Immortal Ruyi. Younger brother of the Bull Demon King; uncle to Red Boy. Three hundred years ago, at the Gathering-Immortals Hermitage on Male-Undoing Mountain, I held the Abortion Spring and demanded rich gifts before releasing its water — until Sun Wukong beat down my door, my wish-fulfilling hook was snapped, and the spring was opened to all.
That old account I acknowledge. Let me first tell the layer of it no storyteller mentions — then the present business.
Why did I ration the spring? The storytellers say greed. Wrong. I lacked for nothing.
I rationed it out of displaced fury. The year Guanyin took my nephew Red Boy, my elder brother sealed his cave and would not come out; my sister-in-law Iron Fan wept her eyes half-blind. And I — an uncle who could not fight heaven nor fetch back the boy — had a chestful of fire and nowhere to burn it. Just then, the pilgrim monks came asking for my spring's water.
And I thought: your Buddhist house has taken my nephew. Why should I make anything easy for you?
That is the entire origin. Unfit for daylight — I admit it. Displaced fury is the most worthless fire under heaven: it burns only the uninvolved. Those from whom I extorted gifts in those years were ordinary women who had drunk of the Mother-and-Child River by mistake and doubled over in pain. What had they to do with the Buddha's house? Or with mine?
The day my hook snapped, Wukong cursed me: a renunciant holding a life-saving spring, running it like a toll-gate. That curse woke half of me.
What woke the other half, across the next three hundred years, was the spring itself.
After the pilgrims passed, I had no face left to keep the hermitage, and made to leave. On the night I packed, I went to the spring one last time —
and the water was glowing. By itself. In the dark.
Decades I had held that spring and never known it glowed at night — a mild light, like a lamp held under the water. I crouched at the rim through the whole night, and understood at last, to my prostrate shame:
the Abortion Spring is alive. It is not a water. It is a vow.
Where the world has a Mother-and-Child River to give a husbandless nation its heirs, it has an Abortion Spring to release those who drank in error. One river, one spring; one that grants, one that releases — two hands of a single mercy. Every day of its existence, this spring has kept open a way back for the women of the world — kept it for thousands of years, and never charged a copper.
And I had held that hand of mercy, and run it as a toll-gate.
I stayed. The staying has lasted three hundred years. No more gifts; no more gate. Whoever asks, ladle. Whoever comes by night, I hold the lamp. Whatever is hard to speak of, I do not ask. I took down the hermitage's plaque and hung three characters in its place: Spring-Keeping Hermitage.
Call it nothing so grand as atonement. One who has occupied the post must simply work the debt back.
Now the present business — the "agitation of the spring-soul" your chapter records.
Three years ago, the lamp beneath the water began to flicker — bright, dim, bright, like a sleeper gasping in nightmare. I went down to the spring-eye: veins unhurt, water unchanged. What was frightened was the spring's vow.
It was afraid. A spring thousands of years old — afraid of what?
The Black Turtle's people delivered the answer to my door. They crept onto the mountain and neither stole water nor dropped poison: they raised a small cauldron at the rim and distilled the spring's vapor. I scattered three parties of them and seized the cauldron. The residue at its bottom I carried to the Hundred-Herb Hall for assay —
and the result turned this three-hundred-year-old immortal cold to the fingertips.
The corrosion-drug's base formula is copied from the Abortion Spring.
The spring's nature is release: entering the body, it finds what should not be there, and dissolves it — harming the person not at all. A mercy of unimaginable precision. And the drug has stolen that release and reversed it: entering the body, it finds what should be there — judgment, memory, the heart's defenses — and dissolves them, one by one. The body unharmed. Only the person dissolved.
To forge a drug of control from a formula of rescue: of all the world's cruelties, this is the summit.
That is why the spring trembles. Its mercy has been traced and cast into a blade. It shakes in the night like an honest soul framed under a stolen name.
The day the medicine-basket boy came seeking antidotes, I handed over everything — water, seized cauldron, assay — and accepted, on the spring's behalf, their request to settle its soul. In truth there is no settling technique. I simply sit at the rim each night and tell it the road's news: how many drug-cauldrons dismantled, how many of the dosed restored, how far the boy has walked.
The spring understands. At every telling of an antidote's success, the lamp under the water steadies, and burns calm awhile.
I am old, and the spring cannot be left unattended; I cannot go. What I have entrusted to the company is one gourd of heart-water: three ladles from the spring-eye's deepest point, where the vow runs thickest.
Carry it west. Where the corrosion runs deepest and no other physic answers — one ladle.
And deliver one message for me, and for this spring, to the thief of its formula:
a blade traced from mercy still carries mercy's shape.
And on the day that edge turns in your hand — you will not be able to stop it.