Chapter Eleven: The Temple of the Tree Spirit

Liu Chengzong stood by the roadside, watching Li Hongji depart.

The northwestern man, well-fed and satisfied, slung his staff over broad shoulders, mounted his overburdened little donkey, and with a thunderous voice sang old Qin opera tunes, vanishing into the desolate ancient road swallowed by endless yellow dust.

Perhaps it was because Liu Chengzong knew what this man would one day become that the scene took on a sense of ritual. In truth, he understood that Li Hongji was merely braving ridicule, shamelessly heading off to borrow a loan he could never possibly repay.

Not long after Li Hongji left, the border troops set out as well. Liu Chengzong was the last to follow, having stayed behind to call the tavernkeeper back inside. They had their code: no one drank the tavern’s wine, but they had used up plenty of the man's firewood. Judging by the tavernkeeper’s lame leg, he hardly seemed to have a son at home to help him chop wood.

They left all their surplus five catties of mutton for the old man. Firewood was cheap, worth far less than the meat, but that was beside the point. At least to Liu Chengzong, this too was a ritual.

With this ritual, they were soldiers; without it, they were nothing more than bandits.

Regrettably, in the end, Liu Chengzong never did glimpse what the tavernkeeper’s daughter looked like.

The border troops didn’t run into Li Hongji again on the official road near Mizhi; Liu Chengzong reckoned he was still at the scholar Ai’s mansion, shamelessly begging for money.

Later, as they traveled, Liu Chengzong’s mind kept circling back to that man.

He reflected that men like himself, his elder brother, and Cao Yao, even had they been born in better times, would hardly have lived peaceful lives—whether as officials, generals, or even choosing the path of the outlaw. All were perilous fates.

But should Li Hongji have lived in better times, perhaps he really could have lived out his days as an ordinary man.

Alas, the age of chaos was at hand. In the face of the famine, war, and plague soon to sweep the land, anyone could be ground into blood, flesh, and bone, smeared across the realm.

To the south, the terrain grew ever more difficult. By evening, having traveled from Mizhi to Suide, the border troops, thinking of the mutton they’d have that night, lit their torches and pressed on a few more miles in the dark.

Unlike the nights he remembered four centuries later, there was no light pollution in this era; everyone moved as if stricken with night-blindness—some truly were, and even those who weren’t could hardly see a thing after dusk.

Fortunately, torches lit their way as they followed the undulating banks of the Wuding River and the Huaining River, covering another twenty-odd miles toward Qingjian.

But after Suide, for a long while they found nowhere to rest. It wasn’t until the hour of the second watch, stomachs rumbling, that the border troops finally discovered a ruined Temple of the Tree Immortal at the foot of a mountain by the official road.

The Tree Immortal was a local god of Shaanbei folk belief, akin to the Fox Immortal temples—originally, a shrine built for an ancient tree, where people would kneel and offer sacrifices.

It was believed these deities possessed powers far beyond their nominal domains; people usually worshipped whichever was closest, for a god is a god, and surely all must wield omnipotence.

Such folk beliefs tended to flourish in the poorest, most isolated places. Not that poverty or isolation itself bred faith, but rather that those born in such places were more likely to encounter insoluble problems, with ever fewer means to address them. When all else failed, one could only turn to external comforts for a scrap of peace.

Whether these gods were efficacious or not scarcely mattered; with chaos looming, all supplications—no matter their nature—were often handled in a single temple.

This kept the grassroots deities of Ming China extremely busy, tasked with solving the most problems with the smallest staff—a challenge faced by rural administrations in any era.

To address this, larger temples in Shaanbei often became “Three-Teachings Temples”—housing Buddhist bodhisattvas, Daoist gods, and Confucian sages side by side. Seeking a harvest from the Lady of Fertility, healing from Lord Guan, or a son from Zhenwu the Great was all quite normal.

