Zhang Rong said that two years earlier, he and another senior fellow disciple had encountered something he still could not forget.
There was a village in the area where the children kept falling ill. Every few days, they would come down with fevers. As soon as one child's fever broke, another child would develop one.
This went on for a long time, until the village doctor began to find it strange.
Children might have weak constitutions and low immunity, but surely they should not have been falling ill one after another.
Later, the village doctor called all the children who had been sick, along with their families, to his clinic. He began questioning the children one by one, asking whether they had seen any strange people before falling ill.
The children's accounts were remarkably consistent. They all said that before getting sick, they had seen a little boy wearing a bellyband, and that he was very cute.
Some of the slightly older children, who could express themselves better, described the little boy to the village doctor. They said he was very small, like a baby brother who had only just been born, yet he could walk, and he could run very fast.
The adults present went deathly pale at those words, badly frightened.
If he really was a newborn baby, how could he walk, let alone run?
Their first thought was that the children had seen a ghost. Since children had weak yang energy, encountering something unclean could easily make them sick.
The village doctor had seen a thing or two himself. He knew this was no simple matter and that he could not handle it, so he contacted a colleague in the city and asked him to recommend someone capable who could come to the village.
That colleague later