The Tale Never Ends Chapter 42 Draconic Mutation

Bian Dashou, hearing the whispers on the streets that the townsfolk were plotting against him, escaped back to his hometown in Renqiu County of Hebei Province. Dissatisfied with another defeat at the victorious Manchurian forces, Li Zicheng sent forth a detachment of troops to Renqiu to arrest him. But he decided to stay and await his fate, despite the desperate urges by the villagers in Renqiu for him to flee. "This is all my doing alone. I cannot leave my relatives and the townspeople here go suffer in my place. I will gladly face the consequences of my deeds!" And so the soldiers of the rebel forces came and took Bian Dashou. But Bian Dashou was blessed with extraordinary fate; before the troop sent to take him reached Li Zicheng's camp, Bian Dashou escaped. This time, the Manchurians were closing in on Li Zicheng, eager to eliminate him once and for all; thus the renegade leader ignored Bian Dashou's flight and focused solely on his own wellbeing. Still, with his destiny disrupted and the Manchurian armies already solidified their hold on China, the renegade warlord Li Zicheng suffered a miserable end—he was ultimately killed by farmers with hoes, ironically the method in which the warlord himself was notoriously famous of when slaying his enemies in battle!

　　Emerging as the ultimate victors across the entire theater of battle across the Central Plains of China, the Manchurians established the Qing Dynasty. Still, there was one threat that remained; a mystery that had boggled the minds of the shamans of the Qing Empire: was Bian Dashou truly unaware that dragon leys could only be properly severed by the use of a special sword: the Dragon-slaying Blade? Was it on purpose that he did not look for the sword to carry out his order; or, he has the sword, but he did not use it? The shamans were worried and frightened. If Bian Dashou indeed possessed the Dragon-slaying Blade, he would also be able to sunder the dragon ley of the Qing monarch and obliterate the destiny of the Qing Empire! It was a risk they could hardly suffer; hence a suggestion was made that Bian Dashou must be a.s.sa.s.sinated for good measure!

　　But the Qing Emperor could not decide what to do. Bian Dashou's deed in disrupting Li Zicheng's destiny made him a hero to the Qing Empire's cause; putting him to death would surely incur the wrath and displeasure of the public. Then again, the Qing Emperor was also worried if Heaven was displeased with the manner the Manchurians took China and was concerned if Heaven might be against the rise of the Qing Empire. The sacred calling to be the disrupter of monarchical destinies—like how Bian Dashou had ended Li Zicheng's—could fall upon other individuals if Bian Dashou was killed; the next-in-line to be the wielder of the Dragon-slaying Sword that might appear if, Heaven forfend, that the Qing Empire was indeed not fated to be. Slaying Bian Dashou would only leave the Qing Empire in a disadvantage of not knowing who to be wary of. Finally, they came to a decision, Bian Dashou would be summoned and rewarded for his acts for the Qing court. He was given a government position but he would constantly be observed. This would allow the Qing Emperor to know his moves and whereabouts and maintain constant surveillance on him. Thus Bian Dashou became the Magistrate of Xiuwu County before he was promoted to the post of Prefect of Taiyuan. But Bian Dashou knew full well that the watchful eyes of the spies of the imperial court rested on his shoulders. Hence, one day, he resigned his post, citing age and poor health and returned to his hometown in Renqiu, Hebei. Nevertheless, the imperial court maintained its tireless vigilance to his movements, although they found no suspicious motions from him until the day he died peacefully during his sleep.

　　On his deathbed before his pa.s.sing, Bian Dashou summoned both his sons and urged them to commit to their minds his final words, "At about 200 miles from the east of the capital, I have found a place called Yahong Bridge, it will be a good place for me to lie and rest. Take the land deed and bury me there when I have pa.s.sed. Remember this: you must make sure that my body is unclothed when my casket is buried! The both of you brother will start a farm there and watch over my grave while you're at it!"

　　The sons of Bian Dashou, being the filial offsprings of their father, followed their father's final request to the letter and brought their father's body to the place where he had chosen, the banks of Huan Xiang River. But during the night before their father's body was interred, they were troubled by their father's orders that his body must be left naked. But to leave an elder's body unclothed during burial was too sacrilegious an act for the two sons to bear; hence they made their minds that they would at least put on a pair of trousers for their father's remains.

