The highest peak of Zetsuzan is called Zansendai, and on it stands a single tree.
Trees grow on mountains. That is unremarkable. But Zetsuzan is bare on every slope, every ridge stripped clean, and so this one half-dead ancient tree rising from the summit carries a weight of strangeness that bare facts cannot account for.
The villagers of Juefeng, settled at the mountain's foot, have long made their peace with it. Twenty years ago the tree was full and green. Now it is not. The old men who sit idle at the village entrance have a tidy explanation for this: the tree is a Dushan Yangxian, a tree that achieved spirit and ascended toward immortality. An immortal thing, they say, cannot share a hillside with common grass and ordinary saplings. It demands the mountain for itself.
The explanation is tidy, but it is not without support.
Twenty years ago, disciples from sects whose names most people could not pronounce came to Jueshan to investigate the tree. The old people still talk about what happened. Those cultivators were powerful enough to summon thunder and call down the divine force of heaven and earth, and yet when they tried to destroy the ancient tree they were each one of them gravely injured and forced to flee. After that, no sect sent anyone again.
Since then Jue Mountain has worn a ghost wall. Fog clings to the slopes all day. Villagers who go up sometimes disappear into the cloud and come back down at the foot of the mountain having walked in circles, the bald hillside turning them around without their knowing. The place has an evil character, and it intimidates people, which is exactly what it is meant to do.
Still, a certain group of people has refused to let the mountain alone. Once a year, for the past several years, they come. They cannot ascend. They do not try. Instead they hire villagers at the foot of the mountain to bury the black iron boxes they bring.
Those boxes are wrong in a way that is difficult to name. The material looks like iron but does not feel like iron. Their surfaces are slicked with black oily sludge that moves slightly, wriggling, as if in the next moment the whole thing might melt into a puddle of dark water. The people in black robes who bring the boxes forbid any villager from touching them with bare hands. Special iron forks must be used to push the boxes into the pits. Wu Laosan from the east of the village once brushed a box with his palm. His entire hand was eaten away. He has been called Wu the Handless ever since.
The work carries no shortage of danger, and despite generous payment, most villagers refuse it. There are always a few, though, driven by poverty or something worse, who can be pushed to go. When these black-robed figures arrive and begin pulling frightened workers from the surrounding area, the village shuts its doors. People stop working in the fields. Even travelers passing through who have no connection to the place have been caught and pressed into service.
In this way the tree's reputation shifted. The name of the immortal tree faded, and the mountain became known instead as a place of evil spirits. Parents threatening disobedient children learned quickly that the words if you cry again, I'll throw you up the mountain worked better than anything else. Even the most defiant child went silent.
The village was poor but its people were hardy. Octogenarians were common. Strong children ran the lanes in packs.
One child stood apart from them.
The girl in Carpenter Xue's house in the east of the village had never been strong. Her parents were solid people, broad-shouldered and capable, which made the daughter's frailty more conspicuous by contrast. Xue Jiafu and his wife had waited long years for a child. Fifteen years ago they finally had a daughter, and she came into the world already fragile. A stronger wind, people said, could snap her at the waist.
The carpenter and his wife loved her accordingly: completely, and with a great deal of anxiety. They were reluctant to let her go anywhere alone.
On this particular afternoon, Qiaolian was pickling sour radish in the yard when she glanced up and saw her daughter Ranran standing on the step near the courtyard wall, peering over the top. Outside, a pack of children chased each other through the lane. Qiaolian set down her work and went over.
"Come down, good girl. Those wild boys will knock you over without even noticing. If you want to go out, wait for your father and have him take you to the river to catch fish."
Ranran stepped down obediently and pulled her gaze back from the lane. She swallowed once, her eyes clear as autumn water. "Aniang," she said sweetly, "I'm not a child anymore. I wasn't trying to go out and play."
Qiaolian leaned and looked over the low wall. The fat boy from the Ding family was standing in the lane holding a piece of jujube flower pastry, its smell drifting on the air. She understood immediately.
Her daughter was well-behaved and biddable in most things, but she had always been helplessly greedy when it came to food. On ordinary days she would pinch little morsels between her teeth just to taste them. A new dish, an unusual ingredient, something she had never tried before, and her large eyes would track it for half the afternoon without shame. The fat Ding boy and his expensive pastry had found exactly the right weakness.
Qiaolian felt the familiar pinch of helplessness. "Good girl, that pastry is only sold in the county town. When your father finishes the work he's doing for Master Ding and gets paid, he'll buy you some."
Ranran had already resettled herself on a stool and picked up her unfinished bun. She shook her head sensibly. "Aniang, it must be very expensive. I only smelled it on the breeze, but I could tell: they press cotton candy and red dates together, then work the dough with lard and bake it in a six-part stove. When the dates come in this autumn, you just need to buy a small bag of cotton candy and I can make it myself."
Qiaolian reached over and pinched her daughter's cheek. "You and that nose of yours. Smell something once on the wind and you know how it was made? Who told you that? Don't try to fool your mother."
Ranran saw she was not believed and did not argue. She smiled and went to help press radish into the jar, then bit a raw slice as she worked. "Didn't Father bring home a piece of cured duck yesterday? We could braise it with the radish tonight."
Qiaolian snatched the radish from her hand. "Stop eating raw food. Your stomach is weak. Ruin your digestion now and you won't be able to eat the duck tonight."
People in the village occasionally wondered aloud how two robust parents had produced such a fragile child. Only Qiaolian knew the real answer.
Sixteen years ago she had picked Ranran up from under the dead tree at the summit of Jueshan.
