Chapter 94 — One Stroke Dots the Dragon's Eye
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
He thought of the dragon pillar of Crimson Dragon City, of the dragon bones and dragon soul in the Dragon Palace of the Surging River, of the stone statues in the village, of the strokes carved by divine hands. The carving of divine images by divine beings was a kind of painting too; that wondrous brushwork, that profound spirit, seemed to endow the statues with souls, so that they guarded the ruins like gods.
After a long while, Shen Mu sensed a thread of light slowly appear in the darkness, as though the dragon were gradually opening its eyes. When all the darkness before him dispersed, a spark of spirit burst forth in Shen Mu's eyes, and he raised his brush and dotted the dragon's eye!
A single touch of spiritual insight bestows the soul! The instant his stroke fell, the dragon in the painting came alive upon the paper, shaking its head and swaying its tail, and suddenly it flew off the paper, soared into the sky, and sported among the clouds — while the painting was left a blank sheet of white, without the least trace of ink! Shen Mu was stunned for a moment.
He had actually succeeded!
He had truly brought a painting of a dragon to life! The dragon swam in the air a while, then quickly turned back into ink, dyeing that cloud black. Shen Mu hurriedly looked toward the Deaf Elder, and saw that he had long since washed his brush and hung it on its rack, and had not dotted the eye of the dragon in his painting.
Shen Mu understood at once.
"Grandpa Deaf, you let me win?
"
The Deaf Elder shook his head.
"I did not let you win. When I was your age, I had no such depth of attainment.
My trial does not turn on victory or defeat.
A teacher's task is to transmit the Way, impart learning, and resolve doubts. What I am doing now is transmitting the Way to you — why should I care about winning or losing? "
The Alchemist said in praise, "Deaf Elder, that is the heart of a true teacher; I am filled with admiration.
Shen'er, my trial is not a contest with you either, but a task of refining medicine. Go to the herb garden outside the village and gather thirty kinds of highly toxic things, and refine them into a single greatly nourishing pill. When it is made, take it yourself. If it nourishes you, you pass. If you die of poison, you may stay on in the village.
"
Shen Mu was caught between laughter and tears.
If he died of poison, how was he to stay in the village? The intent of the Alchemist's trial was plain enough: to refine a greatly nourishing medicine from thirty highly toxic things required an exceedingly thorough mastery of pharmacology. The amount of any single ingredient, whether leaf or root and stem, pollen or petal, whether decocted raw or roasted, all had its fine points.
Moreover, the Alchemist had not told him the prescription, but left him to calculate by pharmacology how much of each was needed and how it must be refined, so that each poison checked the next, link by link, and the whole became a great tonic. In the refining, the heat was likewise crucial: when each ingredient was added, whether as powder or in lumps, how great the flame, how long the decoction — all of it Shen Mu had to judge from his own experience in refining medicine.
A hair's breadth of error, and the loss was a thousand li. If any single step went wrong, Shen Mu might see all his work undone and refine a medicine of deadly poison that would kill him. Shen Mu stood at the edge of the Alchemist's herb garden, looking at the various medicinal plants within, pondering long.
In his heart he calculated the toxicity of each, how to proportion them, how to assign the roles of sovereign, minister, assistant, and envoy, how to subdue the dragon and tame the tiger, how to harmonize yin and yang. After a long while, he entered the garden and began to gather the herbs with the utmost care.