The Great Grandmother

Bai Lingmiao’s eyes went wide at Li Huowang’s question. “Yes, yes! My grandpa used to say, don’t go outside the village. The people out there are wicked. They catch children, skin them, sew dog hides onto them, and train them like dogs. Because children are clever, they can make a dog that understands human speech and use it for street performances. Those poor kids—their skin fuses with the dog’s hide and they can never grow up again.”

Li Huowang frowned slightly and shook his head. “No, I don’t mean the old stories grandmothers tell to scare their grandchildren. I mean things like the Wandering Lord.”

“Things like the Wandering Lord? Let me think…” Bai Lingmiao’s brow furrowed as she searched her memory. “The stories my grandpa told were all jumbled up. Most of them were about serpents in the mountains eating people. Things like the Wandering Lord were really rare.”

“Then who told your grandpa the story of the Wandering Lord?”

Bai Lingmiao blinked innocently. “Well, his grandpa told him, of course. Then he told me. And someday I’ll tell my own grandchildren.”

Li Huowang scratched his head. So the story was a family heirloom. It looked like he’d miscalculated.

“Senior Brother Li, I know one.” A weak-looking young man who had been leaning against the wall, eavesdropping, suddenly spoke up.

His joints were deformed—one shoulder higher than the other, his whole body twisted and crooked. Even among the inmates of the medicating shed, he was considered “distinctive in appearance.”

“Senior Brother Li, my surname is Zhao. Fifth-born in my family. Just call me Zhao Wu.”

Whoever told the story was fine. Li Huowang walked over to him. “Alright, go ahead.”

Zhao Wu looked around left and right, then deliberately lowered his voice. “The kind of wicked thing you’re talking about—I’ve heard the old folks mention one. They called it the Great Grandmother.”

“The Great Grandmother? What does it look like?” Li Huowang quickly searched his memory but found no image to match. From the name alone, he had zero clues.

“Shh! Senior Brother Li, keep your voice down. Lower it. This thing is nasty. I’ve heard that the Great Grandmother can hear you. If you talk about it too often, it’ll come looking for you!”

“Oh?” At this, Li Huowang’s interest perked up.

“My maternal uncle told me: it looks different to everyone. Some see a long-eared spirit. Others see an elderly relative who’s passed away. But the one thing that’s the same is—if you stay near it for any length of time, you’ll become a Great Grandmother yourself!”

Li Huowang stroked his chin, thoughtful. “This place really is strange. All kinds of inexplicable things. Alright. Anything else?”

“Yes, there’s more. There’s the Husband-and-Wife Fish. That one’s nasty too.”

From Zhao Wu, Li Huowang learned a great many bizarre and unfamiliar terms. These were all the ingredients he planned to put into his immortal-elixir formula.

“You sure know a lot. Thanks. This information is helpful to me.” If he listed only known poisons, Danyangzi might notice something was off. But by mixing in ingredients even the old man couldn’t identify, the credibility went way up. The key was incomprehensibility. Anything you couldn’t understand sounded profound.

Hearing this, Zhao Wu smiled with joy. “I heard all this from my maternal uncle. He was an itinerant peddler. He’d been everywhere. Knew a lot.”

“Alright. It’s almost time. I’m going back. You all wait quietly for my news.” Li Huowang took a deep breath and stood up, walking toward the door.

He had barely taken two steps when a towering figure, at least one meter ninety, blocked his path. “I… I… I…”

Li Huowang recognized the bald head before him. Everyone in the medicating shed called him the Fool—the kind with a lazy eye and a perpetual drool. Calling him a complete idiot wasn’t quite accurate. He just had a stutter, slow reactions, and low intelligence. “I… I… I… know, too!”

Li Huowang sighed, reached out, and patted his bald head, then turned and walked out the door.

The next morning, Danyangzi summoned Li Huowang to his quarters early. “I have more or less completed the inner and outer Greater and Lesser Heavenly Cycle cultivation methods you described. Now tell me the elixir formula that goes with the practice.”

“Yes, Master.” Li Huowang walked over to the stone slab and once again pretended to study it carefully. “Hmm… ‘Two Great Grandmother hearts, refined to their essence’? Master, what does this mean?”

Danyangzi paced back and forth inside the room, his expression shifting between doubt and excitement. He muttered to himself, “So that’s how it is… The path to immortality actually requires such sinister things?”

“Master, what is the Great Grandmother?”

“Never mind that. Continue.”

“One Husband-and-Wife Fish, take its gills, soak in two liang of arsenic…”

Weaving together what he had learned from Zhao Wu with his modern-world knowledge, after a sleepless night of effort, Li Huowang had concocted—through his own mouth—a complete, systematic method of achieving immortality.

When he finished reciting his fabricated formula, he saw Danyangzi was extremely agitated, muttering to himself.

But when Li Huowang strained to make out the words, he was stunned.

“Right, it can’t be wrong. Arsenic is cold-natured—it needs the drying heat of the Husband-and-Wife Fish to balance it. Brilliant! And using the Great Grandmother in an elixir—why didn’t I think of that before? If humans can be used as ingredients, why can’t these sinister entities be used as well?” The old Daoist was backfilling the medicinal balance logic all on his own.

Li Huowang realized that Danyangzi was only clever in certain ways. In other ways, he was truly gullible. He didn’t trust anyone—only the system he had built inside his own head.

If there was a word for it, it was superstition. In a world without gods or ghosts, believing in the supernatural marked you a fool. But in a world where gods and ghosts were real, superstition was still superstition. It just worshipped different things.

Just then, Danyangzi reached into his sleeve and pulled out a dented bronze Daoist bell. It was exactly the kind you saw in zombie movies—used to control the undead.

He began shaking it violently. The jarring clangor pierced the air, and Li Huowang felt a splitting headache. He instinctively clutched his head and gritted his teeth.

The eerie bronze sound didn’t only affect his hearing—it affected his vision.

Everything around him began to twist and warp. The whole world shook like an earthquake.

“What’s going on? What is Danyangzi doing? Did I slip up? Did he find out?”

Just as this thought crossed his mind, Li Huowang saw it: the corner of the table, the hem of Danyangzi’s Daoist robe—even the edge of the Heavenly Scripture next to them. Every corner and edge in the entire room came alive, writhing and slowly coalescing in front of Danyangzi.

What formed from the corners and edges of all those objects was impossible to describe. But one thing was certain: it was alive.

Li Huowang thought he was seeing things. He shook his head hard. But that only made it worse. As his head moved, the thing split into two.