She could not account for what had happened that day, even now. She had been napping and woke with a feeling of pressure in her chest that sent her out of the house and up the mountain path without clear intention. The fog was thick. She wandered higher than she intended, and somewhere near the summit she heard an infant crying.
A small white bundle was curled beneath the ancient tree. The baby's eyes were wide and half-open, swimming with tears, crying with the sustained grief of someone who has been waiting a long time and does not expect anyone to come. Qiaolian's heart broke open.
She could not imagine who had left a newborn on a bare mountain in September. She chose not to think about it too hard. What she believed, and what she held onto, was simpler: this was heaven's gift to her and her husband, who had waited so long and been given nothing.
Xue Liangui agreed. He carried the baby home happily and they began raising her as their own daughter. It was only later, as days passed, that they understood the extent of her fragility. She fell ill every few days without fail, and when she was not ill she slept so heavily she could barely be roused. The couple spent years consulting doctors and buying medicine and finding nothing that helped.
Eventually, as parents of sickly children often do, they stopped consulting doctors and started trusting themselves. They developed their own methods over years of careful watching, and by those methods they raised the delicate girl to fifteen years old.
When they had found her she had a red birthmark on her right palm, a shape that an old scholar in the village said resembled the character Ran. Carpenter Xue named her Xue Ranran. By the time she turned one, the birthmark had faded completely. Many children's birthmarks fade with age. The couple noticed and moved on. They had more pressing things to manage.
While the two of them were talking in the yard, a voice called from beyond the wall.
"Auntie! I bought this pastry especially for Ranran to try."
Qiaolian turned. It was not the fat boy but his older brother, Ding Jia Erlang, a young man studying at the academy in town who was preparing for the imperial examinations. He had real prospects. He had already been matched with the daughter of a juren from the county. And yet he kept returning to this village to hover around her daughter.
Qiaolian understood why men of a certain kind were drawn to Ranran. The girl was thin, yes, sickly and fine-boned, but her features were genuinely beautiful. Delicate brows, eyes with the depth of autumn water, skin so pale and clear it looked cold to the touch. Among the fifteen and sixteen-year-old girls in the village she was striking. A farmer looking for a daughter-in-law who could work the fields would pass her over without a second glance, and most did. But a young man who had read books and developed different ideas of what he wanted was another matter entirely.
Erlang had already sent a village matchmaker to the house to propose. His suggestion was that after the marriage was arranged, Ranran would come to live in his household as a child bride. Qiaolian had refused and sent the matchmaker back with a polite but final answer: her family had no interest in climbing toward wealth; the second son should find himself a healthier girl.
He had not listened. Every time he returned to the village he brought food and found excuses to linger.
Fortunately, Ranran herself wanted nothing to do with him. She was greedy about food but she was not stupid or easily swayed. Whenever she saw Ding Erlang she made herself scarce.
So when he called over the wall that afternoon he received only a flat look from Aunt Xue, followed by the sight of Qiaolian steering Ranran back into the house to start dinner. Young Master Ding stood there a moment longer than he should have, then turned and walked away still holding his pastry.
Carpenter Xue had gone out that morning to deliver some furniture. He came back late. Qiaolian heard the yard gate open and looked up to find her husband shutting it behind him with more care than usual, fitting the bolt in and pressing it home. He crossed the yard quickly, took her arm, and pulled her inside. He stopped at the door of their daughter's room and looked in. Ranran was asleep, face flushed pink, mouth curved in some private dream.
Xue Liangui drew his wife further into their own room and lowered his voice.
"Do you remember what day we brought Ranran home?"
Qiaolian thought. They had kept Ranran's origins carefully hidden, to protect her from the cruelty of village gossip and from the grief of knowing she had been abandoned. Qiaolian had gone back to her family home and stayed long enough to pass as a woman returning with her own child. She worked back through the timing now.
"The ninth day of the ninth month of the Geng year. Sixteen years and three months ago."
Carpenter Xue slapped his knee. His voice dropped lower still. "I wasn't sure it was the same month, but I thought so. Listen. The black-robed people who came this time are going door to door through every village nearby. They're asking whether anyone saw or found a child on Mount Sendai in September of the Geng year."
Qiaolian's face went still. Then she turned and her hands were unsteady. "Her parents. They've come looking. They want to take her back."
Xue Liangui had been sitting with that fear all afternoon. He had been in the middle of a carpentry job at the Ding house when he heard the news. He had walked off without waiting for his wages and come straight home.
When it comes to a child, a mother moves faster than anyone.
Qiaolian pulled herself together. Her voice when she spoke was quiet but certain. "She is not a cat or a dog to be thrown away and reclaimed whenever it is convenient. Do you know how cold those mountains are in September? She was left there with nothing, not even a cloth to wrap her in. Whoever did that is not fit to call themselves her parents. Our family is not wealthy, but we have loved that girl with everything we have. She is my life. If anyone wants her, they will have to kill me first."
Xue Liangui had spent the walk home thinking that maybe, if real parents appeared and asked for the child, refusing would be wrong, would be keeping a daughter from her blood. But hearing his wife say it plainly, he felt the confusion leave him. They had raised her. Every illness, every sleepless night, every coin spent on medicine. How could they hand her to someone else? Just the thought that she would marry in two years and leave this house was enough to make his eyes sting.
After a while the two of them went quietly back to their daughter's room and stood in the doorway.
Ranran slept with her cheek pressed into the pillow, face warm and pink, mouth hooked at the corner in a small, contented smile, dreaming something she would probably not remember.