　　To no surprise, Bian Dashou's dying request to be interred so far away from his hometown, coupled with the strange instruction that his body was to be buried unclothed raised many eyebrows, especially the wary eyes of his watchers in the imperial court. Two army commanders, one surnamed Lei and the other Zhang, were surrept.i.tiously issued orders to ride east. They reached a tract of land south of Bian Dashou's grave and began to mark out a large piece of land. By authority of the Qing government, the two commanders took the land and build a ranch. As it turned out, part of the land belonged to a Feng family that used the land as a graveyard for their dead. But due to the overwhelming influence by the imperial court, the Feng family was forced to move further south. The ranch that the two commanders build was called the Great Feng Ranch, while the ranch of the actual Feng family who had moved south was called the Lesser Feng Ranch. On the surface, the two commanders looked like ordinary army commanders here to build a ranch as an army outpost. But in truth, their true orders were to observe and report any movements on Bian Dashou's grave.

　　But the sons of Bian Dashou were honest people who only busied themselves with their daily toilings at the fields. There was nothing suspicious of their mundane lives. Still, the imperial court grew restless and sent forth the shamans here to inspect the grave on their own. They came on boats, borne by the flow of the river towards the Great Feng Ranch. As they pa.s.sed by Bian Dashou's grave, there were people nearby pointing in the direction where the two brothers were working, plodding diligently under the morning sun, saying that there laid Bian Dashou's grave, the father of the two brothers. The sun was climbing high over the mountains on the horizon. The brothers left their farming hoes standing upright in the ground and retreated together down under the shade of a tree for a rest. One of the shamans noticed the shadowed figure of the hoes and was instantly astonished! Silhouetted by the sun, the dark shape of the rods protruding upwards reminded him of a monarch's scepter—one of the regalias of kingship! The sign of a ruler's destiny! He studied the brothers again. Despite their modest lineage, the brothers possessed the bearings of lords among men! The shamans immediately commanded the boatman to stop the vessel for them to disembark. Once reaching the banks, the shamans summoned for their horses and rode as fast as their beasts could back to the capital to present their discovery.

　　Before long, orders from the Emperor were dispatched with the speed of a bushfire and a division of troops surrounded Bian Dashou's grave. The shamans ordered the soldiers to exhume Bian Dashou's remains. When the casket was unsealed, nothing was found inside! The coffin was empty!

　　There was a cracked hole by the side of the coffin which led to the direction of the river. The shaman ordered the soldier to begin digging, starting from the hole of the coffin in the grave towards the river. Before long, they found Bian Dashou's body. The top half of his body had begun morphing, manifesting the traits of the draconic mutation of a human body! His lower half, due to his sons' decision to cloth him during his burial, was still human. Bian Dashou was meant to morph into a true dragon after his death. But the whiff of the earthly aura of humans that the trousers held had broken the enchantment and ultimately caused his doom. The Huan Xiang River just beside his grave, after pa.s.sing through the Ji Ca.n.a.l River, would lead straight to the Bohai Sea. Bian Dashou was supposed to fully transform into a draconic serpent and pa.s.sing into the sea before truly becoming a dragon and rise into the Heavens. What a woeful twist it was, that it was his sons' love for him that had spelled his downfall. The shamans ordered the soldiers to return Bian Dashou's remains to his casket and his grave was to be restored as before. When their work was done, the soldiers retreated as quickly and as silently as possible. Before returning, the shamans made the soldiers swear by the pain of death that no word of the incident was to be leaked!

　　The intrigues surrounding Bian Dashou's mysterious tale was nonetheless a matter of grave secrecy. For the sake of the Empire, it was imperative that the matter remain so.

　　The Bian Dashou's surreal and unsightly end, the matter, at long last, came to a close and the Qing Empire could finally breathe easily. But there remained one last blight in this entire mess - the whereabouts of the Dragon-slaying Blade, the one final menace to the Empire's perpetuity. But none knew that the sword was in fact hidden just below Bian Dashou's grave. Afraid that the sword would be plundered by grave robbers, Bian Dashou's sons had dug a small cavity below their father's coffin; a small hole which fit the sword nicely. The Qing soldiers did not realize that the grave had two layers and they had not discovered the sword just beneath the casket. Thus, the sword would remain a tightly-kept knowledge pa.s.sed down only to a few select members of the Bian family until the curtains closed on the Qing Dynasty more than two centuries later.

　　As Time fleeted by, what remained of the Qing Dynasty became nothing but mere relics of their vain imprints in their pursuit of eternity in the sands of time. Even the Bian family, timeworn by the merciless rapids of Time itself, began to question the legacy which their ancestors had so painstakingly guarded with vehemence, wondering if the bequests of their forefathers were nothing but a myth. Still, the secret remained untold, until a prodigal progeny of the Bian family, in the midst of his drunken outspokenness at a bar, inadvertently revealed the unspeakable. The betrayed truth led a band of robbers to come one silent night and defiled the graves of the progenitors of the Bian family, pillaging their graves of whatever valuables the robbers could get their hands on, including their most precious heirloom, the Dragon-slaying Blade...

