Chapter 5: Into the Jungle

Zhang Lisheng was shocked when he looked at the centipede that grew to over seventy centimeters, almost the size of a grass snake. He calmed himself down and began to chant the incantation again. In the midst of the ‘pst shh…’ noise, he controlled the centipede as he desired, as if it were his own arms. It was the formation of a wizard’s worm, a wizard’s way of turning a normal insect into a wizard worm using incantation and wizard power.

In Chinese mythology, the creator of the universe Pangu separated the sky from the earth. It was a blurry entity at first, but then after he died of exhaustion, his breath transformed into the spring breeze and clouds, while his voice turned into thunder. His eyes transformed into the sun and moon, and his hair transformed into the stars. His body transformed into mountains, while his blood transformed into rivers. His tendons transformed into roads, while his muscles transformed into flatlands. His bone marrow transformed into minerals underneath the ground, while his skin and fine hair transformed into grass and trees.

After Pangu, there was the goddess Huaxu who became pregnant after stepping on the Thunder God’s footprint while she was fishing by the lake. She then gave birth to Fuxi and Nuwa, the siblings who had the head of a human but body of a snake.

Nuwa created mankind with clay, and later on had intercourse with her brother Fuxi and gave birth to Wu.

Later on, there was a fight for the throne between the Water God, Gong Gong, and the Fire God, Zhu Rong. After his defeat, Gong Gong banged his head onto Mount Buzhou, which broke the sky pillar. Kyushu Island collapsed, and the sky rose toward the northwest while the ground was tilted into the southeast direction. The earth was flooded as wildfire spread.

To save the people, Nuwa traveled across the mountain ranges and borrowed fire from the Sun God. She then melted the five-colored giant stones on Mount Tiantai into 36,500 pieces to mend the sky.

After successfully mending the sky with 36,500 pieces of stones, Nuwa then chopped off the four legs from the God of Mount Tiantai, Ao, to support the four pillars of the sky. She finally managed to solve the calamity of Kyushu Island but turned into dust from the depletion of her blood.

Since then, her child Wu that she had with Fuxi replaced its mother to educate the humans. During ancient times, people practiced witchcraft to communicate with spirits, assist demons, determine luck, possess the knowledge of good and evil, as well as to govern people. They were the most powerful people.

However, humankind became self-reliant later on following the appearance of the Three Sovereigns: Suiren, Shennong, and the Yellow Emperor, as well as the Five Emperors: Taihao, Emperor Yan, Shaohao, Emperor Yao, and Emperor Shun. These eight talents who were wise and powerful not only possessed the ability to govern the world but also to tear the sky apart. That was how the heir of Wu was chased to the deserted land of Jiuli land which evolved witchcraft into the exclusive culture of the barbarian lands in Chinese history.

Therefore, witchcraft could be described as an inheritance from the ancient spirit’s bloodline of the Chinese. It was definitely not the chaotic, evil abilities that the innocent minds thought it was.

“I’ve done it, I’ve done it. I can’t believe that I’ve done it. I-I’m a wizard now!”

“B-but, how did it happen out of nowhere?!” Although Zhang Lisheng had a premonition when he woke up at the hospital, he was still surprised when it happened.

However, his joy only lasted for a moment as he blurted, “Father! I’ve done it, father! F-Father…”. He instinctively wanted to share his joy with Zhang Daowu, but he then realized that his father had already passed away. He was all alone in the old house.

At that moment, an unknown sadness grabbed the young man’s heart and crushed it into pieces.

“Father, father, father…” At the moment, Zhang Lisheng could feel all his strength being sapped out of nowhere as if he had fed an immeasurable amount of blood to the venomous worm. He feebly fell to the ground and could no longer control his tears anymore. He fell asleep without being aware of it.

The sky turned bright when he woke up. “Bang, bang, bang…” The sound of knocking came from outside of the door followed by a nervous scream, “Mountain Worm, Zhang Lisheng, how are you? Open the door, can you open the door quickly?”

Zhang Lisheng absent-mindedly stood up from the courtyard ground. While he was standing up, he did not forget to chant ‘pst shh…’ a couple of times to chase his wizard worm into a dark corner to hide. He then shouted with his hoarse voice, “Who is it, who is behind the door?”

“It’s me, Tao Lulu. Open the door now,” the person on the opposite side of the door replied loudly.

Zhang Lisheng walked unsteadily to the door and lifted the heavy latches one by one. With the help of the misty sun in the mountain during the sunny morning, he saw a young lady who was the same age as him standing outside as he opened the door. The young lady had tanned skin, but her features were extraordinarily pretty. He asked the young lady, “What is it?”

“I heard about what happened to your family from my father, I’m here to see you.” The young lady Tao Lulu sympathetically said in a low voice, “Are you alright? Why is there mud all over your body?”

“It’s nothing, I fell down in the courtyard. It was Uncle Ah Lie who helped with everything yesterday. I have to thank your family.”

“You don’t have to be polite, we’re relatives anyway.” The tanned young girl Tao Lulu shook her head, lifted a muddy yellow earthen jar, and proceeded to say, “This is ginseng hen soup that my mother made, she asked me to send you this to replenish your body.”

“Are you going to school today?”

“It’s not me who got hit by a car, why do I need to replenish my body?”

“I won’t be going to school these few days. Your father said that my mother is still alive, and I’ll need to look for her.” Although Zhang Lisheng said that, he still took the earthen jar from the young lady’s hand with gratitude.

