NABC Chapter 43 Tree of Life
Chapter 43 Tree of Life
In the eleventh year of the reign of Emperor Yuan Shundi (1352), the Yellow River breached its banks, and the court conscripted 150,000 laborers to repair the river. During the repairs, someone unearthed a stone figure in the river mud. The stone figure had only one eye, and an inscription on its back read… “Do not say the stone figure has only one eye; when this thing appears, the world will rebel.” The news spread like wildfire among the 150,000 laborers, reaching the ears of Han Shantong and Liu Futong. Han Shantong held a rally in Yingshang, wearing a red turban and shouting, “Heaven’s way is flawed; Maitreya has descended!” Overnight, the 150,000 laborers transformed into 150,000 Red Turban soldiers. That year was the eleventh year of the reign of Emperor Yuan Shundi (1352). Seventeen years later, the Yuan Dynasty fell.
The stone figure was said to have been stolen from the government office under cover of night during the war, and its whereabouts have remained unknown ever since. Some say it was smashed, some say it was thrown into the Yellow River, and some say it was buried by Emperor Yuan Shundi in a place no one knows.
But it's right here. Crouching on an unseen path to heaven, crouching between two sheer cliffs, crouching between the rosy dawn and the starry sky. Who placed it here?
"It's just a stone statue, look at you." The little chick pushed me. His little face was full of indifference, his mouth pursed, as if he had watched a play that had no beginning or end and thought the actors were too loud. In his opinion, a stone statue was just a stone after all. Stones don't move, they don't bite, and they don't jump up from the ground and strangle you.
"You know nothing." I grabbed his collar and dragged him in front of me, lowering my voice and emphasizing each word, "No matter what it is in this world, once it's tainted by great karma and cause and effect, it's no longer an ordinary thing. Even a stone is different from others. Take a person's life, for example. They all have two arms and two legs, but some people's lives are as light as a seed, scattered by a gust of wind; others' lives are as heavy as a mountain, standing there, unmoved for hundreds or thousands of years."
"It's fate." The little chick shoved me, the disdain still lingering on its face. "The fortune teller said you'd die before the cripple, was that right?"
I was stunned for a moment when he said that. Sanjin coughed softly behind me without saying anything. The cripple's head was tilted behind his shoulder, and a small section of the red rope peeked out from the chick's collar, swaying gently in the wind.
I looked at the red string around his neck and suddenly felt something stuck in my chest, a very tight feeling.
"Go to hell!" I cursed, not loudly, as if I were cursing to myself. "Do you even know what fate is? If you really knew, you wouldn't say things like that."
I sat up straight, took the jade tablet out of my bosom and held it in my hand, using its warmth as a springboard to continue speaking.
"Fate isn't about numbers, nor is it about magic. If it were to be properly recorded, it would be about trees."
"The Tree of Life?" Sanjin, who was squatting behind me, looked up at me when he heard those two words. A look of confusion appeared on his honest face. His brows were furrowed and his mouth was half open, as if he had chewed on an unfamiliar bean.
"Yes, the Tree of Destiny. The so-called Tree of Destiny refers to the birth chart a person is born with, which is the root, the trunk, of your tree. A person will die if they don't breathe, they will die if they don't eat, they will die if they don't drink... This is predetermined, the texture of the trunk, and it cannot be changed. But every choice a person makes will cause a small branch to sprout from the trunk. Going left is one branch, going right is another. This is the variable. No matter who you are, from birth, how high you can go, what you will grow into, is all variable. How far the branches extend determines how big the Tree of Destiny will grow. It is ever-changing, with infinite possibilities."
Sanjin placed his cane horizontally on his knees, straightened his posture, and, like the dumbest student in a private school who had finally understood the first word the teacher spoke, eagerly asked, "Then what does it mean when people say 'first fate, second luck, third feng shui'?"
"Luck is like one branch resting on another. You wouldn't normally walk this path, but by some twist of fate, you step from your own branch onto someone else's, following their path for a while. That's luck. Some people are lucky, stepping onto it steadily; others are unlucky, stepping on it breaks. Feng shui is more like nourishment for those branches… If ancestral graves are buried in the right place, and ancestral homes are built in the right orientation, the energy from underground will rise along the roots, nourishing the branches you want to walk on, making them stronger and more robust, making it easier for you to reach that branch."
I paused for a moment, then shifted my gaze from Sanjin's face back to the one-eyed stone figure squatting on the ground in the distance.
"That's why some fortune tellers are always vague. It's not that they don't want to be clear, it's that they simply can't be clear. What they see isn't your future, but the probability of you stepping onto that particular branch. This branch has a 30% chance, that branch has a 50% chance, and they can only tell you about the one with the highest probability."
I gripped the jade pendant tighter; it was still hot.
"There's a saying passed down from our elders: 'Plants and trees are the foundation of all things.' What are plants and trees? They are the trees of life. A person's life is a tree, a family's life is a forest, and a clan's life is a mountain. If you cut off a branch, other branches will grow. But if you dig up the roots…"
My voice suddenly fell silent.
"Then the tree is gone. Not just the branches, but the whole tree."
Sanjin didn't speak. Liao the Bald didn't speak either. The wind blew through the cliffs, making my clothes flutter, but the stone figure squatted there, not even a ripple of clothing.
"And what about this stone statue in front of me?" Sanjin finally spoke, his voice deep and muffled, like a stone hitting another stone. "What is it?"
"It's not a tree." I stared at the one-eyed stone figure, my throat dry as if it were stuffed with dirt. "It's an axe!"
I took a deep breath.
"The red turban that Han Shantong wrapped in Yingshang transformed 150,000 laborers into 150,000 Red Turban soldiers overnight, and seventeen years later, the Yuan Dynasty collapsed. Do you know how many people died in those seventeen years? No. Nobody knows. All we know is that a batch died when the Yellow River breached its banks, another batch died when the Red Turban Army rose up, another batch died when Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang fought at Poyang Lake, and yet another batch died during Zhu Yuanzhang's Northern Expedition. Each batch saw tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of heads roll. Hundreds of thousands of life-giving trees were uprooted. These immense causes and effects, these great karmic forces, wrapped it layer upon layer, transforming it from an ordinary stone into a divine object nailed to the history of this land."
"You said the Tree of Life has infinite possibilities, its branches ever-changing," the little chick squatting next to me suddenly interjected. His voice wasn't loud, but every word hit the mark. "Then what about these people's Tree of Life? What about their branches? Before they even had a chance to grow, they were dug up by this rock."
I looked at him.
The child was nine years old. He didn't understand anything about the Tree of Fate, fixed or variable fate, or the concept of "first fate, second luck, third feng shui." But he hit the nail on the head with just one sentence... No matter how many changes the Tree of Fate undergoes, when the axe falls, the branches and roots break together.
"Yes," I said, "it was cut off before it even had a chance to grow."
The little chick touched the red rope on its chest, looked at the one-eyed stone figure in the distance, and suddenly asked:
"What's that fortune teller waiting for, squatting here?"
I didn't answer.
Because I'm afraid to tell you.
The Milky Way beneath our feet still revolves, its seventy-two stars completing a cycle of sixty years, each twenty-four "poof" sounds marking a full year. The earth dragons still stand in the Milky Way, dozens of pairs of black eyes fixed on the stone figure, motionless. The stone figure sits in the very center of the glazed path, its single, black eye staring straight ahead towards the direction of the King's Palace…staring in the direction we came from.
It is waiting.
I've been waiting for who knows how many years.
I gripped the jade scroll even tighter. It was so hot it burned my palms, but the pain was nothing compared to the buzzing thought in my head…
Is it waiting for us?