1. Do You Know the Herb of Immortality? (2)
The King of Qin, Zheng, having destroyed the feudal lords one and all and annexed all under heaven, commanded the Chancellor and the Imperial Censor to deliberate upon a title befitting an emperor.
The ministers reported: "Even the Five Emperors of old did not come close to Your Majesty. (…) You ought to be called Taihuang, the Grand Sovereign."
The King said:
"Cast aside the 'Tai,' take up the 'Huang,' and joining it with the ancient title of 'Di,' call yourself Huangdi — the Emperor."
And he said further:
"I am the first to become Emperor, so call me Shihuangdi, the First Emperor. Let later generations reckon the count — the Second Emperor, the Third Emperor — and pass it down unto ten thousand generations."
Thereupon the weapons of all under heaven were gathered in; the laws and the written script were made one; the axle-widths of chariots were made equal, and weights and measures were unified. All under heaven followed the laws of Qin.
The Qin dynasty had unified the world.
To the people of the Central Plains it was an earth-shattering event, but to someone else it was a chapter of history long awaited — the official record she had been waiting to see written.
Not long after news of the unification arrived, word followed that the King of Qin, Zheng, had proclaimed himself the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
So-cheong, who had overheard the gossip of herb-gatherers in the deep recesses of Mount Nanhua, decided it was time to take up the worry she had set aside.
She left the dwelling where she lived her days and set off for somewhere — a natural cave not far from her home, a place free of damp, where cold air passed through in a steady current.
Inside the cave, thick sheets of paper lay stacked in neat piles alongside fine-meshed cloth hung to keep out the insects.
"Let's see now…."
These were papers So-cheong had invented herself, made in place of bamboo slips. Over the course of several decades she had made and accumulated sheet upon sheet, and now she selected one, read it, and let the memories of her previous life stir awake.
"Ah, right. The Fengshan sacrifice. Xu Fu."
Her prodigious mind caught hold of her past-life memories at once, and words flickered through her thoughts.
The Fengshan sacrifice at Mount Tai.
Qin Shi Huang would ascend Mount Tai and Mount Liangfu, raise stone steles, and proclaim to Heaven and to Earth alike that he had taken his place as sovereign above all men.
It was after this that he would meet Xu Fu and hear talk of immortals and the herb of immortality.
Xu Fu would ask for several thousands of young men and women and declare that he would seek out the Three Divine Mountains — Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou — in the eastern sea. And Qin Shi Huang would grant his request without hesitation.
"That much is no problem."
Tap, tap. She brushed the dust carefully from the paper and read on.
The Fengshan sacrifice would be held several years from now, at Mount Tai, several hundred ri from Mount Nanhua. It would be on that very progress that Xu Fu first put words of eternal life to his lips.
And the herb of immortality that Xu Fu sought lay in the Three Divine Mountains, far beyond the eastern sea — an unknown otherworld beyond distant waters. Xu Fu's search for the herb of immortality was a story that had nothing to do with her.
It was what came after that was the problem.
"The other fangshi besides Xu Fu… who were they again…."
Qin Shi Huang, obsessed as he was with eternal life, would command not only Xu Fu but the other fangshi as well to seek out immortals and the elixir of undying life.
Those men would comb every corner of the Central Plains in obedience to the Emperor's command, searching for immortals.
And if they searched long enough, hearing rumors of a strange immortal on Mount Nanhua would be no difficult thing.
When the realization settled in, So-cheong let out a small sigh.
Truth be told, she was a person who could reasonably be called an immortal.
Her training under a master of a true and unbroken lineage. Her strange, otherworldly appearance. Her creation of a nourishing-life art she called the method of Basic Breath Circulation.
And last of all — true immortality.
It had come about by accident, from a medicinal herb she had eaten without knowing, but it had come about all the same. Compared to the self-proclaimed immortals of the world, she could claim the title with far greater justification.
But that was where it ended. So-cheong could not summon the wind or command the rain, nor did she possess the monstrous strength to hoist a boulder of ten thousand geun.
She could not even draw a mystical talisman. Could such a being truly be called an immortal, a seon-in?
That was why So-cheong was anxious.
If a fangshi, or the First Emperor himself, came to her demanding the secret of immortality — or some other thing besides — and she failed to deliver it, what then? How would they react to her?
She had read of it only in the records of her previous life, but So-cheong knew the madness of Qin Shi Huang.
Maddened by the pursuit of eternity, he had drained the imperial treasury searching for immortals, and to remain deathless even after death he had built his imperial mausoleum and buried living people inside it as retainers.
So-cheong's nerve was not strong enough to test what future might await her after betraying the expectations of a madman like that.
Then what was she to do….
Handling the paper with a grave expression as she agonized over the question, So-cheong soon reached her conclusion.
"I suppose I just keep hiding."
Even if she left Mount Nanhua, there was no truly safe place anywhere. If anything, venturing out to be searched for carried the greater risk of being found.
And so the girl resolved to shut herself away even more completely in Mount Nanhua.
The First Emperor's world, for all its grandeur, would not last long anyway. If she lay low as she was doing now, it was a world that would one day pass.
Only — even knowing it would pass, its scale was so vast that she had begun worrying about it long in advance.
With her thoughts settled, So-cheong set down the paper she held and looked for a fresh one. She found a sheet, blank yet dull and yellowed, spread it across the table, and picked up her brush, made from the hair of a beast.
