake of ten thousand years — immovable, undisturbed. Yet now she had a dim, uneasy feeling: his emotions were simply buried deep within the mountain’s core and the lake’s bottom, unseen and unknowable by most — but one day, they would surge forth in flood, and the earth would tremble.
She deliberated a while before speaking slowly. “Perhaps people pursue eternity precisely because it does not exist.”
Zhongli Jing actually smiled at this. “You are not wrong. And so death is not always entirely a bad thing. The joys of this world are always brief. If one cannot remain in the moment of happiness, then one must always face the approach of suffering. After suffering comes joy, and after joy comes suffering — round and round without end. Only death can bring all of this to a stop.”
“But if there were no pain, how would we know the preciousness of joy?” Xiao Nanhui said with complete sincerity. “The venerable monk Yikong of Yongye Temple once said that to be born human is always to suffer and endure hardship. Since it cannot be avoided, one might as well face it with equanimity.”
When she finished, she noticed that Zhongli Jing was looking at her without a word, staring at her in a way that made her skin prickle a little.
“What are you staring at me for?”
Zhongli Jing was quiet for a moment longer before saying, entirely without expression: “Yikong never said that.”
Xiao Nanhui’s face reddened slightly, and then she argued with a touch of guilty conscience: “Venerable Yikong loves to talk — he says so many things every day, how could you know he never said it?”
Zhongli Jing tilted his head very slightly, and his posture shifted from perfect uprightness to something faintly languid, his tone taking on a trace of teasing. “Yikong and I are friends of many years. Beyond chanting sutras he almost never opens his mouth. He is a man who came from across the Western Sea — he has not even fully mastered the tones of Chizhou speech yet. Where would all these words come from.”
Xiao Nanhui was left with nothing to say, and a pointless anger flared up. If blame was to be placed anywhere, it was on this dull night and this dull location — she must have swallowed some muddy water just now and addled her head, to have wanted to sit here chatting with this man.
She stood up briskly and stretched her wrists and legs, walking toward the cave entrance. “The fire is dying down. I’ll go gather some dry kindling.”
Zhongli Jing watched that huffy figure receding from view, and turned toward the fire and smiled, just briefly.
Some unknown stretch of time later, Xiao Nanhui felt a warmth touch her face.
She opened her eyes to see a golden morning sun rising slowly over the marshlands. The scorching light rolled out above the horizon, piercing through the mist that never fully left the marshlands, scattering across the land in glittering reflections — as though someone had smashed a vast mirror across this desolate place, and the shards, catching the light, blazed back in dazzling white, both real and illusory.
So that was why Bai Yaoguan had been named for radiance.
The firefly was also known as the Brilliant Night Creature. In the evening, great numbers of fireflies emerged from the entrance of Bai Yaoguan and spread across the marshy ground to feed. As long as one avoided the places where the fireflies were, one could avoid sinking into the bogs. But the light of fireflies was extremely faint, and could only be clearly seen on nights when the moonlight was not too bright — hence the saying, “in bright and clear evenings, pass not through Bai Yaoguan.”
By day the fireflies lay dormant, and the paths hidden in the marshlands vanished once more. At that time only the hour before and after sunrise offered a window to leave the pass, and only to leave — not to enter. Because the exit of Bai Yaoguan faced due east, when the sun had just risen it illuminated the places in the marshlands where there was standing water, revealing the paths where people could walk — and as long as one avoided the reflective surfaces, one could walk safely out of the marshlands. Hence the saying, “at break of dawn, walk the dark, not the light.”
Xiao Nanhui stared transfixed at this most ordinary yet most extraordinary moment between heaven and earth, and for a time forgot to speak.
She found herself thinking of that legendary princess who, alone, had held out against an entire army and in the end sunk into the marshland’s depths. Had she ever seen a sunrise like this? Or had she walked into that abandoned pass and gone downward, all the way to the core of the earth?
“Let’s go.”
An unexpected voice broke her reverie.
Zhongli Jing stood, and turned to look at Xiao Nanhui. The early morning sun gilded his face with fire-like color. His voice was as calm as ever — as though this were an ordinary morning, and they were setting out for some ordinary, perfectly safe destination.
Xiao Nanhui turned to meet the morning sun with a smile, and suddenly felt that having such an unruffled companion at her side was not such a bad thing after all.