This poor wanderer is called Yiye — One Leaf — a traveling fangshi. The word may be lost on you youngsters: in Qin and Han times, the men who read vapors, watched for spirits, and sought elixirs were all called fangshi. The Shiji says so plainly — the First Emperor kept a whole ring of them around him. Later, swindlers ruined the name, and the honest sky-watchers stopped claiming it.
I claim it. Because I don't swindle.
I don't read fortunes, sell talismans, or tell you your brow is darkening. I have exactly one skill: reading the sky. Where the clouds travel, which gully the wind comes down, when the mountain's breath rises and when it settles. Read that, and you know tomorrow's rain from tomorrow's shine; you know which days the gale comes, and that gale days are when the Gale-Splitting Falcon circles the summit — that bird doesn't leave home without wind. You know when the peach-wood mist runs thickest, and that in thick mist some things show themselves more clearly than usual.
People say: old Taoist, that's just weather-watching, any farmer does it. True. But a farmer watches the sky to bring in wheat. I watch it to tell you this: when the mountain is awake, and when it sleeps.
This plague year, the mountain has been awake far too much.
In a normal year, after the Awakening of Insects, the mountain's breath sinks and all things return to their places — the yao to their nests. This year is strange. The breath hangs high, like a pot kept boiling with the fire never drawn. I sat on the summit seven days. My conclusion is one sentence: something below is stirring. Stirring hard enough to keep the mountain from rest.
Before you enter the hills, ask me three things: which day to go, which path to take, when to come back. I charge no money — only one promise: when you return, tell me what sky you saw.
I'm old. I've watched the sky all my life. What I most want to see now is the day the mountain sleeps again.