Pig-Headed Immortals

"Cousin, this canvas is really expensive. Are you sure this will work? If we keep wasting it, Mother will definitely beat a spendthrift like me to death!"

"Just tell me, do you want to sell your paintings or not?"

In the Rong Household's studio, Zhang Xuezhou and Rong Tianding whispered back and forth.

Rong Tianding looked troubled, but he was also a little tempted.

Wealthy households looked down on his paintings, while poorer households couldn't afford them.

It wasn't that Rong Tianding charged too much. The cost of making his paintings was there for all to see; he couldn't very well sell them at a bone-breaking, blood-spitting discount.

If Rong Tianding really did sell them cheaply, he could guarantee that a painting sold today would be seen tomorrow, being washed by the river so the canvas could be made into clothes.

And if he did business at a loss like that, Rong Li would break his legs.

That was why, after all this time, Rong Tianding hadn't sold a single painting.

If he couldn't sell any paintings, Rong Li couldn't possibly support him in continuing to paint. Instead, he would have to keep working at the pork stall.

But Rong Tianding couldn't bring himself to do what Zhang Xuezhou suggested.

Cutting up the canvas, painting with pig's blood, depicting fierce pig-headed immortals that drove away evil...

Rong Tianding felt that none of it sounded reliable.

But his scholarly father had spent years making plans without managing to sell a single one of his paintings. If he still couldn't sell any, Rong Tianding felt certain he would inherit the pork stall and spend the rest of his life slaughtering pigs.

"Could we perhaps..."

"If you're good at painting something else, then let's paint some other ghost-banishing immortals!"

"No, I'm only good at painting pigs. I'll paint those immortals with pig heads and human bodies, just like you said!"

Rong Tianding waved his hand, then flushed a little.

He observed pigs carefully, but his skill at painting them could only be considered average.

The only reason he stood out in the field of pig painting was that no one else painted pigs.

But paintings of pigs really were unfit for the halls of high society.

Rong Tianding dreamed of becoming a court painter who came and went from the imperial palace, but he also knew the limits of his abilities. He knew he probably couldn't even make it out of Hibiscus City.

If he couldn't leave Hibiscus City, he could only keep tilling this little plot of land until the path to making a living from painting finally opened up.

But before Rong Tianding's painting skills had improved enough for the people of Hibiscus City to buy his paintings of a hundred pigs, Zhang Xuezhou had suddenly come up with a wild idea.

Aside from requiring an investment that would earn him a beating if it failed, the idea wasn't bad. It was worth a try.

He thought about it for a long while before taking an inked line and marking out where to cut the canvas.

A piece of canvas was expensive, but once cut into dozens of pieces, each one was cheap.

Still, Rong Tianding wasn't confident that paintings of pig-headed immortals made with pig's blood would sell.

The cost was lower, but whether people would be willing to buy such stinking, bloody paintings and take them home was another matter.

He thought it over for a long time, then steeled himself and cut the canvas and painted as Zhang Xuezhou had instructed.

"What if we paint them like this and people think they're pig demons?" Rong Tianding asked worriedly.

"What pig demons? These are pig immortals that suppress ghosts and evil," Zhang Xuezhou corrected him.

"I really can't see how this is an immortal!"

Rong Tianding looked at the pig-blood monster he had painted. No matter how he looked at it, it was ugly. Anyone who bought something like this and took it home had to be sick in the head.

"Cousin, I don't think you understand painting at all," Rong Tianding said miserably.

"Cousin, you don't understand the market!"

Zhang Xuezhou waved his hand.

Although Zhang Weimeng was a failure at business, Zhang Xuezhou had been exposed to his theories and knew some of the basic factors involved in selling things.

Only demand could give rise to trade.

Even if Rong Tianding practiced painting for another ten years and improved his skill at painting pigs tenfold, the common people had no demand for paintings of a hundred pigs. No matter how skilled he became, it would be useless, and in the end he wouldn't sell a single painting.

But where there was demand, even with Rong Tianding's current limited skill, he could still sell this substandard work.

"The market?"

Rong Tianding looked utterly bewildered.

He glanced at his father behind him, who had offered no opinion, and found it hard to understand what the market was or why Zhang Xuezhou could be reasonably sure these paintings would sell.

"I roughly understand some of my nephew's thinking, but Ding'er's paintings really don't inspire anyone to buy them," Jia Zhiyuan said.

