Cui Jiuyang nodded, then asked, "Did you tell your family anything before you left?"
Wang Dali grinned. "Of course I did. How could I go out selling goods without telling my family?"
Cui Jiuyang shook his head without answering, then worked his fingers through another calculation. "Think a little harder."
Wang Dali froze. Thinking back, he finally remembered the angry words he had said to his wife before leaving!
Oh, damn! My wife takes things to heart! Surely she didn't really think I was going to jump into the river! This is bound to end badly!
He abandoned his carrying pole, leaving Cui Jiuyang to watch it, and sprinted home.
By the time he reached home, he was gasping for breath. Wang Dali crashed through the door and looked inside!
A stool lay overturned on the floor. His wife was hanging from a roof beam, her eyes already rolling back!
Chapter 14: Huzi
Early the next morning, Wang Dali brought four kinds of pastries and four kinds of cooked meat to the divination stall. He also took out two silver dollars to thank the man who had saved his wife's life.
Years of peddling goods through streets and alleys had given him a nimble tongue. When he told the story in front of everyone on the street, Cui Jiuyang's reputation began to shine. Word spread that there was a Mr. Cui down by the docks whose divinations were accurate and whose heart was kind.
The second life he saved belonged to a little boy from the north of the city.
The boy's family was poor, and he had no formal name, only the childhood nickname Huzi.
True to his tiger-like name, Huzi was a sturdy, bright-eyed little fellow, full of spirit.
None of his neighbors had ever seen him walk properly. He was always charging about, a gust of wind blowing west one moment and east the next, lively as could be.
A lively child was certainly endearing, but a child like that was bound to be mischievous too.
Huzi was no exception. He spent his days pestering cats, teasing dogs, and chasing ducks on the river until they scattered in a flurry. Leave him unbeaten for three days, and he would climb onto the roof and tear off the tiles.
The adults at home were forever dragging Huzi over for a beating, but the boy had a thick hide. No matter how often they beat him, he never changed.
That day, Huzi went out to find his playmates, but the sky was gloomy and rain looked imminent. Their families were keeping them indoors.
With nobody to play with, Huzi still refused to go home. He wandered the streets alone and somehow found himself at the Land God Temple.
The Land God Temple was no grand sanctuary with towering gates. It was a finely built little shrine, barely as high as an adult's knees and about four feet wide. Inside stood clay figures of the Land God and Land Goddess, husband and wife, each no bigger than a palm.
Anyone coming to burn incense would place three sticks in the burner before the little shrine, kowtow, and murmur a few words.
The beggars of Jining City often recited a comic verse poking fun at the Land God Temple.
"Four feet long and two feet tall, not three stalks' worth of incense at all.
"The god and goddess stoop down low, with nowhere dry when rain starts to flow.
"Watch slippery moss when you bow to the floor; don't scorn its size when you pray at the door.
"East seeks riches, west seeks gold, but clay gods can't save their own household!"
Small as the shrine was, plenty of people came to burn incense and leave offerings. When Huzi wandered over, he happened to spot three yellow apricots sitting before it!
Yellow apricots were hardly choice fruit. They were sour and astringent, and only after enduring that first mouthful of sourness could one savor the faintest trace of sweetness.
But Huzi was a greedy little boy.
He glanced at the silent Land God and Land Goddess inside, looked around to make sure nobody was there, then snatched the three yellow apricots and ran without looking back.
Turning and running was precisely where he went wrong!
Eating a few offerings from a shrine was no great offense. Poor people with nowhere else to turn often went to graves or temples, knocked their heads against the ground three times, and took some offerings home to eat.
Generally, neither the dead in the graves nor the immortals in the temples would blame them. They could hardly stand by and watch someone starve to death, after all.
But Huzi had neither kowtowed nor bowed. He had not even said thank you.
To the Land God and Land Goddess, that was no different from robbery!
