Chen Ping'an left his ancestral home in Mud Bottle Alley and Huaihuang County City, taking Xiao Mo with him as they walked toward the tallest peak among the western mountains, Northern Sacred Mountain Piyun Mountain.
At the foot of the mountain, worshippers streamed by without end, carriages and horses flowing like a river. There was even a mountain market here specializing in local mountain goods and medicinal herbs. The goods were naturally genuine—how fake could mountain goods possibly be? It was simply that the prices could hardly be called fair. Local worshippers from Chuzhou never stopped here. They merely headed straight up the mountain to burn incense, praying for wealth, marriage, or peace, with different destinations in the mountain for each. Good men and women from elsewhere had spent no small amount of wasted money here. It was not their fault. The mountain hunters running these stalls were each more silver-tongued than the last. If it was not Poria cocos dug from the back mountain of Piyun Mountain or lightning-struck wood chopped from Aotou Peak, which only needed to be placed at home to banish ghosts and ward off evil, then it was reishi from Xiancao Mountain. "You've heard of Xiancao Mountain, haven't you? One of the smaller peaks under Luopo Mountain. Why does no one else dare go there, while I can dig up reishi from that place? Good question! As it happens, Mountain Lord Chen Ping'an and I are distant relatives who used to visit each other every Lunar New Year. Our relationship is anything but ordinary. If we ran into each other on a road in the county, he'd have to call me Uncle. Every Lunar New Year's Eve, at the New Year's Eve dinner, that lad would toast me again and again. Don't believe me? I