That day, Wang Er took Lin Shou's greed-abstinence silver.
He went home that evening brimming with happiness and ate two extra bowls of rice. Business had been good lately, and he'd been earning quite a bit.
He scraped through the ashes under the heated brick bed and dug out a little iron box. Inside were five taels of silver—the savings a porter had scraped together over several years of hauling heavy loads at the wharf.
"Fan Ge, it's not that I wanted to covet your money. I'm just terribly short of cash, and life hasn't been treating me kindly. Your sister-in-law's got a child to raise on her own, and those five taels wouldn't be enough to help her anyway. Better to let me use them for now. She'll surely remarry someday. When she does, I'll find her a good man to look after her, so you can rest easy."
When people do something they know is wrong, they get a guilty conscience.
And once they feel guilty, they start spouting nonsense.
Take a look at what Wang Er was saying. Did that sound like anything a decent person would say?
"Your money won't do you any good, brother, so I'll hold on to it for now. Your wife's bound to remarry, and when she does, I'll find her a match."
If the dead porter, Fan Ge, could hear those words from the underworld, he'd probably drag Wang Er down with him and shove him into the boiling oil reserved for demons.
You could never see into another person's heart. They'd shared a bond strong enough to trust each other with their lives, and Fan Ge had entrusted his savings to Wang Er. Yet greed had blinded Wang Er, and avarice had made him lose his heart.
After pocketing the money, Wang Er twisted his thoughts this way and that to dig up excuses for himself, seeking comfort in self-deception.
Then he put the money he'd gotten from Lin Shou into the iron box too, hid it away, and buried it again beneath the charcoal ash under the heated brick bed.
But as soon as he'd buried it, a worry inexplicably rose in his heart. What if someone stole all that money?
He couldn't sit still, no matter what he did. He dug the money back out from beneath the bed and kept it close to his body.
That night, while he slept, a breeze brushed the paper on the window, making a sound no louder than a mosquito's buzz. Wang Er still woke with a white face and cold sweat streaming down him.
He felt for the money against his chest. It was still there, but he couldn't put his mind at ease. He got out of bed, slipped on his shoes, and checked the door bolt and window latch, wondering if a thief had come in to steal his money. He repeated this over and over throughout the night.
The next day, he went out with one hand clutching the money in his breast pocket as if it were his lifeline, while his eyes darted nervously in every direction.
Whenever he saw a passerby, he thought they looked shifty. He suspected each one of being a thief. Even the two people whispering behind their hands—were they plotting to steal his money?
All day long, he clutched his silver and couldn't eat or drink. His mind wandered, his steps wavered, and dark circles ringed his eyes. He looked as if he'd been smoking opium.
An illness of the heart could kill just as surely as a physical one. Wang Er spent his days in constant terror until he gradually lost his mind, taking in neither food nor water as his body wasted away.
In less than three days, his face had turned sallow. He stood beside the teahouse counter, and the wind nearly knocked him flat. The man looked as if he were about to die.
"Wang Er, haven't you been feeling well lately? The teahouse hasn't been busy these past couple of days. Why don't you go home and rest for a day or two?"
Seeing that Wang Er seemed ill, Shopkeeper Xia asked out of concern. But Wang Er was already as jumpy as a hunted rabbit, and the question only frightened him more.
Why is he telling me to go home? Is he plotting something? Maybe he's planted thieves near my house to snatch the money I'm carrying!
He was mad. The man had lost his mind completely.
Shopkeeper Xia owned the teahouse, and his family was a famous Shu merchant house. Each year, the imperial tea they sent to Kunning Palace was so valuable that even a little of the tea dust they sifted out would keep a teahouse worker fed and clothed for the rest of his life.
Would someone like him really covet those few taels of silver?
On an ordinary day, Wang Er would surely have understood that. But today was no ordinary day.
Since he'd lost his mind, Wang Er hadn't noticed that the two taels of greed-abstinence silver Lin Shou had given him—the money he clutched as if it were his lifeline—had been blackened by the fumes of greed.
This vicious thing was about to cost someone his life.
Inside the teahouse.
Lin Shou sat at a table, drinking cheap tea and cracking sunflower seeds as he watched Wang Er, who was standing by the counter and looked close to death. He clicked his tongue and shook his head. The man looked like a paranoid delusion case in the final stages.
The greed-abstinence silver was no joke. It had taken a perfectly decent man and, with the fumes of greed, turned him into a ghost.