The Land Goddess was good-tempered. Finding the sturdy little boy rather cute, she tried to soothe her husband. "Don't be angry, dear. A child eating an apricot is no great matter."
The Land God was a stubborn old fellow and would have none of it. "No, that won't do. I have to give him a scare!"
The Land God was hardly an immortal of mighty powers. Giving Little Huzi a scare meant nothing more than sending him a couple of nightmares...
But an immortal displaying his wrath was less frightening than a monster stirring up trouble.
A rat spirit behind the shrine overheard their conversation. His two black eyes rolled about, and a wicked plan came to him.
During the first half of that night, Huzi drifted into a dream. He dreamed that melons, pears, peaches, and other fruit were raining down from the sky, and he was delighted.
A peach here, an apricot there-he could not have been happier.
But his delight did not last long. Looking closely, he saw that what fell from the sky was not fruit at all, but toads, fluttering moths, and flies as big as mung beans!
Then he looked at his hands. The toad in his left hand had no head, and the moth in his right had no rear end.
Little Huzi was utterly sickened!
A child did not understand what a dream was. He truly believed he had eaten those filthy things.
He got up in the middle of the night and vomited for a while, then insisted on rinsing his mouth with water!
The adults thought he was deliberately making trouble instead of sleeping. They gave him a couple of smacks in the dark before realizing something was wrong. Hastily lighting a lamp, they saw that his mouth was pitch-black and he was spitting out filthy water!
They carried him to a local folk physician that very night. The physician was a kindhearted man. He felt the boy's forehead, lifted his eyelids to examine them, and pondered for a while before saying that the child was not ill; they needed someone who understood these matters to take a look.
People in those days were superstitious, and they immediately understood what the physician meant.
Early the next morning, they invited a spirit medium to the house. By then, Little Huzi lay unconscious in bed.
The moment the medium entered, she knew a spirit was causing trouble, intent on taking the boy as an attendant. But the spirit enshrined in the spirit pavilion in her main hall was the Gray Gate Immortal, one of the Five Immortals. Strictly speaking, she had to address that rat spirit as her martial uncle!
How could a junior like her spoil an elder's plans?
The medium circled the room three times, made a show of muttering a few indistinct incantations, wiped away nonexistent sweat, collected five copper coins, and went home.
The family wholeheartedly believed Little Huzi would now be saved, but after waiting most of the day, they found his symptoms had only grown worse!
Poor Little Huzi vomited whatever he ate, and everything he brought up was filthy and pitch-black. Watching the lively boy wilt and sink into near unconsciousness, his family almost went mad with worry.
Little Huzi's grandmother loved a good chat. Just then, she suddenly remembered hearing a few days earlier that a new diviner surnamed Cui had appeared on the street by the docks, and that he knew a thing or two.
A few words from him had saved Wang Dali's wife several days before. Without him, even the seventh-day rites after that woman's death would already have been over.
After hearing this, Little Huzi's father pocketed every copper coin in the house and rushed straight to the street by the docks.
By the time he found Cui Jiuyang, the sun was setting and darkness was drawing near.
Cui Jiuyang was packing up his stall. Little Huzi's father hurried over and grabbed his hand. Before the man had even caught his breath, Cui Jiuyang plucked a gray hair from his shoulder and held it beneath his nose for a sniff. He already had a fair idea of what had happened.
He worked his fingers and examined their lines, and the whole chain of events became clear. Silently cursing the beast, he waved a hand. "No need to explain. I already know. Lead the way."
At those words, Huzi's father nearly burst into tears. He had met a living immortal!
On the way, they happened across several stray cats. Huzi's father watched the diviner smear some whitish, greasy ointment on his hand and beckon to them. The cats rushed over, scrambling to lick his hand.
Cui Jiuyang's hands moved as swiftly as lightning. He plucked nine cat whiskers, sending the strays yowling in pain and scattering in every direction.