“My father said he’ll look for your mother for you. A kid should stay in school so that you’ll get to university and walk out of this mountain with a bright future. Rest for two days and go back to school.”

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“I’ll look for my mother on my own, and I’ll go back to school a couple of days later.”

“Alright then. Eat the chicken. Get a good sleep, stop lying in the courtyard or you might fall sick. I’m going to school now.” The young lady nodded since she thought there was nothing else that she could say any longer. Moreover, the day was bright now, so she turned around and left.

Zhang Lisheng closed the wooden door while blankly staring at the young lady’s silhouette as it vanished in the village road. He then opened the earthen jar that he held before his chest, and as he did, a hot, rich fragrance rushed to his nose.

The way Miaowei people made ginseng chicken stew was very simple. All they had to do was to feed distilled liquor to an old village chicken by force to clear its stomach, then suffocate it to death. Later on, after adding lard, clean water, and condiments to boil over a slow fire together with old wild ginseng, the smell would become fragrant, tempting, and it was the best replenishment.

Zhang Lisheng had not drunk nor eaten most of the day. All he had eaten were the two herbal eggs, and he had fed the venomous worm twice. He had been starving, so how could he resist the fragrance that was coming out of the earthen jar.

He wiped his hand hard on the clean part of his school uniform and picked up the succulent hen from the earthen jar while tolerating the heat. He then put it into his mouth and chewed on it with big bites. After just a couple of bites, without knowing why, he suddenly thought of what Tao Lulu said earlier that exposed his lie.

“Stop lying in the courtyard, otherwise, you might fall sick.”

His tears streamed down and dripped into the earthen jar.

However, his temperament naturally became much stronger since he had become a wizard. Soon, he stopped feeling sorry for himself and shook off the sadness in him.

Zhang Lisheng finished the entire jar of ginseng chicken soup, together with the salty tears that dripped inside without leaving anything behind. He felt much better from his sluggishness earlier. A mysterious wizard power had grown in his flesh as the nutritious food was digested in his stomach.

He walked out of the old house and put the earthen jar down after calming his emotions. He took out the more than 200 yuan that he saved and a few clean clothes from the side room where he stayed in.

He then returned to the courtyard and took off the dirty school uniform. Zhang Lisheng took two buckets of water from the old well and used soap and cold water to clean the mud off his body. He then made his way into the county town after putting on some clean clothes.

Just when he was about to go out after removing the latches, he suddenly recalled that he had refined his centipede Qing Hong into a wizard worm. According to the myth, a wizard had to have the wizard worm with him everywhere he went. He then shouted a few times to get Qing Hong to come over. It crawled up to his body following the edge of his pants and spiraled around his waist under his clothes.

In order to not lose too much blood which would lead to losing his life, the centipede Qing Hong that Zhang Lisheng kept was not a xenogenetic one but a normal worm. Even so, a normal venomous worm that was refined by a wizard into a wizard worm would not have much power anyway.

However, as soon as the wizard worm latched onto him, he felt exuberant after flows of wizard power came off the pores on his abdomen, which was naturally to feed the worm. He felt much better as a sense of control grew in him without him realizing it.

Such feelings were actually an illusory sense of power, but it made a person indulge in it like what a drug could do as soon as a person got his hands on it. Out of nowhere, Zhang Lisheng had changed his mind. Figuring that looking for his mother whom he had lost more than 10 years ago would not happen overnight, he thought that understanding the changes that he would experience after becoming a wizard was the most important thing that he should do now.

He then walked out of the old house’s wooden door after giving that a thought. After which, he went out of the village while in deep thought.

Stepping on the shady stone roads, many villagers who were heading out for work in the morning saw Zhang Lisheng who looked blank. They sighed and said with sympathy, “Mountain Worm… Sigh, you poor thing…” Things were better left unsaid.

There were also backpackers from busy cities who woke up early, or tourists who came with tour guides. They walked out of the roads from the farm stands ran by the mountain people. They clamored in excitement as they breathed in the refreshing mountain village air.

Looking at the young man from the mountain village who was plainly-dressed walking by, some of them treated Zhang Lisheng like an attraction and took pictures with all sorts of poses.

However, be it the villagers or the tourists who visited outside of the mountain village, Zhang Lisheng ignored them all. He walked out of the village with quick steps and arrived at the roads that led to the city. After confirming that there was nobody around, he silently turned into the road that led into the jungle.

People were daring, and the land had major production at the beginning of the Red Revolution’s success. It was a unique historical period where human had defeated human.

Many of the mountain villages in the Western Sichuan were burned down to build farmlands, the mountainous woods were turned into fields for cultivating crops, and the large-sized animals as well as the villagers of the Guawo Village were chased into the deep mountains.

However, due to the rise of environmental awareness throughout the last ten years, projects to turn farmlands back to jungles had become one of the Western Sichuan government’s basic administration concepts.

The mountain villages in the province were gradually restored to its original form, however, it was still impossible to restore the original jungles that were destroyed in a short period of time.

Apart from the attractions that had been specifically gazetted, intruding into the jungle outside of the mountain village was extremely dangerous.

Zhang Lisheng was thrown into darkness as he walked into the jungle. As he instinctively took a couple of steps, his eyes slowly got used to the darkness in the jungle. A world of wilderness that was completely different from civilization revealed itself before his eyes.

People who had never experienced this could hardly imagine the drastic change that could occur within just over ten meters of distance. At the same time, it could be this wonder why these adventurous tourists chose to go after endless adventures.