First, let me be clear about who I am — a question I have only half worked out myself.
I am the great boar-yao of Cloud-Ladder Cave. The name Ganglie — Iron-Bristle — was given to me by the people of Gao Village. Three hundred years ago a true Old Ancestor Ganglie lived in this village, and left with the scripture-pilgrims for the west. The villagers are a nostalgic people: when a great boar with tusks and bristles like the old paintings settled in Cloud-Ladder Cave, they simply began calling: Ganglie. Marshal Ganglie.
At first it frightened me. The name was too large; a mountain-born boar could not carry it. But they called it so earnestly — they came in bad harvest years, came when children went missing — and where I could help, I helped. And with the helping, the name became like another's old coat: worn long enough, it began, impossibly, to fit.
Until the black lines found me.
It began as strange dreams. In them I was not in my cave — I was in the sky, governing a great silver river. I had committed some offense; I fell; I fell into mud and was given a different body. And a voice in the dream asked, over and over: do you remember yet? Do you remember yet?
But I had forgotten nothing — I am a boar born of the hills; my mother was a pig and my father was a pig. Yet the dream was terrifyingly real. I would wake with the mist of the River of Heaven still clinging to my tusks.
Then the dream-voice began to teach me things. To draw the earth-veins — the ground under this village runs richest, it said. To gather the earth-breath toward the altar — collecting a debt for Heaven, it called it. Awake, I braced against it with everything I had. Asleep, my body walked on its own. Villagers began to see me standing in the fields at midnight, black lines crawling from under my hooves toward the mulberry ground. The crops fell; no grain went missing. That was never rooting for food. This body was being used as a living plow to strip the land's veins.
The black lines thickened by the day. I could feel myself being ceded, inch by inch. In my clearest hour I locked myself in the deepest chamber of Cloud-Ladder Cave and bound my own four hooves with the chain-set the Old Ancestor left behind. His old iron hissed and scalded wherever it touched the black lines — it bought me my last half year.
And then the boy came into the cave.
What happened next, the village now tells as legend: a battle of three hundred rounds, a treasure-mirror revealing the evil. The truth is far simpler. When he raised the demon-revealing mirror, I saw myself in the glass — saw, beneath the black lines, one terrified boar still bracing with all its strength, refusing to be ceded. And he spoke to the me inside the mirror: hold on. I'm here.
When the seal came down and the black lines burned away, the dream-voice fled shrieking. And as it went, it flung out one last sentence — not at me, but at someone impossibly far away:
"This one is not it either."
This one is not it either.
Which means: it is searching, boar by boar. For the one that is.
I travel with the boy now, bonded by spirit-pact. The village walked us out ten li, still shouting Marshal Ganglie. I answered to it. I dare answer to it now — not because I have become worthy, but because I finally understand: a name is not a coat. It is a posting. The Old Ancestor has been gone three hundred years, and some boar must carry on the duty of keeping Gao Village safe.
But there is one thing I have told no one.
Since the sealing, the dreams have not stopped. Still the silver river; still the nine-toothed rake. Only the voice has changed — it no longer asks do you remember.
Now it only sighs. Long, worn-out sighs, like someone carrying too much weight who is not permitted to set it down.
And after every sigh, the dream leans a little further west.
The boy is bound west anyway. Good.
I intend to see whose face is standing at the end of this dream.