Jia Zhiyuan was the scholar who had married into the Rong Household, making him Zhang Xuezhou's uncle by marriage.

Though Jia Zhiyuan wasn't a scholar with five cartloads of learning, he was educated and reasonable, and capable of a certain amount of thought.

He had some idea that Zhang Xuezhou wanted to sell these pig-headed immortals by taking advantage of the haunting, but Jia Zhiyuan had questions of his own.

"If we say these are pig-headed immortals, will other people really believe it?" Jia Zhiyuan asked. "And these are just paintings smeared with pig's blood. They can't ward off evil or drive away ghosts at all!"

"Li Erlang said pig's blood, chicken blood, and dog blood can all ward off evil. Everyone believes that, so why can't paintings we make with pig's blood ward off evil?" Zhang Xuezhou said with a smile. "When people first see these paintings, they definitely won't believe they're immortals, but we can label them and explain!"

"Explain?" Rong Tianding asked. "How?"

"If people don't know what immortal it is, can't we just write an immortal's name on it?" Zhang Xuezhou said.

"Brilliant!" Rong Tianding said. "What's the immortal's name?"

"Uncle, do you know the names of any immortals in this world?" Zhang Xuezhou asked.

"I've heard there are immortals on the divine mountains in the west. The immortals established a Heavenly Court, and its ruler calls himself Great Emperor Haotian. There is also the immortal Queen Mother of the West, who, as empress, serves as a motherly model for all under heaven," Jia Zhiyuan replied after thinking for several seconds. "But those divine and celestial immortals take dazzling human forms. I've never heard of any with a pig's head and a human body."

"None of the immortals have a pig's head and a human body?" Zhang Xuezhou asked.

"Probably not. I've heard those Daoists say that immortals all have handsome features, every one of them a man or woman of the finest beauty in the world," Jia Zhiyuan replied.

"That's a little troublesome," Zhang Xuezhou said with a nod. "But it's not a big problem. Since there aren't any pig-headed immortals, we'll make one up!"

"Make one up?"

Rong Tianding and Jia Zhiyuan spoke almost at the same time.

Compared with their limited thinking, Zhang Xuezhou's thoughts leaped far beyond the bounds. He was even bold enough to reach for the heavens, going so far as to make up a fake immortal.

But father and son stared at each other for more than ten seconds before giving in.

If they still couldn't make a living through scholarship and painting, one would have to keep doing fine needlework, sewing and mending clothes, while the other would have to take up the business of slaughtering pigs.

For the sake of their own fates, Rong Tianding and Jia Zhiyuan had no choice but to take part in this audacious decision.

"Can you really make up an immortal?" Rong Tianding asked quietly. "What if someone checks and finds out there's no such immortal?"

"How would they check?" Zhang Xuezhou said, waving his hand. "Even if there really were some important person who could verify such things, would they come and make trouble for common folk like us?"

"Three li outside the city, there's a Universal Cloud Daoist Temple. There's a Daoist Mu there who's good at performing rituals to drive away ghosts. If selling our pig-blood immortal paintings affects his business, he'll definitely come looking to get even and expose us, proving there's no such immortal in the world," Rong Tianding said.

"Then we'll make it convincing enough that he can't find fault with it," Zhang Xuezhou said. "He's only one Daoist. We're not afraid of him. Could he possibly know every immortal in the world? Besides, all immortals were made up by people anyway. Are others allowed to make them up, but we aren't?"

Zhang Xuezhou was someone who had weathered great storms, and he had even crossed paths with great cultivators.

With that experience, he wasn't very afraid of a mere Daoist. He felt that if soldiers came, a general would block them; if water came, earth would dam it. He only had to deal with whatever came his way.

"Then how do we make up the immortal's name?"

"The name we make up needs to be obscure and long, and it needs an official title. The title can't be too high. We'll say he serves under such-and-such an immortal and does the hard labor of killing demons and catching ghosts. We also need to be able to make up a rough account of his origins and the great ghost-catching deeds he's done..."

They painted through the night.

The next day, Rong Tianding opened his panda eyes wide and set up his stall.

Compared with the hard labor of slaughtering pigs, selling paintings felt wonderful to him. This was what a scholar ought to do.

The only problem was that the paintings he was selling this time were a little improper.

He thought about his old ambitions as a painter, then about the business of selling paintings he was engaged in now. Somehow, without his noticing, his painting career seemed to have changed direction, becoming little different from the work of those Daoists who warded off evil and drove away ghosts.