They say a wise man knows when to cut his losses. Zhang Guozhong bolted for the door. But just as his feet found their stride, Li Daming suddenly collapsed like a sack of mud. The heavy thud made Zhang glance back over his shoulder—only to see the village head, Li, lunge forward with a grin twisted across his face and clamp both hands around Zhang's throat.
The young men nearby, frozen a moment too long, finally surged into action. They pried the headman's arms loose and pinned him down. Compared to Li Daming's monstrous strength, Li the headman was feeble; in seconds he was tied up tight. Zhang staggered aside, clutching his bruised neck, gasping for air. The headman crouched in the dirt, grinning vacantly, his face now eerily identical to Li Daming's.
The headman's son came rushing forward, fists balled. "You bastard! My father trusted you, and you've cursed him with that thing!" Before he could strike, others restrained him. And then, with another dull thump, the headman collapsed to the ground as if felled by an unseen hand. At that exact moment, Li Daming lifted his head and released a low, sinister laugh. The sound wasn't loud, but it seemed to crawl into every listener's bones, sharp and cold as needles.
Though both attempts had failed, Zhang's outlook had changed forever. He no longer saw the Mao Mountain Treatise as some foolish relic. The book's words held power—more power than science could explain.
With a heavy heart, and with apologies left unspoken to the headman and to Li Daming's daughter, Zhang returned to the city. One evening, he poured out the entire story to his grandfather. The old man's brow furrowed.
"Was it really that fierce?"
"Fierce? It nearly tore broomstick-thick ropes apart with its bare hands."
The grandfather shook his head. "Stay away from such things. When I was young, I feared nothing, same as you. I paid dearly for it. Those forces aren't for the likes of us." With that, he climbed back up to his attic and shut the door.
But Zhang's mind would not quiet. The very next day, he handed the Revolutionary Committee a fabricated critique of "feudal superstition." In his article, he claimed he had taught the villagers to believe in science. Where shamans and spirit-healers failed, he said, he had brought doctors whose injections worked miracles. The Mao Mountain Treatise, he wrote, was nothing but poison—misleading the people and endangering lives. In his tale, the book was publicly burned, a symbol of proletarian science triumphing over feudal superstition.
The article earned him praise from the school's revolutionary leaders and was even recommended for publication in the city.
By then, it was the spring of 1968. The Cultural Revolution was plunging the country into deeper chaos. By day, Zhang joined in the campaigns, the rallies, the smashing and the denunciations. By night, behind closed doors, he studied the Mao Mountain Treatise in secret. Confiscations from intellectual households turned up new treasures: a pristine Republican-era Kangxi Dictionary, a printed edition of the Plain Language Book of Changes. These gave Zhang the tools to decode passages of the treatise that had once seemed impenetrable.
A year slipped by. Zhang's mastery grew. He could now make sense of much that had once baffled him. Ancient terms matched real objects; obscure methods revealed their logic. His greatest wish became to hone these skills enough to one day return to Li Village—to try again to save Li Daming. The man's family was destitute, poorer than poor. If even Zhang, from his own threadbare household, thought them pitiful, then they must have truly had nothing.
Life during the Revolution was lean for everyone, but Zhang's family bore it harder than most. His father had been dismissed from the factory after being implicated by his grandfather. His mother earned seventeen yuan a month watching the storeroom of a shoe-insole plant. Zhang himself had only recently begun working, with a wage of twenty yuan. His younger brother was still in school. Altogether, five mouths lived on thirty-seven yuan a month. If Zhang felt pity for another family's poverty, it meant they lived in unbearable straits indeed.
One evening, his mother brought home two pairs of shoe insoles wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. Zhang's eyes skipped over the insoles; it was the printed words that caught his attention.
"It is necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside and receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres in the cities must be persuaded to send their children—whether they've graduated middle school, high school, or college—down to the villages. Rural comrades should welcome them."
It was Chairman Mao's call. But in Zhang's mind, it was something else: a perfect excuse. An official reason to go back to the countryside, where strange happenings abounded—and where his study of the Treatise could deepen.
His family opposed the idea at first. But Zhang had connections; the head of the school's Revolutionary Committee arranged for his younger brother to take a school job in his place. With classes suspended and most teachers persecuted, high school had become meaningless anyway. Normally, replacements filled the posts of their fathers, not their brothers, but in those days the Committee ruled supreme, not the principals. With their approval, no one objected.
The family's income remained steady, one less mouth to feed, and so their resistance ebbed. Zhang packed a few clothes, tucked the Mao Mountain Treatise among his belongings, and joined a band of teenagers heading into the countryside as "educated youth."
His destination was Li Village.