At Huzi's home, he found the boy lying in bed, breathing out more than he breathed in. Cui Jiuyang hurriedly burned the whiskers and blew their black ashes into Huzi's nostrils.
Strange as it seemed, the boy had looked beyond saving, yet the moment the ashes entered his nose, he opened his eyes and sat bolt upright. He sneezed nine times in succession, each sneeze expelling a tiny tuft of gray rat fur.
After the ninth sneeze, the boy seemed perfectly fine. He opened his mouth and said he was hungry and wanted griddle cakes!
With that, Cui Jiuyang's name truly rang throughout Jining Prefecture!
Chapter 15: The merchant guild
After those two lives were saved, people came to Cui Jiuyang for divinations in an endless stream every day.
Over those days, Cui Jiuyang soothed the suspicious, comforted those who could not untangle their troubles, and resolved matters for those who had genuinely encountered something strange. He had not found the opportunity he sought, but he had certainly earned a fair number of silver dollars.
He was in no hurry, though. A fated opportunity required waiting for the right moment and trusting in fate. How could he find it by searching blindly through the streets?
That day, people were again lined up before his stall. Cui Jiuyang calmly performed divinations and interpreted fortunes for them one by one.
The morning had passed, and he was consoling a woman whose husband gambled.
Two men approached from farther down the long street, each riding a bicycle. They wore black jackets, black hats, black trousers, and black cloth shoes with thick, layered soles.
Bicycles were rare things in those days. People who knew something of the world knew there were quite a few in places like Jinan and Qingdao.
Qingdao in particular had Germans and Japanese stirring things up, bringing in plenty of foreign novelties. Bicycles were one of them. There was an extra period.
Anyone who could ride a bicycle was bound to be somebody out of the ordinary. Combined with the way these two were dressed, they hardly looked like kindly men.
When the ordinary people waiting at the stall saw that the two men had also come for a fortune-telling, the timid ones abandoned the line and left outright.
The bolder ones dared to stay, but they still stepped aside to let the two men take the front.
Naturally, Cui Jiuyang had no intention of indulging them. What was so impressive about a bicycle?
My little Yadea electric scooter beat your lousy crossbar bicycles hands down!
He watched the two men approach without speaking first. Opening his fan, he fanned himself slowly, not even lifting his eyelids.
The two men were brothers, one called Meng Da and the other Meng Er. Both were deputy caravan captains of the Shengdelong Chamber of Commerce, one of the Twelve Merchant Guilds involved in canal transport.
Deputy caravan captains was merely their title. In truth, they led the guild's guards. Back under the Qing, their profession would have been called escort masters.
Now that the country had been reformed, they were called deputy captains, but the work remained the same: wielding blades and guns to protect merchant caravans.
Seeing that the diviner showed neither surprise nor delight-not even a flicker of expression at their two gleaming, polished bicycles-the Meng brothers understood that this was a man who had seen the world.
The whole vast Jining Prefecture had only a dozen or so bicycles. Few people could dismiss such foreign contraptions so lightly.
The brothers exchanged a glance. Meng Da stepped forward and respectfully cupped his hands. "May I ask if you are Mr. Cui Jiuyang?"
Only then did Cui Jiuyang lift his eyelids. He snapped his fan shut, rose, and returned the salute politely. "You are too courteous. I am indeed."
Meng Da nodded. "Our chairman sent my brother and me to extend an invitation. We sincerely hope you will honor Shengdelong with your presence early tomorrow morning, Mr. Cui."
Then Meng Da gave Meng Er a meaningful look. Meng Er stepped forward, took an invitation with gold-stamped lettering from inside his jacket, and presented it with both hands.
Cui Jiuyang truly had no idea what sort of place Shengdelong was, but he could not show his ignorance. He accepted the invitation, opened it, and read it carefully before cupping his hands again. "Please inform your chairman that I will certainly arrive on time tomorrow."
After exchanging a few more courtesies, Meng Da and Meng Er mounted their bicycles and rode away.
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