The office of State Preceptor of Cart-Slow Kingdom was bought with a life. Outsiders never learned this.
Three hundred years ago, the three Grand Immortals — Tiger Power, Deer Power, Goat Power — held that office here. The storytellers tell only their fatal wager with Sun Wukong — the beheading, the disemboweling, the cauldron of boiling oil — a comedy of demons unmasked.
But the people of Cart-Slow remember the other half. Before the three came, this land had known five years of drought, the starved lying unburied in the fields. It was Tiger Power who mounted the altar, moved the Bureau of Thunder with the Five-Thunder rite, and brought the soaking rain that saved the kingdom entire. For twenty years after, wind and rain kept season; prayer at the altar was answered every time.
Every rain he called still lives in this kingdom's genealogies — count the families whose ancestors survived on those years of water.
He lost the wager: true. His methods were not clean: also true. But the people gathered his body in secret from beneath the scaffold and buried it behind the rain terrace, and on the stele they dared carve no name — only three characters: THE RAIN-ASKER.
It was before that stele that I completed my cultivation.
I was a mountain thrall, walking the Power-lineage road. The day I attained human form I came to the rain terrace to pay a disciple's respects — everyone under heaven who walks the way of strength owes him half a master's bow. As I knelt, the old shrine-keeper studied me a long while and spoke the sentence that redirected my whole existence:
"The altar has stood empty three hundred years. Since you carry his art — will you carry his name?"
To inherit a name is not to inherit its fortune. It is to inherit its debt.
Tiger Power's debt is rain. The drought on this land now is crueler than the one three centuries past — not that rain refuses to fall, but that rain can no longer be asked for. The Bureau of Rain does not answer. The Bureau of Thunder does not answer. Even the Wind Matron's back-channels are severed. Meanwhile the state's grand ceremony grew larger and stranger by the year — and I learned, too late, that the so-called Rite of National Fortune had long been taken over by Shixuan's people, feeding the incense of an entire nation to something else.
I took the name, and I mounted the altar. The first year, daily — full Five-Thunder rite, and not a whisper of response. The second year, every third day. From the third year: new moon and full, without fail, in any weather.
I have knelt for three hundred years — two hundred ninety-seven, to be exact, since I took the name.
The whole city watches me the way one watches a joke. State Preceptor? Rain-asker? Three centuries of asking — has one drop come down? The children have a rhyme about me. The Bureau's file reads: yao falsely claiming the preceptor's office; erects altars, gathers crowds, misleads the people; investigate.
I make no defense. The rain-asker's office is half asking for rain — and half letting the people see that someone still asks. If heaven does not answer, that is heaven's account. But if the people stop asking — that is the end of the human world.
On the fifteenth of last month, I mounted the altar as always. Three sticks of incense. The Five-Thunder mudra. The memorial presented. The kowtow.
On the third touch of my forehead to the boards — something fell from the sky.
Not rain. A paper.
Yellow silk, in a format ancient beyond use — the old shrine-keeper searched every archive and identified it: a response-slip of the Bureau of Rain, the very form on which rain-prayers were answered three hundred years ago. On it, one line, the ink fresh:
"The rain is in the Western Heaven — all of it intercepted and held. Three hundred years of rain are owed you. It is entered in the account. — a surviving clerk of the Bureau of Rain"
A surviving clerk. Surviving! The Bureau of Rain still has someone! One? Several? Where? And all of it intercepted — the world's rain, held where, in the Western Heaven?!
I clutched that slip on the altar and wept like a child. For the first time in three hundred years I knew: it was never that heaven refused to answer. It is that heaven cannot — the road my prayers travel has been cut. And even so, one surviving clerk found a way to pass me an IOU.
Someone up there is still keeping the books. Still recording the rain owed to the human world.
The day the medicine-basket boy's company destroyed the false rite's grand altar, I showed them the slip. The Taibai-sending read it and was silent a long time, saying at last only: so the Bureau of Rain… still has someone holding on.
I have left the name in the shrine-keeper's care, and joined the westward company.
I am going to the Western Heaven to find that surviving clerk, and ask to his face:
the three hundred years of rain owed to Cart-Slow Kingdom — when is it repaid?
And — how many pens are left, still keeping that account?