Luo Yuan fell into the chest of the clan deity, as though falling into the whirlpool of his memories.
In a stretch of darkness, someone cheered loudly, their voice filled with joy.
“Wonderful! Wonderful! Our Qin clan finally has a shentai (divine fetus) born!”
“With this, from now on, we no longer need to fear those ghosts and monsters eroding us. We can receive the clan deity’s protection, we can pray for everyone’s safety and smooth days, pray for the clan’s prosperity!”
“We will definitely live better and better, this is wonderful!”
At this time, the Qin clan was merely a branch separated from a major surname, their numbers extremely small, forming a tiny village gathered in the mountains and forests. In this era where smoke of war rose everywhere, with years of warfare and frequent natural disasters, the people lived in misery. Even yaogui (demonic spirits) appeared far more often than before. If a child in the clan wasn’t watched carefully, their soul could be sucked away by such yaogui, or even their body could be seized and devoured.
However, more terrifying than yaogui and evil creatures were famine and plague that had no cure, fields that could not grow grain, and those vicious refugees attacking villages to rob food and women. Even the slightly larger towns and villages nearby could bully them.
But this branch of their clan had given birth to a shentai! A shentai was a deity descending into the world. They were born through a human womb just for the sake of bringing prosperity to the clan. At the beginning, it was the Shang clan that used a shentai to create the “clan deity.” Their clan leader received a revelation from Heaven and learned the way to shape a shentai into a clan deity.
Once the ritual was completed, the clan deity would become a true deity of the human world, able to guard the clan for thousands of years. As long as they sat in protection, ghosts and monsters could not invade within a certain range, no plagues would arise, and people could pray to him and receive the power bestowed by the clan deity. Any clan with a clan deity would certainly become the dominant power in an area; many of the great surnames and cities today originated this way.
Therefore, when this branch of the Qin clan gave birth to a shentai, everyone was wild with joy.
A so-called shentai had bones that carried a strange fragrance and could ward off evil. They were born knowing, but they would often possess certain defects. The shentai of the Qin clan was born unable to move his limbs, only able to lie on the bed every day.
Until he reached his teens and could be transformed into a clan deity through the ritual, he would be carefully cared for by his blood relatives and supported by the entire clan.
“A human body of flesh and blood will bind the shentai. We only need to wait until he grows up, and once he becomes the clan deity and transcends the restraints of flesh, he will be free.” The shentai’s biological father, the clan leader of the Qin clan, often said this.
The clan leader’s wife, Pingxiang, was a gentle woman. Each time she heard her husband say this, she would cry silently afterward. Although a shentai would definitely transform into a clan deity, the ritual was so cruel and painful that whenever she thought of her child enduring that pain after growing up, her heart ached unbearably.
The shentai was not only her child but also the hope and future of the entire clan, their god. Therefore he was fated to have no name and could only be called by the title of clan deity. However, Madam Pingxiang secretly gave her child a name—An, the “an” of peace.
“An, how do you feel today?”
“An, yesterday your little uncle’s child ran into evil. After giving him a strand of your hair to wear, his condition is much better today. Your little uncle and his family are very grateful to you.”
“An, thanks to you, our days this year have been much better. No children in the village were taken by yaogui, and the plague did not reach us.”
“The crops in the fields are growing well. This year will likely be a good harvest.”
She accompanied the child every day, caring for him meticulously, telling him about the matters of relatives and friends in the clan. The child quietly listened to those fragmented bits of daily life.
“He is not only our child, but also our god. You should not have given him a name.” The clan leader said so, yet when he privately went to see the child, he couldn’t help but call him by that name.
Compared to the complicated feelings the parents and elders held toward this shentai, An’s older brother and sister were much simpler. They were still young and only knew that they had a new little brother—this little brother was jade-white and adorable, lying on the bed unable to move, gentle and fond of smiling, just like their mother.
Most of the people in the clan felt a mix of reverence and closeness toward An, for at this time they all shared very close blood ties, and there were not as many rules as in later generations. Relatives who came to visit would directly come to An’s side and greet him. The children of the clan, aside from his own siblings, including cousins, would often cling to the wall, trying to peek at the precious shentai carefully kept inside the large house.
