In the third year of the Guangxu era (光緒), Emperor Dezong (德宗) sat upon the throne, but the kid was barely seven years on the clock. The country was a spent shell, unravelling from the inside out. Behind the static of a heavy curtain, the Empress Dowager and her rat-warren of sycophants were busy stripping the gears of the state, processing the common folk for every last copper while foreign predators lined up to slice the middle out of the Great Land.
And then came the drought—a chemical curse from the sallow sky. In the north, the machine stopped. No rice, no greens, and the rivers gave up the ghost until the very water was a king's ransom. It was a world of pain. Families were unmade, selling their small-fry just to stall the dark. Those who couldn't hack the hunger ate dirt until their bellies were full of cold lead. People were dropping into the dust like flies in a charnel house; those who kept breathing turned into beggars or vultures, looking for a raid.
But the rot didn't reach every corner. Tucked away in the Xishan Mountains (西山), northwest of Beijing, was a tiny pocket of logic in a world gone mad. A place called Wangchun (忘春村 : Wàngchūn Cūn)—the 'Forgetful Spring' Village.
It was a monolith of isolation, a private, faraway static protected by a geometry of stone. There was only one way in—a narrow, jagged scrawl of a pass that could be shut like a valve. Behind it stood cliffs as solemn as stone effigies and a forest so dense it was a dark gallery where few dared to tread. But inside the gates, the gears of nature still ground smoothly. A stream flowed year-round, its water like a million sparkling diamonds, and the soil was so rich it seemed to mock the sallow wasteland outside. Even as the north was processed into a slaughterhouse of thirst, Forgetful Spring remained a glossy dream, an artifact of peace that the nightmare simply couldn't touch.
It sat anchored deep in the jagged teeth of the high ranges, a pissant plot of dirt that the world had simply overlooked. The community was a huddled collective of maybe twenty buildings, mostly one-story brick hulls topped with gray tiles or rotting straw. The only monolith that broke the skyline was the Happy Spring Inn (春乐客栈 : Chūn Lè Kèzhàn), a two-story artifact where the bottom floor served as a tavern and the upper level held exactly six rooms for the weary or the wicked.
The village market was a pittance—a row of small stalls where the locals haggled over salt, oil, and coarse cotton. Traveling merchants were a rare breed; only two or three vultures knew the roadmap into this particular pocket of logic.
The largest carcass in the village was the Ancestral Shrine, a sprawling one-story monument to the dead. Inside, spirit tablets (神主牌 :shén zhǔ pái) stood in sentinel rows across the altar, flanked by massive earthenware pots of incense and ritual candles that cast a sallow, flickering glow. Tucked behind this dark gallery was a row of seven rooms—the private enclave for the seven elders who called the shrine home.
There was no village head to turn the gears; instead, the seven elders governed like a committee of ghosts, their word the final thud of certainty for any soul looking for guidance.
Life in Wangchun was a glossy dream. Despite the slaughterhouse of famine and the chemical curse of drought raging across the north, these sixty-odd souls lived on the right side of the mirror. Their granaries were bulging with life, their fields a riot of abundance, and their livestock—the goats, chickens, and cows—were as plump as king's ransoms. The village was so flush with resources that it could have supported twice the human wreckage without ever stripping its gears.
"The best thing about Forgetful Spring isn't the corn or the cows—it's the booze!" a scrawny piece of human wreckage with a pockmarked face crowed from the middle of a sweaty circle of men.
"That hooch is brewed from rice, wild flowers, and mountain fruit," the scrawny piece of human wreckage with the pockmarked face crowed, raising a slow thumb in approval. "They use the water from the village stream—water as clear as a million sparkling diamonds straight from the high ranges. Let it sit long enough, and it turns into something fantastic. Me and Lao Sha (老沙) walked in there on the day those ancient ones were unearthing the jugs, and the smell... it performed fantastic rubber acrobatics in my nose. The reek of it—sweet and heady—just swallowed the whole town."
"Every word Er Dao (二刀) spits is the gospel," a tall, fleshy bastard added. "The stuff is a pale, bleeding red with a scent as deep as an abyssal pit. One sip slides down your throat as smooth as silk. I'd drown myself in three jugs of that and never complain."
The sweaty circle of men erupted into a riot of noise, a chaotic babble until the big, dark-faced wall of meat in the center yanked his piece and sent a liquid whipcrack of a gunshot into the sallow sky. The crowd went dead silent.
