Precious Root and Golden Egg - Chapter 2

Thanks to the arms race, masculine yang energy in the mortal world reached unprecedented heights.

Every February, Old Liu at the end of our lane made eggs steeped in young boys’ urine.

He used to take a bucket to the boys’ toilets at the primary school and beg the pupils to bestow their precious pee upon him. Back then, the stuff was rare: one candy per bladderful.

The parents would proudly add, “You’re getting a bargain.”

Times had changed. Every household had boys now.

Old Liu set eight big wooden barrels outside his door. The children running wild in the streets filled them in less than fifteen minutes.

But more kept arriving from all over the city, remembering the old arrangement and hoping for candy.

The barrels were full.

The candy was gone.

Their bladders, however, were still holding a whole night’s supply.

So they unloaded at the nearest convenient spot: the foot of Old Liu’s walls.

What a sight.

He had built his fine, three-room, tile-roofed house on the proceeds of those eggs. Now the thirty meters of wall around it had acquired an actual moat of piss.

Old Liu rolled up his trousers and waded through the moat, chasing children.

“I don’t want any more! No more! Get out of here!”

Unfortunately, his house had four sides.

When he shouted on the east side, they went west to provide artificial rainfall. When he shouted on the south side, they went north.

The unprecedented flood lasted until early March.

Old Liu’s house was practically an island in a lake. Yang energy rose from the entire island in towering clouds; its fragrance carried five kilometers on the wind. Even the rats swimming away from his house belched great blasts of yang.

Sadly, after this incident, Old Liu washed his hands of the business—in a chamber pot.

He never sold urine eggs again.

A delicacy was lost to the world.

Six months later, the flood had fully receded, and the households in our lane found themselves a new source of income: scraping saltpeter from the foot of Old Liu’s walls.

Dad sold what he collected to a pharmacy. Soon he had saved enough to send me to primary school.

With my little schoolbag on my back, I listened to the teacher call the roll.

“Wang Yaozu.”

“Wang Chuanzong.”

“Li Yaozu.”

“Zhang Tianci.”

“Li Chuanzong.”

And so on.

There were sixty first-graders: seven Tiancis, eight Chuanzongs, and twelve Yaozus. With common surnames like Zhang, Wang, Liu, and Li, a single primary school might have more than a dozen children with exactly the same name.

Luckily, our teacher devised a brilliant way to tell us apart. Combining a child’s name with his father’s produced a unique identifier.

And that was how I became Yaozu Tianci Baogen Wang.

Why include my grandfather, Wang Baogen? Because the class next door had a Yaozu Tianci Jindan Wang.

Baogen: Precious Root. Jindan: Golden Egg.

Those names told you everything.

We were destined to be lifelong nemeses.

Two dark clouds hung over my entire primary-school career.

One was Golden Egg III, the only pupil in the school capable of challenging me for first place in our year.

The other was the female classmate—a creature that existed in our teachers’ stories.

From scraps of conversation with teachers and older pupils, we gradually assembled a picture of this unknown life-form.

Girls were excellent students.

“Girls mature early. That gives them an advantage. Making boys sit the same exams is unfair.”

But they were also terrible students.

“Boys are smarter. The moment they apply themselves, they leave the girls behind.”

Girls couldn’t handle responsibility.

“Class monitors should be boys. They can cope when things get tough.”

But they were also very good at taking responsibility.

“Sit a naughty boy beside a quiet girl. She’ll keep him in line, and his marks will improve.”

They had no shame.

“You have bangs/wear skirts/talk/laugh/get love letters? Have you no shame?”

But they also had higher moral standards.

“Boys have nothing to lose, but girls must respect themselves and keep themselves pure!”

They were weak and easily bullied.

“Little girls cry at the drop of a hat. So annoying.”

But they were also terrifyingly powerful, capable of harming you without a trace.

For instance, my classmates couldn’t understand how one person could possess all those contradictory qualities. Their brains overloaded, a fever swept through them, and large numbers fell ill.

The adults said the spirits of the baby girls dumped in the hills behind the school were afflicting them.

That night, the parents held an exorcism there. They cursed the female ghosts they imagined and trampled all over the pit where my previous body lay.

I was not pleased.

I summoned several hundred owls and had them swoop over the ritual altar, imitating the cries of babies.

The parents and pupils were already scared half to death when blood-red rain began falling from the sky.

“This ghost is too vicious! We can’t contain her!”

Everyone scattered.

Then Golden Egg III came sliding down the tall poplar behind the altar, panting, a bottle of red ink tucked inside his clothes and a water gun slung across his back.

After that night, the pupils added two new activities to their fevers: nightmares and bed-wetting.

The elite families had it worst.

Ten pairs of underpants to wash every day.

It was the rainy season. Nothing dried on the line. So on day two, they had twenty pairs to hang out. On day three, thirty.

For a long time, washing lines spread like cobwebs across the city’s sky, hung with underpants in every color.

About ten days later, the situation improved.

They had run out of underpants.

When I passed members of the elite on campus, I could still see that special, elite-family pride on their faces.

But what good did it do them?

I knew perfectly well they weren’t wearing any underwear.