“A drought demon? That can’t be!” The dark-skinned, honest-faced man felt a chill in his heart at the mention of drought demons, instinctively afraid.
What is a drought demon? Since childhood, he’d heard the elders speak of it: when a drought demon runs amok, the heavens refuse to rain!
“Why can’t it be?”
The man shot him a look of annoyance, as if he’d never seen anyone so ignorant, then continued. “I’ve heard it’s not just here—other places are suffering from drought too. The wells have gone dry, and the cracks in the riverbeds are wide enough to swallow a man whole.”
He spat on the ground, but his mouth was so dry that there was barely any spittle.
These were all country working men waiting for odd jobs, except for the old man who had spoken first, a local loafer from the town itself.
They were huddled together in the shade beneath someone’s eaves, escaping the heat, and soon the conversation turned to the drought.
The only reason they still had water to drink was because, a month ago, the young preceptor had visited and brought heavy rain, temporarily alleviating the crisis.
But now a month had passed, the sky hadn’t rained again, and the weather was sweltering, with a blazing sun every single day. The fields were starting to dry up again. People whose hopes had been rekindled by the goddess’s rain now watched the water levels drop day by day, their hearts filled with panic.
A young man took up the thread. “Ain’t that the truth? They say someone’s even seen the thing at night—dressed in a floor-length blood-red gown, hair all tangled and face hidden. Everywhere it goes, the moisture just vanishes...”
Another man chimed in with “proof.” “Take the Big Bowl River in the next village. In just one night, the water level sank by a finger’s depth. They say that thing carried it all away!”
Gossip like this spreads faster than any horse. No way stations or fresh mounts needed—just one pair of lips and another set of listening ears.
Within a few days, these tales multiplied. “Evidence” cropped up everywhere along the border.
“When the drought demon appears, the world turns dry; for a thousand li, not a blade of green.” These words had become the ironclad “truth.”
When the officials of Huacheng heard about it, they were furious. “Ridiculous!” Assistant Magistrate Zhou Zhou Shencai nearly smashed his cup in his study.
Huacheng was a border town, a small one at that. There were troops stationed nearby, and since there was no prefect here, he, as assistant magistrate, was the highest official.
If this rumor caused any trouble, he’d be the first to bear the blame—a huge burden to carry.
What times these were! Dayuan and Nanyue were already at war, and if this gossip destabilized the border, his head would be as good as lost!
“I wonder when the young preceptor will pay us another visit?” Assistant Magistrate Zhou Shencai mumbled to himself for what felt like the hundredth time that day, thinking of Yue Fuguang.
Back on the distant frontier, Yue Fuguang was someone who could withstand being talked about constantly. If everyone in the world muttered her name every day, her ears would have grown calloused long ago.
“Master, I hear that the young preceptor has just reached Hezhou and Jizhou at best—still far from here,” his adviser, the magistrate’s secretary, tried to soothe him. “First things first, we need to squash this rumor. Mustn’t let it cause any chaos.”
Truth be told, Huacheng and its environs were short on water, but thanks to the young preceptor’s rainfall, things weren’t as dire as imagined.
The real puzzle was where all this anxious talk of drought had actually started.
Besides, over in Lanzhou, the fighting with Nanyue was already going hot. If they couldn’t help out, at least they shouldn’t disrupt things, or no one would have an easy time.
“Right, right!” Zhou Shencai clenched his teeth and muttered low. “Cracking down on these rumors can’t wait!”
He thought for a moment and quietly instructed his secretary, “Do this...”
Not far from Huacheng, the setting sun hung red as blood, staining the whole earth an anxious yellow, like pottery scorched in a kiln.
In the fields, the wheat sprouts bore a pale green with faintly yellowing tips. It was this slight yellowing that filled the steadied old farmers with worry.
The river, once topped up by the young preceptor, seemed to be leaking. Within half a month, the water level had clearly dropped, and in some places the dark gray mud was beginning to emerge.
Along the farm path, a bedraggled band of strangely dressed people approached from the distance, slowly coming nearer. These people were dark-skinned, with thick, calloused knuckles on their fingers—clearly ordinary country men and village women who had labored year in, year out.
What was most striking were the few among the group whose clothing obviously marked them apart.
This procession of over a hundred people was dressed mostly in rough, gray-black homespun. Only one man, about forty years old, had a shirt made of fine cotton.
The rest of them included a person of medium height, holding a staff carved with a snake's body and a human face, wearing a fearsome mask of a fanged green and red demon and a deep-red cape that covered him completely—so no one could even tell if they were male or female.
Following that figure were six men also draped in red and black capes, each wearing small demon masks.
Two carried bundles of firewood, two held knives, and two were shoving along a young woman with her hands tied, pushing and dragging her toward the riverbank ahead.
Behind these eight people pressed an ordinary crowd of locals: about a hundred men, their faces either wooden or blank, with only a few flushed with indefinable joy, a strange, blood-hued glint brightening their eyes.
At the very rear stumbled a few women who moved just as unsteadily as the captive girl ahead.
One of them had red-rimmed eyes and was murmuring to herself; if one listened closely, she was saying, “My poor daughter, she’s no drought demon, no drought demon. You can’t... can’t...”
As for what they couldn’t do, the last words weighed a thousand pounds or burned the tongue, leaving her choked with sobs that she could get out no more.
“We’re here!”
“Begin the ritual to pray for rain!”
At the narrow, piercing command from the masked man in the demon crown, a makeshift and utterly crude folk rain ceremony, from its participants to its offerings to every step, staggered its start.
But no matter how hard the men with the demon masks twirled and skipped, there wasn’t even a scrap of cloud at the horizon.
The commoners kneeling in the back whispered nervously to each other. “Dashun, would you say those prayer-callers up front just ain’t got the knack?”
“Last time when the Goddess spread clouds and summoned rain, it was simple: she waved her hand at the sky, and the wind brought in the clouds. Then she motioned again, said ‘Rain, come,’ and the rain galloped down for a whole day and night.”
Stealing another upward glance at the figures with their frantic and jerky dance steps, he shook his head. “I don’t buy a word of their talk about some drought-demon woman.”
Hard as things were, could they really be worse off than the Southern Yue kingdom beyond the next range?
They were short on water, yes, but not desperately so.
They still had water stored from when the Goddess came, and there was water held in the ponds and ditches, too. The land was a bit dry, but the crops were not worse than years gone by. How could the clan leader still trust a few good-for-nothing strangers’ half-truths?
“Datou, brother, keep it down! Don’t let the clan head or them lot get wind of it. Next thing they will set you to burning right alongside sweetmeat Xinghua!”
The young man named Dashun plainly feared the demon-masked men and warned his friend quietly even as he nervously snuck a peek in their direction.
“Fear ’em? If they can’t bring the rain today, let’s see if the clan leader will still believe those tall-tales!”
Datou said the toughest words, but the apology written in his eyes had already betrayed his bluster.