The modern internet’s concept of an “ecosystem,” wringing every last bit from every sheep in the pen, was nothing new. The faith of early seventeenth-century Shaanxi had long since mastered it.

As for these remote, incense-starved mountain shrines, they were even more versatile and resourceful. For the locals, the ancient tree in the temple was an omnipotent deity.

The Tree Immortal’s abode was also a Three-Teachings Temple: a Daoist crown hung from a branch, a pair of Confucian shoes lay at the roots, and a monk’s robe was draped around the trunk.

On the temple’s west wall, old ink inscriptions remained; Liu Chengzong shone his torch to see words that read: “Ominous dreams at night, written on the west wall; when the sun shines, misfortune turns to blessing.”

He chuckled at this—if the dream were a good omen, it wouldn’t need to be written on the wall.

It made him feel a kinship with another time—four centuries of change, yet the old superstitions persisted: twitch of the left eye portends fortune, twitch of the right eye is nothing but old wives’ tales.

Some things are simply inherited.

The mutton bubbled fragrantly in the pot, coarse salt scattered in generous handfuls, nothing else added. Still, the aroma made Little Whirlwind, the dog, stretch his long legs and follow his nose toward the big pot, face up and eyes half-closed.

Even Brow-spot Plum, the monkey, was well-behaved; when there was food to be had, it wouldn’t run off even if let out of its cage, instead curling up on Liu Chengzong’s leather-booted feet, dozing contentedly.

After a full day’s march, the border troops were exhausted. Only the fire-tenders, obliged to cook, stirred themselves; the rest slumped against the walls, unwilling to move.

A few neat fellows doffed their helmets and untied their headscarves, sitting by the fire and discussing how to get some sulfur powder for washing. They took turns combing lice from one another’s hair, crushing the insects and tossing them into the flames.

His elder brother and Cao Yao used torches to sketch out the terrain inside the temple, while Tian Shoujing and Gao Xian, both squad leaders, took three or five men each to circle the grounds and dig traps beyond the walls.

At such times, Liu Chengzong was idle. Everyone else belonged to a military unit, but he had no assignment—eating without working, day after day.

Always armed with sword and arrows, letting Red Banner carry his armor, he looked the part but had no duties, which left him restless.

He’d thought, since he had a warhorse, he might hunt along the march to supplement the rations, but once they left Yuhe Fort, the land grew ever more barren—within forty miles in any direction, the grass and trees along the road had all been stripped away, leaving nothing to hunt.

The farther south they went, the more chaotic it became; it was ever more unsafe to stray from the unit, so he abandoned the thought.

Now he sat on the temple’s stone steps, cradling a copy of The Plum in the Golden Vase, using its pages as paper, sketching maps from memory with a charcoal pencil in the torchlight.

That book was his treasure—a banned volume, acquired through southern merchants back when he trained with the yamen constables in Mizhi. Its pages were nearly worn thin from constant reading.

As for the charcoal pencil, it was nothing fancy: just a spent pencil shaft, stuffed with a bit of charcoal. Hard-tipped writing tools had existed since antiquity, though never considered elegant or refined.

They were now only forty miles from Qingjian—the reason they spent the night in the Tree Immortal’s temple and dug traps outside its walls. Qingjian was the cradle of rebel armies in Shaanbei; even in calmer times, banditry abounded, and now those bandits had all become insurgents.

The ones Liu Chengzong could name—One-Character Wang, Heaven-Piercer, Chaos-Bringer, the Eight Great Kings—were all locals of Qingjian. Their aliases were ever more imposing, adopted to hide their true identities. Some were former border troops, others from powerful local families; all had turned bandit in these mountains.

A hundred miles more, and he’d be home in Yan’an.

Note:
Pencil—an ancient writing tool called “lead slip”: lead powder and a wooden strip.
From the Han-era Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital, Volume III: “Yang Xiong, being fond of such matters, always carried lead and a slip, following the scribes to seek rare words from distant lands.”