I am the herb-gathering acolyte of the Yellow-Flower Abbey line. A centipede spirit — a hundred legs on the mountain, seven ridges crossed in a night. In the herb-gathering trade, legs are capital.
First, the family history, laid bare. The founding master of my line was the Many-Eyed Daoist of Yellow-Flower Abbey three hundred years ago: the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord. He was a senior of the seven immortals of Web-Coil Cave, and when the pilgrims defeated the sisters, the founder stood up for them — and how did he stand up?
He poisoned the tea.
Seven cups nearly ended all five pilgrims at a stroke. Then Sun Wukong fetched the Bodhisattva Pilanpo; one embroidery needle tossed into the air, and the founder's thousand eyes went dark at once. He fell back into his centipede form, and the Bodhisattva took him away to keep a gate.
That is the account in the classic. The account outside the classic, our line has passed down mouth to mouth:
before he was led away, the founder begged leave to speak one last word to his disciples. It was granted. Facing the assembled abbey, he said two things:
First: to stand up for kin and friend is righteousness; to stand up with poison is sin. That I could not tell the two apart — there lies the blindness of all my thousand eyes.
Second: no disciple of this line shall ever poison again. To know poisons, to counter them, to compound them into medicine — all permitted. To mix one qian of harm — expulsion.
In three hundred years, Yellow-Flower Abbey changed trades: from the abbey that poisoned, into the greatest antidote-hall on the western road.
The founder's old poison-formulas were "reverse-solved" one by one by the generations after: a recipe that can compound a poison, read backward, is the blueprint of its antidote. However deep his art of harm ran, exactly that deep runs our inheritance of rescue. Every physician on the west road knows: the unidentifiable toxin goes to Yellow-Flower Abbey.
To my generation fell the corrosion-drug.
You know the allies: the Hundred-Herb Hall labored; the scorpion maiden gave her sting; Immortal Ruyi gave the heart-water. But you may not know that the derivation that fitted those pieces into one complete antidote was done in Yellow-Flower Abbey's elixir-room — three months, my master and seven of us, unpicking the corrosion-formula backward.
The night the unpicking was done, the master gathered us before the founder's portrait, lit three sticks of incense, and said:
"Founder — your rule was used today. The poison-unpicking you taught has unpicked the most poisonous formula of these three hundred years."
In the candlelight, the thousand-eyed Daoist of the portrait seemed, for a moment, to move his lashes.
Now, why I march.
In the unpicking, the master found one anomaly, and told only me — because the errand needed the fastest legs.
At the very bottom of the corrosion-formula lies one activating agent that would not unpick. It is no toxin and no herb; its notation is bizarrely archaic. Half a month of deciphering yielded three characters:
"An old friend's tears."
Tears of an old friend, as catalyst. What can it mean? Whose old friend? Whose tears? And how does a teardrop enter a formula measured by nations?
The master said he had seen that same brush-hand once before — in the oldest manuscript of our archive. The manuscript the founder sent back, after the Bodhisattva took him, from his post keeping the gate. Only a few pages survive, and every page speaks of a single subject:
what the founder saw, on the far side of the gate he keeps.
What gate? What door does a thousand-eyed being get posted to watch? The manuscript holds one sentence without head or tail, which the master made me learn by heart:
"The thousand eyes all ruined; one heart-eye remains. With the heart-eye I watch the gate. Behind the gate there are tears — falling, drop by drop, toward the west."
Behind the gate there are tears, falling toward the west.
The corrosion-drug's catalyst is an old friend's tears. Behind the founder's gate, tears fall westward.
Two facts, three hundred years apart — and they meet.
So the master dispatched the fastest legs — mine. My commission: travel west with the company; mark the destination of every "tear" along the way; and should fortune allow, find the gate my founder keeps, and ask on the line's behalf:
Founder — your heart-eye. What has it seen, these three hundred years?
At parting, the master wrapped a packet of incense-ash from before the portrait into my pack for protection. He said: the founder sinned in life and keeps a gate in atonement, a lifetime in debt to the pilgrims —
and now someone walks the pilgrims' road again.
Our line has fast legs. So we run at the front — repaying, on his behalf, those seven cups of poisoned tea, one antidote at a time.