A Leisurely and Extravagant Life - Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Mysterious Tortoise Shell
Luo Tianwang was born on May 5, 1995.
A fortune-teller once said that his life would be marked by several great trials. If he could survive them, he was destined to soar like a dragon or phoenix, with a future beyond measure.
But after Luo Tianwang was born, he seemed no different from any other child. His family soon dismissed the fortune-teller as a fraud and stopped taking those words to heart.
Like most kids in the village, when Luo Tianwang was barely a year old, his mother Zeng Hongmei followed his father Luo Zhengjiang to the coast to work as migrant laborers.
Luo Tianwang stayed behind in the countryside with his grandparents. He only saw his parents once a year, during the Spring Festival. Every time they came home, it took him a long while to rediscover the familiar feeling of being their child. But that bond inevitably grew weaker.
When his parents came back, he would sleep in the same bed with them. Yet in the middle of the night, he always woke up and strained to see who was lying beside him.
A child would never sleep soundly with strangers—it stripped him of any sense of security. And although they were his real parents, the estrangement made them feel like strangers.
Zeng Hongmei would laugh and tease, “Son, you don’t recognize your father and mother anymore?”
Half-asleep, Luo Tianwang would drift off again.
As he grew older, he stopped sleeping with his parents when they returned for New Year.
At the age of eight, while tending cattle, he went swimming with the village kids. The river was deep, but for them it was nothing. Luo Tianwang could dive down in one breath, stay under for a minute or two, and swim from one bank to the other underwater.
The riverbed was full of mussels—some as big as an adult’s palm, with plump meat inside. Stir-fried with pickled chili from the jar, they made a delicious dish.
These mussels buried themselves in the river mud. To catch one, you had to feel with your feet, locate its shell, then dive down and dig it out.
“Tianwang! Look, look at this monster—I already f-found several this big!” said Luo Shengui, who was the same age as him and also his neighbor. They had grown up playing together.
As a child, Luo Shengui once suffered a high fever all night. Though cured, it left him with a stutter. The doctor said it had damaged his brain.
Luo Tianwang glanced dismissively at the mussel in Shengui’s hand. “That’s nothing. Just wait, I’ll find one even bigger!”
He waded around, feeling with his feet, until in the middle of the river he stepped on something shaped like a mussel. He quickly dove down. But when his hand grasped it and he tried to pull it free, something cut his hand.
It felt almost like being bitten. Luo Tianwang thought it was just the sharp edge of the shell, and unwilling to let go, he dug harder and hauled the object out of the mud.
Surfacing with a leap, he held it high with both hands, water splashing as he shouted to Shengui, “Look, Shengui! Mine’s way bigger than yours!”
“Tianwang, th-that—that’s not a mussel! It’s—it’s—” Shengui stammered so hard his eyes rolled, unable to finish.
Climbing ashore, Luo Tianwang finally looked closely at what he had pulled up. It wasn’t a mussel at all, but some strange object.
Since it had taken such effort to retrieve, he couldn’t bear to throw it away. Naked and dripping wet, he squatted on the bank, examining it carefully. It was peculiar, carved with markings he didn’t recognize. But he had seen similar ones on TV—ancient oracle bone script.
[TL: Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtles.(from Google)]
Meanwhile, his cut hand was still bleeding, though he paid it no mind. He also didn’t notice the blood soaking into the carved symbols. The blood seeped into the lines like water filling a riverbed, staining every character.
Suddenly, the oracle script seemed to come alive. One by one, the characters turned into streaks of golden light, flying off the object and shooting straight into Luo Tianwang’s head.
The flood of images and knowledge made him freeze as though struck by lightning.
Still in the river, Shengui hadn’t noticed a thing. Only when he grew tired did he climb ashore.
“Tianwang! You’re so lazy. When we get back, I’m not sharing my mussels with you!” Shengui pouted, thinking his friend had slacked off.
But Luo Tianwang didn’t respond. Shengui assumed he’d fallen asleep, so he pushed him. “Tianwang! Let’s g-go home.”
With a thud, Luo Tianwang toppled stiffly to the ground.
Shengui panicked—his friend lay there like a corpse on TV. Thinking he was dead, he threw down the mussels and bolted, screaming all the way: “Help! Tianwang’s dead!”
The villagers, hearing him, dismissed it as children playing pretend. No one took it seriously.
But Luo Baolin, the grandfather, heard and grew furious. He stormed out and barked, “Shengui! What nonsense are you shouting?”
“Grandpa Baolin, Tianwang’s dead! He’s by the river!” Shengui cried, nearly in tears.
At that, Baolin’s face changed instantly. Shengui didn’t seem to be lying. Barefoot, he sprinted toward the river.
It was midsummer, the bluestone road scorching hot like a heated iron plate, burning his soles with a charred stink. But he didn’t stop to put on sandals.
When he reached the river, he saw Tianwang lying on the bank. Half his fear melted away, at least his grandson hadn’t drowned.
“Tianwang!” He rushed over and cradled him. In the blazing sun, even an uninjured child could fall ill from exposure.
But Tianwang’s body was chillingly cold. Baolin quickly felt under his nose—he was still breathing. Relieved, he muttered, “That stutterer, I’ll deal with him later.”
Lifting his grandson to his back, Baolin noticed something in the boy’s hand. He took it and his face paled. It looked like a tortoise shell. Such things were mysterious, handled only by fortune-tellers and ritual masters in the countryside.
A foreboding sense rose in his chest, and he suddenly recalled what the fortune-teller had once said about Tianwang’s destined trials. Perhaps this was one of them.
On the way home, Tianwang stirred awake several times. Once, he even called softly for his grandfather. But he seemed so exhausted that his eyelids could barely stay open.