　　The old man stopped for a brief respite and took a gulp of tea. "Most of the Bian family had relocated to Beijing then. When news of the plunder reached them, one of the family members returned to Yahong Bridge. After inspecting the damage and commissioning for the graves to be reconstructed, the member announced a list of items that were lost in the raid. Among the list was a sword, supposedly worth hundreds of thousands of dayang coins (silver yuan coins, common denomination during revolutionary China). But to anyone who long suspected the truth, all would instantly realize that the sword was none other than the Dragon-slaying Blade! But the local police could not close the case; therefore it was pa.s.sed up the ladder to regional police headquarters. I was serving at the Tianjin regional headquarters then as a contract-based investigator. I was famous then, for being a super sleuth; hence unexpectedly the case file to my desk. Immediately I set off to inspect the scene myself, although I could find no useful clues. Robbers were as rampant as mushrooms after rain then. Most villagers would prefer to keep their doors and windows closed to invite no trouble. With no other witnesses other than the gravekeepers, my one only clue was that the chief of the robbers spoke a hoa.r.s.e voice. But day and night, I received calls from my superiors, pressing me to solve the case as soon as possible! I knew, that they had not any intentions of delivering justice for the sake of the Bian family. In fact, what the higher-up in the government was after, was the sword itself! But I paid no heed to any political agendas; I only wanted to solve the case, and it had to be me, lest my reputation would suffer! Still, the painful reminder that I only had the clue of the hoa.r.s.e-voiced band leader cast a dismayed gloom over me, until I remembered about a junior I once had."

　　"I was once a student in my youth, learning to be a medium when I grow up. But due to my family's insistence that being a medium was not a lucrative business, they stopped my lessons and sent me to school. When I left, I had only my teacher and a fellow student; a junior of mine. I remembered my teacher once told me that our order had a treasure, an heirloom pa.s.sed down through the generations by every chief of the sect. This item allowed its user the ability to communicate with immortals, but every leader of the sect was made to swear that the treasure would only be revealed when the order is in great peril. Not long after that, our teacher pa.s.sed on, leaving only my junior as the sole heir to the order. He was in Shandong then, and I went to him, hoping that he might be able to help me. But when I found him, he was so sick that he was close to death." The eyes of the old man squinted as he suppressed a tear, the pitiable state of his junior returning to him.

　　"He was a useless and frivolous person, this junior of mine. With no one to bridle his life of wanton indulgence after our teacher's pa.s.sing, he immersed himself in a life of depravity; prost.i.tution, alcohol, eating and drinking binges, all of it! In the end, he contracted syphilis. With no relatives and family, he suffered alone, for he was an orphan my teacher had found in his early days. He was bed-ridden when I found him that he could not even get up. I asked him of the heirloom that our teacher had left him, and his frail finger pointed under his bed. From underneath the bed, I dug up a wooden chest, and in it was a short sword. By the side of the chest, it was inscribed that the contents of the chest should never be revealed unless the order was in grave peril! I held the sword in my hand. With another hand gripping tightly at its scabbard, I drew the sword with all my might and the sword exited its sheath with a huge puff of white powder that obscured my sight! It was talc.u.m powder; white talc.u.m powder which was tossed into the air when I drew the sword and cast a white smog into the air! The predecessor of the sect had foreseen that the short sword could not be easily drawn due to age and wear, hence he had applied a layer of talc.u.m powder before sealing the sword away! But I looked at the sword, and found that it was broken! At the broken part of the sword was a layer of rust; this would mean that the sword had been broken ever since it was sealed away."

　　The old man stopped again. His eyes opened wide suddenly and everyone's attentions were on his face as his eyes gleamed strangely. "Just when we were at a loss of what to do with the sword," he continued quietly, "Everyone around us went dark that instance." It was not the darkness of night, but the gloom with the likeness of a solar eclipse, as if the sun had been blotted off our skies. Then there were shafts of light; not ordinary rays of light, but columns of bright, yet colorful lights that shot down from the sky. It was the divine lights of Heaven that held five colors, although in Western science we call it seven. Like a rainbow, the columns of light descended into the courtyard, and from the bright luminance of the blinding radiance of the colonnade, the silhouette of a man appeared! As (former) students of the arcane arts, we believed in the existence of immortals. We knew that the figure that appeared could not be possibly mortal, he could only be an immortal! The bright shafts of light shot through the windows of my junior's residence; his windows were only hollow wooden frames, devoid of any paper screens, and through the windows we could see the man dressed richly in a long suit, a handsome-looking top hat, with a gold-rim gla.s.ses over the arch of his nose as he held a finely-crafted walking stick. Not only he was modern-looking, but he was dressed like an aristocrat, putting me in my best days to shame!"

　　The old man's recollections were chaotic that they were in disarray. What followed was a version of his tale after my re-organization...