While the peach banquet began in the square outside, Pan Long and the others set off to eat the Immortal Peaches.
Everyone tucked two pungent pills into their nostrils and followed their ancestor, Ren Changsheng, through layers of formations that looked like curtains of water. Pushing through the ever-stronger, otherworldly fragrance, they arrived before a peach tree.
The tree was small, its trunk no thicker than an ordinary adult's fist. Compared with the great trees outside, whose trunks took several men to encircle, it could almost be called a sapling.
Six bright red peaches the size of fists hung among the green leaves of this "sapling." Tree, leaves, and fruit all looked ordinary. If they had not known it was no common tree—and had that fragrance stirring their very souls as proof—no one would have thought it special.
"When I first saw this tree two hundred and forty years ago, it was a little thinner, with slightly fewer leaves," Ren Changsheng said. "More than two centuries have passed in the blink of an eye. I'm old and near death, yet it has barely grown... In Lord Wenchao's Chronicle of the Divine Monkey, he wrote of a female immortal called Golden Mother who planted Immortal Peaches at the Jade Pool. Those trees took a thousand years to grow and hundreds, even a thousand, more to bear ripe fruit. Whoever ate a peach could become an immortal. As a boy, I thought it was only a story. It wasn't until I saw this tree that I understood: even a rumor born from an empty cave may have an echo behind it."
"By your account, senior, could this be what our forebears called a Flat Peach?" Jiang Bei could not help asking.
Ren Changsheng replied, "Perhaps. I think it probably hasn't finished growing.