Dipping the brush's tip in ink, So-cheong moved her hand with practiced ease.
In Mount Nanhua, the sixty-fifth year. Tenth month, third day.
Qin has annexed all under heaven. The First Emperor has appeared.
The fangshi shall soon go forth. One must guard against them.
Thus I shall not leave this mountain, but remain hidden.
"Hmm…."
Having swept the words down in a single flowing hand, So-cheong paused in thought for a moment, then moved the brush again.
Until Qin has fallen, and even the war between Chu and Han has ended.
For she knew that even after the First Emperor's world came to an end, a great upheaval would soon break out upon it — she would have to be careful through all of that as well.
………
A year or so later.
So-cheong practiced the method of Basic Breath Circulation that had become her daily routine, and whenever an unusual idea occurred to her or something came along that she needed to remember, she wrote it down and kept it.
Her food had also dwindled year by year, until now a single meal a day sufficed — a morsel no bigger than half a palm.
And even that was little more than juicy fruit. By the common sense of her previous life she would have long since succumbed to malnutrition, but for So-cheong there was no problem at all.
She attributed it to the effects of the Basic Breath Circulation method.
'Seventy years of training and this is where I've ended up — no idea whether that's a good thing or a bad one.'
Sitting cross-legged today as always, practicing the breath circulation, So-cheong was mulling over that thought when — quite suddenly — her breath stopped.
"Oh?"
Both eyes flew wide open, and she looked up at the sky.
Clear heaven was reflected in her blue eyes. White clouds spread wide and racing across the firmament — a sight as ordinary as any other day. But So-cheong's senses told her something entirely different.
Hoooooong…!
She felt the heavens writhing. She was nearing three digits in age, yet this had never once happened before.
"What on earth is this…?"
The scene before her eyes was so utterly ordinary that she might have dismissed it as a simple misperception — but the sensation was too vivid.
Letting out a low, unsteady hum, So-cheong chose instead to close her eyes.
In a world gone black, freed from the interference of sight, she groped after the trembling of the heavens through her senses alone.
It was a mystifying sensation unlike anything she had ever felt — a strange, deep, transcendent awareness, as though her very consciousness were tracing the changes of the sky.
So-cheong had never imagined herself capable of such a thing, yet once she had felt it, it seemed almost strange that she never had before.
Carefully catching the frayed edge of that trembling, she stretched her senses slowly outward.
And before long, So-cheong made out the outline of the writhing.
The heavens, by what So-cheong felt….
"………Eh?"
They were reverently holding up something. And something utterly, immeasurably vast.
The moment she grasped it, a passage rose unbidden in the girl's mind.
Jian Wu asked Lian Shu, saying:
"I heard words from Jie Yu — grand and without measure, going forth and never returning.
I was startled and terrified by his words, for like the Silver River they stretched on without end.
They were so far removed, so remote from human feeling."
A passage her master had once recited to her personally. There was hardly a thing that left his mouth that did not qualify, but it was a passage steeped in memory all the same.
Having recalled it, So-cheong found herself thinking,
'…But why, of all things, am I remembering this?'
The instant that thought filled her head, So-cheong realized something was trickling from her nose.
Drip. Drip-drip.
Blood was pouring from her nostrils like a waterfall.
And only then did So-cheong understand. She had sensed something far too vast, and her mind — unable to contain it — had merely fished up the nearest thing it resembled.
"Ah……!"
So-cheong pitched forward. Fallen flat, she clutched her head against the ground and struggled to erase the sensation of that something.
But the heavens churned on without mercy, and every passing moment her senses drank it in.
It was only long after the trembling of the sky had ceased that So-cheong came back to herself.
………
The first thing So-cheong did upon opening her eyes was — having opened them — to look up at the sky.
The heaven reflected in her blue eyes looked as it always did. A sky near evening, dyed crimson by the sunset.
She gazed at that sky for a while, and then simply parted her lips and laughed.
"Ha…, hahaha…."
After laughing for a long while, So-cheong murmured in a daze.
"The Fengshan sacrifice…."
The Fengshan rite that Qin Shi Huang was said to perform was divided into the Feng sacrifice offered to Heaven and the Shan sacrifice offered to Earth.
So-cheong had always taken the Fengshan to be a mere ceremony — a political tool Qin Shi Huang used to fasten his power in place.
But what So-cheong had felt in that trembling just now was no wretched instrument of statecraft….
— "Feng."
It had been a fragment of the sacrifice called Feng — the rite offered up to Heaven by the king of all mankind.
Reincarnation, qi, immortality — for all that she possessed them, it was only today that she finally glimpsed the true face of this world, one she had never seen before.
"Ha……."
So-cheong did not even think to tidy her disheveled state; she simply stared blankly at the sky.
Several years after the Fengshan sacrifice had been performed.
An age in which the world stood unified, and every standard of measure had been remade around Qin as its center.
In such an age, a lone traveler stopped at the village at the foot of Mount Nanhua.
Arriving in the village, he glanced around until he spotted an old man passing along the road, and asked him:
"May I ask you something, elder? Is this truly the village at the foot of Mount Nanhua?"
The old man frowned at the traveler's abrupt question, but nodded and answered.
"It is. What of it?"
At the old man's reply, the traveler's face brightened, and he pressed on.
"Then is it true, what they say — that an immortal dwells in this Mount Nanhua?"