No wonder people said you had to cultivate your character and keep your desires in check.
Lin Shou knew this experiment had gone far enough. If he let it continue, Wang Er would really die, and that would be a grave sin.
Wang Er had only betrayed his conscience and coveted another man's money. He'd fallen short in his personal conduct, but he didn't deserve to die. This punishment was enough. There was no need to take his life.
Besides, Lin Shou wasn't some righteous hero or moral saint. He'd done all this on a whim, simply following his fancy.
His main reason for using the Paper-to-Silver Art had been to test the power of the greed-abstinence silver. Punishing Wang Er and standing up for the porter's wife and child had only been secondary.
Lin Shou snapped his fingers.
The greed-abstinence silver burst into flames and turned to blue smoke in moments. As it burned away, so did Wang Er's swelling greed.
"Ah!" Wang Er suddenly let out a yelp. He pulled the silver from his breast pocket and saw that, somehow, he'd lost two taels! The world spun before his eyes, but then his mind cleared, and everything fell into place.
"Good riddance! I must've had lard covering my heart!"
Ill-gotten money burned to hold. Losing the silver had broken his spell and let him set aside his obsession.
"Shopkeeper, I just remembered an errand my brother asked me to do. Please give me a day off. I'll be back as soon as I can."
Shopkeeper Xia was understanding. He'd seen Wang Er distracted these past few days and figured something must be troubling him, so he nodded and gave his permission.
With the day off granted, Wang Er left the teahouse and hurried straight out of the city. He found his brother's wife and child and returned their money.
Once the money was returned, Wang Er's mind was completely at ease. His appetite came back, and he could eat and sleep again.
So, people, don't do evil just because you think no one will find out.
A moment's greed can condemn you to a lifetime of scraping by.
Later, when Wang Er thought back on those confused, muddled days, he couldn't remember what had caused them.
Who had given him the money, how he'd lost it, or why his heart had gone blind—he'd forgotten it all, as if a fire had burned away every memory connected to it.
He only remembered that on the day he returned the money, his heart had felt open and honest, clear as daylight.
The matter of Wang Er coveting the silver was settled, and the dead porter's wife and child got the money that had belonged to them.
Lin Shou, the mastermind behind it all, was now sitting leisurely in the teahouse, listening to a storyteller.
Though the Qingcheng Teahouse was backed by major tea merchants from the Shu Region, this branch in the Capital City wasn't some high-end establishment. Ordinary people could walk right in, and the tables were mostly set with inexpensive snacks and rough tea.
Lin Shou couldn't tell whether they ran it just for fun or whether it was a business strategy: perhaps they'd deliberately avoided competing with the other tea merchants' upscale teahouses in the Capital City, taken a different path, and gone for a more affordable crowd.
Either way, the teahouse's decor and atmosphere were quite nice for an ordinary man like him.
The only thing that fell short was the storyteller they'd hired.
It was true that storytellers grew more valuable with age. An old gentleman had years of experience and a vast repertoire, and he knew all the tricks of the trade, the twists and turns, and the techniques for keeping a story going.
But there was such a thing as being too old.
According to some heckling patrons, the old gentleman hired by the Qingcheng Teahouse had one foot on the coffin lid and was surfing the waves. When he lifted a cup of tea, his hand shook so badly that half of it spilled. He was there to earn his coffin money.
Every time the old gentleman told a story, half his words were slurred and his voice was feeble. It really wasn't pleasant to listen to. So even though the Qingcheng Teahouse was cheap, it was often far from full.
Lin Shou understood. He considered himself an ordinary man from the bottom of society and wasn't picky about what he ate—or listened to.
Today, the storyteller was talking about the Eight Sects of the Jianghu.
Lin Shou had been in this world for some time now and had learned a little about its customs and ways. He knew that The Eight Sects of the Jianghu was the most familiar, widely used template in the storytelling trade.
It was the storyteller's basic training, the script beginners started with.
The whole thing was a sprawling epic, a story that could go on and on. Most storytellers only picked out a few sections they knew how to perform. It was the kind of tale full of hooks and cliffhangers, and no one knew exactly how long it was. Lin Shou had never seen anyone tell it from beginning to end.
Put simply, it was a tale of the strange and wondrous characters and happenings in the jianghu's eight trades: "gold, skin, color, hanging, flat, willow, tune, and troupe."
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