Headman Li could see plainly enough: Zhang Guozhong was no match for the vengeful Qing scholar haunting Li Daming. Still, unlike all the other so-called masters they'd dragged in—men who had offered nothing but empty rites—Zhang was the only one who had unraveled the true cause of the calamity.
Back at home, Li tried to cheer him up. "Don't wear yourself thin. A solution will come. Besides," he added with a grin, "Li Er'ya has already taken a liking to you. But more to the point—years ago, the commune across the river punished an old Taoist. He's still there, working the fields. Name's Ma. He's the one who ordered us to plant the willows. Why not seek him out?"
At the mention of Li Er'ya, Zhang nearly wished for a brick wall to smash his head against, just to prove his innocence. But the name Ma stirred something in him. Mao Mountain had produced true masters in the past. If this man had once laid the willow formation, perhaps he might be the key to ending it.
The next morning, Li's second son escorted Zhang across the river to Caoschang village. That river marked the boundary between their two communes.
It was the height of the Cultural Revolution. Every village had to stage public denunciations. If they lacked landlords, they denounced rich peasants; if no rich peasants, then loafers; failing even that, they hauled out coffin sellers. Someone always had to be "struggled against." For Caoschang village, the perfect target was Ma the Taoist of Tongtian Temple—the very picture of a "feudal parasite." Beatings and denunciations were his daily lot, as routine as going to work.
When Zhang finally saw him, all his illusions of a sage-like figure collapsed. Ma's beard hung wild as thistles, his hair matted into greasy felt, his skin black as charcoal. He wore patched trousers that hadn't seen a wash in years, a battered tobacco pipe tucked at his waist. He sat at the edge of a field, sipping water.
"Master Ma…" Zhang began hesitantly.
The old man turned, wary, and muttered in a flat voice, "I've sinned against the people. I've sinned against the Party. I confess." Then he kept drinking, wiping his face with a sleeve stiff as tar.
Li's son leaned in, whispered a few words. Instantly the Taoist's expression softened, his face creasing into delighted wrinkles as he studied Zhang.
"You saw the Corpse Field by the river?"
Zhang nodded. "Yes, but I don't know how to break it. I've come to ask your guidance."
"Why not become my disciple?" Ma asked, ignoring the question entirely.
Zhang's heart sank.
This countryside was absurd. First the headman who treated him like a shaman, then the villagers tying him to Li Er'ya, and now a ragged beggar of a Taoist who insisted on taking him as a pupil. Rural ghosts, Zhang thought bitterly, were less strange than the living.
"Master, I only—"
"Enough. Don't argue. Er'gui, tell your father this young man has formally become my disciple. Have him prepare a banquet." And with that, Ma lit his pipe, humming to himself, while Li's son dashed off with a grin.
But prying Ma free from Caoschang was another matter. He was their favorite target for struggle sessions—if they lost him, who would they denounce next? The commune refused outright.
Li had to pull every string he could think of. By kinship he was technically the cousin of Caoschang's production captain, Liu. They barely spoke, but now Li paraded every scrap of connection he could muster, bowing and scraping, even offering up one of the commune's few draft animals—worth more than several men in a farming village—plus thirty yuan. In the end, he succeeded, though it nearly broke his heart.
Ma was overjoyed. After Li, drunk on a jin of baijiu, exaggerated Zhang's bravery in confronting the ghost and unraveling the Corpse Field, the Taoist was convinced he had found a prodigy. In an age when every tradition was smashed and priests were paraded as criminals, having a gifted disciple was a rare blessing.
Zhang, still dazed by his accidental apprenticeship, learned that Ma claimed to be one hundred and two years old. Yet he looked scarcely sixty, strong enough to labor in the fields. Zhang doubted the claim, but held his tongue.
At once, he showed Ma his battered copy of the Mao Mountain Gazetteer. The old man chuckled. "Child's play… mere child's play."
Ma revealed his lineage: he was a descendant of Ma Danyang, a Taoist patriarch from the Jin dynasty. Though only a leader of the Quanzhen sect in his time, his heirs had preserved secrets from many schools—Suotu, Mayi, Quanzhen, Mao Mountain itself. Compared with these, Zhang's text was a late-Qing vulgarized manual, useful only for identifying minor phenomena. It lacked the true essence, what Mao Mountain called xinshu—the "heart method."
"Heart method," Ma explained, "is the core of Mao Mountain art. It awakens the forgotten instincts within the body itself, and uses them to expel demons and heal. Charms and rituals are toys. They might work on petty ghosts. But for something as strong as what binds Li Daming? Useless."
Zhang listened in awe.
Ma had heard rumors of the troubles in Li village, but he himself had been powerless—his temple burned, his life reduced to hard labor. A Taoist struggling to survive could hardly rescue others.
Still, he had prepared for this day. He led Zhang to a hidden cache near the ruins of Tongtian Temple. There, buried in the earth, he unearthed his treasures: the Annotated Thirty-Six Methods of Quanzhen, an archaic copy of the Mao Mountain Treatise on the Arts, several medical texts, and a compass.
The Thirty-Six Methods looked to Zhang like nothing more than strange, acrobatic postures. But the Mao Mountain Treatise was different. A handwritten manuscript from the Yongle era of the Ming, it spoke of theories stranger and darker than anything Zhang had glimpsed before. Born of a time when war and famine left the land piled with corpses and echoing with wails, the book embodied a world where Taoist arts flourished in response to death itself.
For Ma, it was a family heirloom, preserved through centuries. For Zhang, it was a door into a terrifying new world.