The leader scanned the group, his face a jagged scrawl of a grin once the heavy blanket of silence settled. "Fine! Fantastic!" he bellowed. "It's settled. We're taking that Forgetful Spring place. We'll turn that pissant village into our own private nest!" The gang let out a high-voltage shriek of pure satisfaction.
"But Big Brother," a man who looked like a scrawny country teacher interjected, his voice a shivering rattle of doubt. "Doesn't the math feel wrong? The place is a rat-warren of elders. No small-fry, no youth. What if there's a ghost in the machine? A trap we can't see?"
"Teacher Mao (毛先生 : Máo Xiānshēng), you're overthinking the gears," the leader barked. "It's a village at the end of the line. The kids beeline for the big cities to find a glossy dream. Look at the foreigners—they're flooding the country with strange new toys. You think the youth want to rot in the dark galleries of the mountains? I've heard the gospel a thousand times: the youth leave the human wreckage of their elders to decay while they chase the Lantern-lit Vanity of the City."
The scrawny advisor stepped back into the shadows, his trap shut. This was a dead-letter file of a conversation between vultures. These were men who had survived the slaughterhouse of famine and a world of pain by processing the misery of others. They were the Black Cloud Gang (黑云帮 : Hei Yun Bang)—predators who haunted the north during these days when the machinery of the state was stripping its gears, gathering in the dark to plan their next raid.
The name sounded like a monolith of power, but the reality of the "Black Cloud Gang" was just thirty-odd pissant vultures traveling the dirt to raid the weak. Their lead dog was Deng Liang (鄧良), a fifty-year-old wall of meat with a face as dark as a washed blackboard. He bellowed his words with a high-voltage roar and called himself the "Black Whirlwind" (黑旋风: Hēi Xuánfēng)—a vanity project intended to mimic Li Kui (李逵), the hero of Mount Liang (梁山). But there was no heroism in him; he was a jagged scrawl of a man, a cunning and slippery piece of human wreckage. Once a descendant of Kaifeng nobility, he'd stripped his own gears through a life of malice and turned to the only trade that didn't require a single cent of investment: processing the lives of others.
"Everyone in that village is at least sixty on the clock," Er Dao said, leaning into the sweaty circle of men. "We spent three days bird-dogging the place, masquerading as salt merchants, and we didn't eyeball a single soul younger than that. Except for the Ancient Ones who stay tucked away in the Ancestral Shrine. We never saw their faces, but the way the locals talk about them, you'd think they were stone effigies—ancient, fragile, and probably ready to give up the ghost."
Er Dao looked at the roadmap of a plan that Teacher Mao had laid out on the table. "It's accurate, Teacher. The village is just like this. Every gear is in place."
"Damned right it's accurate," Lao Sha added, giving a quick, clinical nod. "I spent half the day feeding Mao the math on this setup." Er Dao quickly tried to scoop up the credit for the intel.
"The geometry of the place is something else." Teacher Mao mused, raising a slow thumb in approval. "Tucked into a hidden valley with only one way in. It's a narrow pass—the kind of place where one man could hold the line against ten thousand soldiers (一夫当关,万夫莫开 : Yī fū dāng guān, wàn fū mò kāi). A perfect sarcophagus if the law tries to turn the key on us."
The leader, Deng Liang, let out a jagged, booming laugh that filled the choking emptiness of their camp. "But the real kicker is the pantry! They've got a stream, rice paddies, and livestock as plump as a king's ransom. If we go to ground in there, even the imperial armycould hammer at the door and we wouldn't have to worry about a thing!"
He stared down at the map again, then slammed his palm onto the table with a sound like a liquid whipcrack. He let out a high-voltage shriek to his crew.
"Come on, you vultures! Let's go pay those old fossils a visit. I reckon they've been on the clock for long enough. That glossy dream of a village is officially under new management. It belongs to the Black Cloud Gang now!"
"If we can bird-dog this village into our hands, Big Brother, you'll have the reach to recruit a whole new army of vultures," Teacher Mao said, his face performing a jagged scrawl of a grin. "Any grand ambitions for the future won't be such a void of logic then. This is a gift from the God of Wealth—a real king's ransom of an opportunity!"
"Good! Fantastic!" Big Brother bellowed, his dark face splitting into a wide, jagged grin. "Bring out the hooch and let's celebrate! We'll process the gears of the plan tonight, and tomorrow afternoon, we make a beeline for that nest!"
The dark-faced wall of meat let out a jagged, booming laugh that filled the choking emptiness of the camp and rattled the stagnant air.
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