The title first: the Nine-Spirit Sage, nine-headed lion beneath the seat of the Heavenly Worthy Taiyi, Deliverer from Suffering.
And the old account of Bamboo-Joint Mountain, laid open at once: three hundred years ago I descended to find two grandsons — sold to Yuhua Prefecture and suffering there — and in my fury I flattened the prince's palace, and captured even Sun Wukong's company. When my master arrived in person, I bowed my heads and returned. The classic records that passage as "demon-breath surging to heaven."
Not unjust. To level a prefecture for one's grandsons puts private grievance above public right. I own it.
But you should know who my master is. The Worthy Taiyi — Azure Radiance Emperor of the Eastern Pole — and his office? To seek out the voice of suffering and deliver it. Wherever in the Three Realms an afflicted soul calls his name, he follows the sound and arrives. Into the fires of the hells he goes; onto the blade-mountains he goes. I was his mount for millennia, carrying him wade by wade through every suffering the Three Realms could offer.
These nine heads of mine are not for majesty. The master taught: suffering is ninefold — birth, age, sickness, death, parting from the loved, meeting the hated, seeking without obtaining, the blazing of the five aggregates — and a ninth kind, he said, the deepest: the suffering that no one knows.
Nine heads: one head assigned to each. When I bore the master at speed, nine heads and nine pairs of ears sorted the weeping of nine sufferings, and not one cry was lost.
Seven days before the black moon rose, the master changed.
Seven nights running he stood on the roof of the Azure Radiance Palace, listening west. On the seventh night he came down, and stroked my nine heads one by one, and said the sentence I had never heard in all my millennia beneath him:
"This journey, I do not ride you. Your legs are fast — but what matters more is that your ears remain below."
He said: if I am not back in three days, descend. Do not seek me. Seek the suffering.
"Where the suffering is, be there. While you are there, it is as if I am."
Then he went west alone. Three days: no return. Three hundred years: no return.
I obeyed. Below the Lesser Thunderclap I chose a ruined post-station and raised the Hall of Hearing Suffering.
No god's image inside — only nine meditation cushions, facing my nine heads. Whoever under heaven, human or yao, has suffering and nowhere to speak it: come, choose a cushion, sit, speak. Birth, age, sickness, death; love severed; hate met; longing denied — whichever suffering is yours, sit before its head. I do not convert. I do not preach. Most hours I say nothing at all.
I listen. And not one cry is lost.
Three hundred years; the cushions have been re-stuffed by the hundred. Some speak and leave. Some speak and weep themselves empty. Some return every year to say the same thing. Bureau soldiers have come in secret. Miss Red Ling has come. Master Yellow Brow, when his false temple was fully dismantled, came and sat one night — before the ninth head, until dawn, without one word.
The ninth head's charge is the suffering no one knows. Before it, not speaking is speaking.
You will ask: what use is mere listening?
The master taught: half of suffering's weight lies in no one knows. Spoken, and heard, suffering loses half itself. Only the remaining half can be delivered at all. The world reads "Deliverer from Suffering" as the rescue alone — the master said: before the word deliver stands the word hear. Hearing is the first half of deliverance.
That first half is what I do. The second half I am saving — for the master to do when he returns.
Last, one private matter among my nine heads.
Nine heads listen to the eight directions — but the center head, for three hundred years, has faced only west.
It waits for the master's seeking-voice. The master finds sufferers by sound; a mount finds its master the same way. Three hundred years, and the west made no sound.
Until the eclipse last month — when the center head's ears rose all at once. From the deepest west came one sound: very faint, very short. The sound of someone beneath something enormously heavy — drawing a fresh breath.
One sound only. But I carried the master for millennia. The way he draws breath, I know.
The master exists. The master is in the west, beneath something enormously heavy — alive.
So the Hall of Hearing is entrusted to friend Long-Brow, and the nine-headed lion marches west.
Suffering, I have heard for three hundred years.
This journey, at last, it is my turn to follow a sound.