Night Tales of Lingmeng Mountain: Vol. 2

A monograph on local folk tales and ballads of Chenyu Vale, recording many absurd popular legends.

Volume II

After Rex Lapis pacified the mountain forests, a boatman once entered the tangled brooks below Lingmeng Mountain and lost his way in the damp evening mist. Poling through water-plants that glowed blue-violet, past thickets of bewildering fallen flowers, following a jade-colored bird he had never seen even in dreams, the boatman broke into a sleeping cave.

By the fluorescence of jade and the ghost-light of fungi, he dimly saw figures of the ancient people of old. They wore long garments of ancient gauze, hems adorned with pure water-like jade discs and nameless fragrant herbs, as if mountain gods and ghosts. They stood in ranks on the shore of a deep pool, chanting a ballad the boatman had never heard:

"Day dark and dim, alone holding resentment; ghost-wind carries rain, vapor hazy."

"In vain the spirit-cultivation sighs at year's end; alone resenting the noble one who comes too late."[1]

The song was sad and still, as if full of regret. Looking more carefully at the ghost-lit figures in the cave, they began one by one to unbind their jade discs and cast them into the black pool, as if never noticing a guest. The boatman felt ever more bleak and uncanny, hurried to pole back, left marks along the way, and returned to Qiaoying Village.

It is said that later the Yuehai Pavilion sent surveyors again to seek a mysterious settlement that never appeared on maps, and some say a Millelith unit entered the deep mountains to check possible illegal dens—but all found nothing. The famous doctor of Yilong Port, Lan Jing, in his youth entered Lingmeng Mountain seeking the legendary mysterious grotto for ancient prescriptions; after returning he never again spoke of it. Only at his death did his family find among his effects an inkstone said to be the color of clear water, bright as high heaven—yet the man was gone, and the stone's origin could never be known. Later his descendants went bankrupt through failed merchant shipping, and the inkstone passed among the folk and was lost without trace.