“That’s my little brother! What shentai, shentai—sounds awful!” The little boy of a few years old was the clan leader and his wife’s first child, mischievous in nature. He refuted his little playmates, though because of his mother’s repeated warnings, he didn’t dare tell others that his younger brother’s name was An.
After playing with his friends and coming home, he would go visit his little brother, teasing him with childish laughter. He once tried to secretly carry his younger brother out of that room, take him outside to play, and let this brother who had stayed indoors since birth see the outside world.
As a result, he was of course severely punished by their parents, beaten until he was limping. Yet the next time, he still dared. The immobilized An was carried on his brother’s back, and for the first time, saw the blue sky and green waters outside.
His older brother carried him and ran wildly along a secluded path, the lush blades of grass and wildflowers on both sides brushing against the white sleeves hanging down from him. His brother showed a proud, boastful smile, excitedly introducing the things around them: “An, look, that’s rice. Rice—you know it, right? It’s the food we eat. This is what it looks like when it grows in the fields. And this—this is a flower, this is an ant, this is a beetle! Oh—big bug! Are you scared!”
The little boy deliberately used that black beetle to scare the brother on his back, but An only opened his eyes to look, tilted his head slightly, and revealed a puzzled smile.
The little boy snickered. He hid the beetle beside his brother’s pillow, saying he wanted to give it to him as a gift, to keep him company. When changing the child’s clothes, a huge beetle shook out from the blankets—Madam Pingxiang screamed in fright and grabbed her eldest son by the ear, giving him another fierce beating.
Even with bruised and darkened eye sockets from the beating, the little boy still did not change his ways. Since he could no longer sneak his brother outside, he gathered all sorts of messy things from outdoors and scattered them beside his brother’s bed.
“An, do you know what this is? This one you can eat—try it?”
“Ge (brother)! Don’t give An random things to eat! And that one is really sour, don’t shove it into An’s mouth!” The little girl walking in from outside stopped her elder brother’s actions.
As the second child, the older sister was far more sensible than her brother. From a very young age, she would voluntarily help their mother take care of their younger brother, attentive and thorough.
Once, she wore a camellia flower on her hair bun and noticed her brother staring at it as though he liked it. She specially begged her father to dig up several red camellias from the mountain and plant them in the courtyard, so that when her brother lying on the bed turned his head, he could see them through the wide-open window.
“An likes this flower? I heard there are even more beautiful flowers in other places. Our home is still too remote. If we ever get the chance to go outside in the future, jiejie (sister) will bring back other pretty flowers for you.”
During their traditional festivals, she would carefully weave blessing bracelets and distribute them to the whole family, while An alone received two. After she learned tailoring, all the family’s clothes were made by her and their mother. The clothes she made for her younger brother were especially comfortable, because he could only lie in bed. Worried he might feel uncomfortable, she would turn him over every day, comb his hair, wipe his face, like a second mother.
Later, An gained several more younger siblings. The newly born infants were pure and flawless, staring with curious, wide eyes and drooling onto his bedding. Their heavy little bodies pressed onto his heart.
Their mother smiled as she watched the children and said to him, “An, your didi (younger brother) thinks you smell very nice.”
The younger brother crawling on the ground learned to babble, learned to call “gege,” learned to walk. Just like their eldest brother, he often sneaked in to see him, running back and forth in the room, the floor thudding noisily beneath his feet, incredibly loud.
The tiny little sister was loud as well. Because her body was not very strong, she often cried loudly when feeling unwell. Only beside her shentai older brother would she quiet down. So when she was still very young, she would often sneak into this brother’s blankets and curl up beside him to sleep.
Their family used every possible way to treat him well—out of love, but even more out of guilt.
Finally, as the days passed one by one, the transformation ritual was to be held.
People believed that the innate divine power of a shentai came from the bones, so they would cut open flesh and remove the bones. The bones, emitting a faint fragrance, would be ground into powder and mixed with the soil of the Qin clan’s ancestral land to create clay for firing the ceramic god statue.
