River Monsters

Dawan Village sat on a flat plain in a valley surrounded by mountains.

A massive river curved like a half-moon through the broad plain between the mountains, dividing the entire valley basin into two irregular halves.

Dawan Village had been built upstream, on high ground at the foot of the mountain behind it.

The twelve mu of Spirit Fields,

lay behind the village, beside a courtyard halfway up the mountain, on terraced fields that looked like a flight of stairs.

The village's spring, rich with spiritual energy, flowed down from the mountains. Over time, its waters had seeped into the earth, imbuing the surrounding area along its course with the spiritual essence needed to grow Spirit Grain.

But Shen Changchuan was now in the main hall at the center of the village, at the foot of the mountain.

So when the commotion outside reached him, he heard it too.

He put away the Spirit Ginseng.

Shen Changchuan headed outside the village,

where he saw a group of people gathered on higher ground, pointing toward the river.

"What's going on?"

As soon as Shen Changchuan arrived, the people around him made way.

At that moment,

Shen Changchuan followed their earlier gazes,

and spotted a small black-canopied boat capsized on the choppy, murky river nearby. Most of it had already sunk, with only part of the top still visible.

Amid the churning currents, he could just make out a dark red stain rising from beneath the water.

The lush grass along the riverbank

had been flattened over a wide stretch, leaving it in disarray.

It was clear that many people had trampled through the once-lush riverside grass. Nearby stood heaps of black silt, several feet high, dredged up from the riverbed.

Eight or nine zhang from the riverbank, his grandfather Han Qinhu and the other members of the Han Clan were keeping order, telling the crowd to back away.

"Grandfather, what happened?"

Shen Changchuan came to Han Qinhu's side and asked.

"Something's happened. There's a Demon Beast in the river!"

"Those fools thought they could dredge up silt from the river. They never expected there to be a monster in there. The beast dragged two of them straight under!"

Seeing that Shen Changchuan had arrived, Han Qinhu didn't hide anything. He explained the whole story.

After hearing Han Qinhu's account,

Shen Changchuan furrowed his brow.

As it turned out, this incident

was tied to his reform experiment.

When he had first drawn up the reform plan, he'd wanted to spur the members of the Eleventh and Twelfth Teams into action, so they'd have a reason to tend to the Spirit Grain with greater care and raise the yield from the two mu of test fields as much as possible.

Shen Changchuan had made them a promise: when the Spirit Grain was harvested, they could keep thirty percent of anything they produced beyond a hundred jin.

Things had developed

just as Shen Changchuan had expected. The plan to share the surplus had greatly motivated the people in both teams.

So, while cultivating the Spirit Grain,

nearly everyone in the Eleventh and Twelfth Teams had pored over both sets of notes Shen Changchuan had left them.

They parsed them line by line, carefully putting the various methods into practice.

Almost everyone was giving it their all, hoping for an excellent harvest of Spirit Grain that season.

Deep plowing, turning the soil, selecting seeds, raising seedlings, and so on—they did their best to follow the notes to the letter.

But one of the steps in those notes was troublesome.

That was composting.

The fertilizer here wasn't human waste.

Spirit Grain was, after all, a spirit crop infused with spiritual energy. Even without thinking it through, Shen Changchuan knew that human waste wouldn't increase its yield. It might even "contaminate" the Spirit Grain and cause the seedlings to wither.

Spirit crops were delicate by nature.

Methods for tending ordinary crops couldn't simply be copied over in full.

Still, Shen Changchuan hadn't written composting into the notes on a whim.

At the time,

he'd remembered something from the two and a half years he'd spent at the Shen Family Estate. One of the travel journals kept by an ancestor of the Shen Clan had recorded an incident from his travels across the world.

The ancestor had once seen low-level cultivators near a place rich in water-vein energy dredge up large amounts of silt containing "deposits" from the water. They had then used it to carve out fields for growing Spirit Grain in a nearby barren area that had no spiritual energy.

Although the Spirit Grain grown in these man-made "Spirit Fields" yielded far less than grain from true Spirit Fields,

the sight had astonished the Shen ancestor.

Later, his curiosity had led him to investigate.

He discovered that when the energy of river water veins mingled with the energy of earth veins, it produced a fertile kind of "deposit."

It was precisely this "deposit" in the silt, formed from the mingling of water-vein essence and earth-vein energy, that created an environment where Spirit Grain could grow.

It let Spirit Grain grow even in ordinary fields.

When Shen Changchuan first read that account, he'd found it interesting, but hadn't given it much thought.

But not long ago,

while compiling his notes on ways to improve Spirit Grain cultivation, he'd remembered the story.

And an idea had come to him:

Could the Spirit Grain in a Spirit Field grow better if he piled silt containing these "deposits" in the fields as fertilizer?

With that idea in mind,

Shen Changchuan had added composting to the notes.

And the source of the silt

was, of course, this very river running across the entire valley plain.

The members of the Eleventh and Twelfth Teams had been greatly encouraged by the promise of a share in the surplus,

so naturally, they weren't about to skip the step for improving the compost in the notes.

But they hadn't been working long

before disaster struck.

An unknown river beast had suddenly attacked, capsizing the small boat dredging the silt and dragging both people aboard beneath the water.

"How could there be a Demon Beast in this river? Has there always been one?"

After learning what had happened, Shen Changchuan's expression darkened.

He hadn't expected

his reform experiment to end in disaster before he'd even seen the results—and for people to die because of it.

"I don't know."

"I asked the villagers, but they don't know whether there's a Demon Beast in the river either."

"The river is wide, and the current is especially swift in the middle. Even outside Half Moon Bay, where the water seems calm on the surface, treacherous undercurrents rage below."

"On top of that, the village has always drawn water from a stream coming down the mountain. So few people have ever ventured into the river, and they don't really know what's in it."

As Shen Changchuan's most trusted confidant, his grandfather Han Qinhu held a position in Dawan Village much like that of a village head, managing all sorts of affairs.

Even before Shen Changchuan arrived, Han Qinhu had already looked into the situation.

He answered Shen Changchuan's questions readily, laying out the facts without hesitation.