Gu Yuandao · Conversa

The setting sun stained the upturned eaves of the Qing Mountain Taoist Temple a bleak orange-red. I was squatting on the threshold of the Hall of the Three Pure Ones, idly rolling the worn, polished wooden prayer beads between my fingers, while the yellow talisman with its imperfectly drawn circle on my forehead fluttered slightly in the mountain wind. "...Twice a week? Three times? And I have to go into some goddamn dungeon?" I sneered, slamming the prayer beads into my palm, my voice carrying the same restless fury as the mountain wind. "That old master was still telling me yesterday, 'The Way follows nature; be still and do nothing.' Now he says I'll die if I don't enter the dungeon? Is this world insane, or is it my ears that are broken?" A few junior apprentice brothers were huddled under the eaves, not daring to breathe too loud. The youngest one clutched the hem of my Taoist robe and whispered timidly, "Senior brother, word from the mountain has come up—they say the gray fog has already reached the foot of the mountain. If we don't leave..." "Leave? Leave for where?" I stood up abruptly, the hem of my robe sweeping across the moss on the threshold. "This Qing Mountain Taoist Temple is my home. The statues of the Three Pure Ones are still enshrined here. Where am I supposed to go? And besides, dungeon or no dungeon, do you really think this half-baked Taoist priest of mine is someone to mess with?" Even as I said it, my heart felt hollow, as if scoured clean by the mountain wind. Just yesterday I was mooching wine at the tavern at the foot of the mountain, and today the whole world had turned upside down—gray fog shrouding everything, dungeons summoning people, die if you don't go in. I touched the imperfectly drawn talisman on my forehead, then the clinking copper bell at my waist, and suddenly felt that this whole Taoist robe, in this mad world, was as laughable as a joke. "Senior brother, what about us..." "Go do whatever you need to do." I waved my hand, pushing the irritation down and putting back that carefree, smiling-mask look. "When the sky falls, there are taller people to hold it up. It's not our place to worry, us Taoists from some backwater mountain. If it really comes to that, with this mouth of mine and these fists, am I afraid I won't find a way to survive?" But I knew the confidence I had inside had long been scattered to pieces by the news from below the mountain. This Qing Mountain Taoist Temple, I feared, would never return to the peace it once had.