People believed that human emotions and desires came from the organs, and that selfish desires made gods fall, so the organs were removed.
People believed that filth came from blood, so the blood was drained.
Symbols were embroidered onto the skin. The shrunken body that had lost bones and blood was wrapped tightly with red thread, placed into the clay statue molded from bone ash and soil, and put into the kiln to be fired.
Clay mixed with divine bone became lustrous white, and only after a month of firing in the flames could it take form.
Before that, when shaping the god statue with clay, people would attach ghost-and-god masks onto the unfired figure. Majestic masks, indifferent masks, gentle masks… layer upon layer pasted onto the statue’s face.
While smoothing those masks, the shaman chanted:
“May you be just and stern, may you be benevolent and gentle… may you bring prosperity to the clan… continuing for ten thousand generations…”
During this month, the clansmen held grand ceremonies, kneeling devoutly in prayer. This was the Month of Divine Birth.
What a painful experience that was—
A shentai was born with immortality. Even if the body was destroyed, it would still regenerate, so he would grow continuously while dying continuously.
He heard his family crying, the young siblings wailing and stubbornly shouting that they didn’t want their brother to become the clan deity. They couldn’t even understand what a clan deity was yet. The elder parents and siblings were silent, not uttering a word, shedding tears quietly.
The first prayer he received after becoming the clan deity came from his family. They cried and pleaded: “May the clan deity never suffer again!”
“May the clan deity stay far from pain.”
“May the clan deity have no resentment.”
Becoming a clan deity was indeed very painful. Only, when he was An as a human, he was willing to protect his family.
His parents grew old; before the two of them, hair white as frost, passed away, they still lit incense and prayed before his shrine. His older brother had long since succeeded as clan leader. With the clan deity’s protection and blessings, he expanded the Qin clan’s territory, the village turning into a city. His older sister married into another clan; every year when she returned, she brought flowers grown over there. His younger siblings also slowly grew up, married, had children, their households filled with descendants, and then one by one, they too aged.
There were more and more members of the Qin clan. There were fewer and fewer members of his family.
The shrine enclosed in the center of the splendid residence grew quiet. There were no more traces of his family. He sat upright on the divine platform, watching the long days slant into the west, falling beneath the platform, the sun and moon alternating, the seasons endlessly turning.
Human time passed so quickly. In the blink of an eye, the children who once looked at him with curious eyes had already become withered old men. Who was the old man kneeling before the divine platform now? He remembered—he was the youngest brother’s grandson, already so old. And the child being brought before the platform to request a blessing—who was that? A child of his elder brother’s line. The ninth generation, wasn’t it? And that child being dragged before the shrine, filled with malice, brought to receive judgment—who was he? His eyes looked somewhat like his elder brother’s. That was his thirteenth-generation descendant.
Generation after generation, more and more people worshipped him. He could no longer clearly remember each person; all they left behind with him were their names. They still maintained the habits from long ago, offering him food, because in the era when he was born, the most precious thing was food.
Having survived the harshest age, the Qin clan had become a dominant power. The nearby towns had migrated elsewhere; only the shrine remained here, receiving incense and worship. The residence built with the lifelong effort of the finest craftsmen grew old under the erosion of time. The traces of the former city were swallowed by the forest. The clanspeople all went far away.
Now, when those children came again to offer sacrifices, he could no longer trace from the bloated genealogy who their ancestors even were.
Too long, far too long a time had passed. Even those few red camellias had lived and died many times over. Only he remained, time slowing to almost a standstill.
───♡───
Luo Yuan awoke from the long, lonely memories, feeling so pained she could not breathe, unable to stop sobbing. The emotions the clan deity passed to her were faint—faint melancholy and sighs, faint joy and longing. Through countless calm years, even with the painful Month of Divine Birth, he had never harbored resentment, because all those members of the Qin clan were children he had watched be born and grow, silhouettes within his memories.
The anguish overflowing in her heart now came from herself.
“How did you end up crying like this?” The clan deity lifted her face, stroking her as though soothing a child.
