There are one hundred and thirty-seven treasures in my den.
Half of a stone lock the King lifted as a boy — broken in two. Three peacock feathers, not from this mountain. A clay bowl with a chipped rim that Grandpa says the King drank from. And a whole wall of rubbings, every one pounded out by my own ink pad, tap by tap. Yiya trots behind me all day asking questions, and the question she asks most is: what's the use of all this junk?
Use? Old things can't talk, but they all remember.
After the stele cracked, the carved characters started shedding flakes. Every gust takes another stroke. Grandpa Marshal Ma paced in circles — if the characters keep flaking away, he said, our grandchildren will have nothing left to read. I said I had a way. My grandfather passed down a craft called rubbing: press paper to the stone, dab the pad in ink, and tap — gently, over and over — until the characters walk off the stone and onto the paper by themselves. Stone rots. Paper doesn't. Kept well, it reads clear a hundred years from now.
I rubbed for three months. The pedestal, the body, every crack. The crown was hardest — I had to hang upside down from the top to pound it. Yiya handed me the ink from below. Wrong one, seven times.
When I reached the middle slab, a half-character came up under my pad. I couldn't read it, so I took it to Grandpa Marshal Ma. He looked at it for a long, long time — so long I thought he'd fallen asleep. Then he said: that's the right half of the character for "Sage."
I asked him where the left half was.
He said: inside the stone. And the stone isn't telling.
Since then I've kept an eye out. Every loose fragment around the stele, I've gathered. The ones that fit, I piece together; the ones that don't, I keep anyway. One day they'll all fit. And then the half-character gets its left half back.
Oh — if you want to learn rubbing, I'll teach you. Pad, paper, ink, I'll lend you everything. Three conditions: gentle hands, a quiet mind, and if you damage my stele, I'll bite you.
Not to brag, but on all of Flower-Fruit Mountain, I'm the only monkey with this craft. It can't die out. Old things die, old stones crumble — someone has to pound out what they remember, sheet by sheet.