Du Zichun was a man of the Zhou-Sui border years, born to a good family and ruined by his own character. He drank, he idled, he spent everything, and when he had spent it his relatives, one after another, declined to know a man who did no work. By winter he was walking the streets of Chang’an in rags with nothing in his belly, and at the west gate of the eastern market he stood at dusk with hunger and cold written on his face and sighed at the sky.
An old man with a staff came up to him. “What is a gentleman sighing about?”
Du Zichun told him — the ruin, the relatives, the shame — and his anger showed in his face.
“How much would set you up?” said the old man.
“Thirty or fifty thousand cash would keep me alive.”
“Not enough. Say more.”
“A hundred thousand.”
“No.”
“A million.”
“No.”
“Three million.”
“That will do,” said the old man.
He gave it, and vanished, and did the same the following year when Du Zichun had spent it — and a third time, larger. And the third time Du Zichun, who by then understood, said: “I have taken everything from you and done nothing. Let me serve you.”
“Not yet,” said the old man. “Meet me at the old mulberry tree west of the market on the evening of the mid-autumn festival, three years from now.”
Du Zichun spent those three years differently: he gave the money away, buried the dead of his district, fed the poor, and when the three years were out he went to the mulberry tree and the old man was waiting.
They travelled to a mountain, and to a cave that was not a cave but a palace of jade and gold, with a great furnace in the middle of it and a cauldron on the furnace.
“You must sit before this furnace,” said the old man, “and say nothing. Whatever you see, whatever happens to you, whatever you are made to believe — you must not speak, not one word, and not cry out. If you do, the elixir is lost and I must begin again.”
He swallowed a pill and sat.
And the visions began.
First armies — thousands of them — filling the cave with spears and shouting, and then beasts, and then fire that climbed his body, and he did not speak. Then thunder and rain and the whole mountain splitting, and his own parents’ voices calling for help from the wreckage, and he did not speak. Then soldiers took him and killed him, slowly, and he watched from outside himself and did not speak.
He was reborn as a woman. He grew up in a poor house, married, and bore a son, and the boy was two years old and perfect, and he loved the child more than he had loved anything in either life.
And his husband, in the vision, took the child by the ankles and dashed its head against a stone.
And Du Zichun — who had endured armies, fire, his own death, and hell — made a sound.
It was only a sound. Not a word. An ah, from the throat, of grief.
In that instant the cave came apart. The fire went up in one sheet. The furnace cracked, and the cauldron with it, and the smoke of it went purple to the roof.
The old man stood in the smoke and looked at him for a long time and then said:
“Greed is gone from you. Anger is gone from you. Fear is gone from you. I thought you were finished.” He paused. “But love is not gone.”
Du Zichun, standing among the wreck of the furnace and the ruin of his master’s life’s work, could say nothing at all.
“Go home,” said the old man. “The elixir of immortality was never going to be yours. You have one attachment left, and it is a child’s skull on a stone, and there is no discipline in the world that will burn it out of you.”
So Du Zichun went down the mountain, and the story ends with him walking, and with the observation — which is the point of the whole thing — that the thing which kept him from becoming a god was the only thing that made him worth anything as a man.