Don't look for me by day. By day I am stone, and stone must sun itself.
Come at night. When the moon rises and touches the third crack in the stele, I can speak.
I am the remnant spirit inside this stele. And what stone is the stele? That's a long story. That stone stood on the very peak, marked with nine apertures and eight holes laid out after the nine palaces and eight trigrams, with no trees to shade it but magic fungi at its sides. It drank the essence of heaven and earth, the vigor of sun and moon, for untold years, and conceived a cell. The cell ripened, and out sprang a stone monkey. What happened next, all the world knows.
After the monkey left, a stub of stone root remained on the peak. The monkeys cut it into a stele and carved his name on it. The chiseling woke me. Stone can wake — woken by chisels.
I kept that name for three hundred years. Watched the generations change: elders crawling to the stele to tell the old stories, infants peeing on its pedestal. Watched old Taibai Jinxing come by every few decades for a turn. Watched the town below grow from a few straw huts to half a hillside of tile.
The night the stele cracked was no earthquake.
Someone called out to this stone from very far away. And the stone answered. It answered too hard, and split.
Who called? I don't know. I only know that when the stone answered, it wasn't only the stele that cracked — something's seal cracked too. Half the name is left in the stone now; the other half washed down the mountain as dust in the rain. Where to? Where it was meant to go.
Not long ago, a cub fell onto this mountain. I know the stone-smell on him — exactly the smell I knew three hundred years ago. The monkeys ask me: Grandfather Stele, what is this cub?
I say: he is enormous.
They ask again, and I say no more. Not from unwillingness — from prohibition. Some words, once spoken by stone, are heard by heaven; and once heaven hears, the road changes. The child must walk his own road. Step by step he walks, and step by step I'll speak.
Come sit with me at night. I'll tell you stone's stories. Three hundred years, and I've forgotten nothing.
After all, a stele remembers more than monkeys do.