Chapter 248
Chapter 248
The course of human history has also been a struggle against nature… a struggle marked by all manner of natural disasters.
Among those calamities, floods have posed the gravest and most common threat to ordinary people’s lives and property!
After all, people have always preferred to settle near water.
Most cities and trading hubs lie near great rivers or lakes. The relationship between humanity and water is therefore both intimate and adversarial…
When torrential rains and floods struck in ancient times, the imperial court and local officials had to lead the people in controlling the waters, but naturally they also sought metaphysical solutions.
There were two common approaches: appeasement and intimidation!
The former mainly involved building temples such as River God Temples and holding annual sacrifices, offering livestock and other tributes to rivers and the River Gods within them.
The hope was that the rivers would cease flooding and that the water deities would show mercy and stop harming the people along their banks.
The latter approach relied on suppressive objects such as river-warding iron oxen, river-warding pagodas, and river-warding bridges!
The goal was the same, but the method carried a tactful, half-veiled threat: if the river caused another flood, great formations and ritual implements would suppress and attack it.
In truth, neither method was inherently better or worse.
Each had its merits.
As long as it was not the horrific evil practice of sacrificing living people to a River God, using livestock, offerings, music, and dance was a perfectly legitimate form of worship.
As for a River-Warding Token, it was the core component inside the various suppressive objects used in the second method!
Whether a river-warding iron ox, a river-warding pagoda, or a river-warding stone bridge, somewhere inside it there would always be a River-Warding Token.
That token was the essential key that allowed the river-warding method to work!
To offer a simple analogy, a River-Warding Token was to a river-warding structure what an engine was to a car.
Of course, the river-warding method had to suppress the force of a stretch of water and intimidate its River God. It had therefore always been an exceptionally profound and powerful magical art.
Few cultivators knew the method, and those who performed it had to pay a certain price.
Moreover, casting or constructing the river-warding structure itself consumed enormous wealth and resources.
For that reason, throughout history, only in times of prosperity could an imperial court find extraordinary adepts and supply enough money and materials to undertake such a project…
Rivers varied enormously in size and covered vast basins. Naturally, no river-warding structure could suppress an entire great river. Usually, a local government erected one to protect only its own stretch of water.
Thus, the structures also differed in size and strength.
The Jinmen River-Warding Token Old Cao had once seen, for example, was used to suppress the stretch of the Hai River flowing through Tianjin.
The river-warding structure there had originally been a seven-story pagoda, but it was destroyed during wartime.
Some patriotic cultivators fighting foreign evil cultivators nearby found the Jinmen Pagoda’s River-Warding Token in the ruins…
At the time, Old Cao’s grandmaster was taking his master and the young Old Cao to the capital on business. They passed through Tianjin and stayed there for a while.
Through their dealings with those patriotic righteous cultivators, they happened to see the Jinmen River-Warding Token left behind by the Jinmen Pagoda.
As for the mysterious black token we had retrieved that night from the Yellow Springs pool beneath the hill behind Lianghe District Middle School, Li Miao suspected that it was the core of a river-warding structure erected outside Lianghe Town more than two centuries ago: the Lianghe Iron Stele!
Though Lianghe was only a town, its history stretched far back. From the late Qing through the early Republic, it was an important wharf on the waterway linking Sichuan and Chongqing!
Over the course of history, many cities and towns had once been very different from what they were today.
Shanghai, for example, had been only a small fishing village two centuries ago. Today, it was an international metropolis and the country’s most economically prosperous city.
Luoyang, by contrast, had been the “center of all under heaven” during the Tang dynasty, with an economy that rivaled even Chang’an. Today it was only an ordinary third- or fourth-tier city.
Chang’an had fared only slightly better…
Likewise, Lianghe Town had been far more important two centuries ago than it was now. Its prosperity had rivaled even Fubei County’s seat!
The imperial officials of the time therefore possessed enough money and influence to find a highly capable cultivator.
With his help, they mobilized laborers and craftsmen to cast an iron stele weighing several thousand jin!
They erected it on a small hill near Lianghe’s main wharf to suppress the Chuan River waters around Lianghe and ensure favorable weather, peaceful currents, and prosperity nearby.
But with the end of the old society and the founding of New China, infrastructure gradually expanded.
A provincial highway ran west of Lianghe, while road and rail transport rose in importance. Shipping on the Chuan River declined.
Changes in climate also caused the river’s water level and flow to diminish rapidly compared with ancient times and the old society. The tonnage of ships able to navigate it grew smaller, freight volume fell, and Lianghe Town ultimately lost its status as a river port.
As technology and civilization advanced, people also placed less faith in supernatural matters.
Together, those factors meant that for the past forty or fifty years, almost no one had maintained the River-Warding Iron Stele outside Lianghe Town…
It was gradually abandoned.
Of course, the stele had been cast from pig iron and weighed several thousand jin!
Even an ordinary iron stele made from such material could stand unmaintained against wind and rain for a very long time.
This particular Lianghe Iron Stele also carried the magical empowerment of incantations left by a powerful cultivator, and a River-Warding Token rested within it.
Even if another thousand unattended years passed, it probably would not corrode or break!
Later, however, during certain major events that were difficult to discuss openly, a group of people deliberately destroyed it by force…
And so the River-Warding Iron Stele that had protected Lianghe Town for more than 160 years disappeared.
The River-Warding Token that had served as the stele’s internal core naturally vanished with it, its whereabouts unknown.
Its loss became a source of deep regret throughout the esoteric world of Lianghe Town, the Fubei county seat, and even eastern Sichuan and western Yu.
The corpse retrievers who worked the Chuan River within Fubei County lamented it most of all!
Corpse retrievers spent their lives dealing with great rivers, so they also faced River Gods and aquatic monsters. Where a river-warding structure existed, their work was both easier and safer.
Such structures therefore held special symbolic and emotional meaning for them.
After society gradually returned to normal, powerful cultivators from several nearby counties and prefecture-level cities reportedly joined forces twenty-odd years ago to search for the token.
Among them was Li Miao’s adoptive father and master!
But they found nothing.
The River-Warding Token of the Lianghe Iron Stele remained missing…
Although Li Miao had never seen it, his master had talked about it constantly while he was growing up, often describing the Lianghe River-Warding Token’s shape, appearance, and distinctive features in detail.
When drunk, his master even demanded that Li Miao repeat the description back to him.
Li Miao had heard it endlessly since childhood!
Naturally, the precious object left a profound impression on him, even if that impression existed only through his master’s words.
Of course, no matter how prosperous Lianghe Town had been, it was still only a town, at most comparable to Fubei County’s seat. It could not rival a vast city and major port like Tianjin.
The Lianghe River-Warding Token therefore could not be as powerful as the Jinmen River-Warding Token Old Cao had seen.
Even so, it remained an extraordinarily precious and formidable treasure!
It was also a fine ritual implement.