Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine - Book 2: Chapter 2

In Xiangxi, there were a few very naughty county record transcribers. Since there were a lot of merchants and guests coming and going, there were many rumors in various places, which were recorded in the county records. As a result, I often had a great time reading them.

Among the villages next to the Myanmar border by the Xi River, there was a village called Shikong that had a kind of herbal medicine called Huancao Shi. There were two types of this herb: horizontal roots and vertical roots. If women ingested it within three months of pregnancy, they could change the sex of the baby at will.

Shikong was a very mysterious village, and the villagers almost never married outsiders. As a result, a lot of people married their close relatives. In the early days, they sold this kind of herbal medicine to make a living. Since this medicine was rare, people had to go deep into the mountains to get it and then give it to pharmacists who specialized in preparing it. The method was only passed down to women instead of men.

The ratio of males to females in this village was almost one to one, which seemed to confirm this medicine’s efficacy. This male-to-female ratio was so accurate that it was actually quite terrifying, but it was later said to be the result of a horrifying “scam”.

The legend of Huancao Shi was like a scam that the locals had all agreed to practice. In fact, when the ratio of males-to-females in the population became unbalanced, the locals would drown the babies in alcohol at night in order to maintain the legend of this miraculous Huancao Shi medicine and also regain gender balance.

This scam was discovered because an official had done extensive research on the “two years that had been lost”. This official found that there was a problem in the age structure of Shikong’s children. Each family often had children that were three or four years apart in age.

However, most local people didn’t take contraceptive measures, so based on common sense, the age gap between the children should’ve been much closer. But that wasn’t the case at all. Many children were three or four years apart, and some were even five or six years apart.

The official believed that in these families, there was a child missing between the elder child and younger child. For some families, it could even be said that two children were missing.

Where did these missing children go? The official later discovered that the sorcerers in the village drowned those children in alcohol the moment they were born. It was said that those who were drowned in alcohol wouldn’t be in as much pain.

Some said that the gender balance was the result of women taking Huancao Shi. But just taking Huancao Shi alone wouldn’t work. It required a mixture of multiple herbs in order for the medicine to take effect.

The formula of this medicine was very mysterious, and only a few people in the world knew it. If you asked people in the village, the women would all say that they strongly believed in this medicine’s efficacy.

The key effect of this medicine was that it would definitely make the sex of the current baby they were having the opposite of their previous baby. Moreover, local couples generally only gave birth to two children—one male and one female—before they would stop having babies.

There was still no definite conclusion on whether the gender balance came from drowning babies or this miraculous medicine.

On the other hand, the evidence of people drowning babies in Shikong had never been found. According to the rumors, the babies’ corpses would be brought deep into the mountains so that Mountain Mother would take care of them.

The legend of Mountain Mother was very similar to the legend of soil girls in Xiangxi in that they were all women living in the soil.

There was another story about this in the county records. In the depths of the mountains outside of the eighty-two villages, there were bandits who threw the people they had killed into a sinkhole until the corpses eventually piled up.

One time, the bandits also jumped into the sinkhole as they were being chased by the authorities. They saw that all of the corpses they had discarded before were dragged into the soil, the flesh and blood sucked clean. That was when they learned that this place had turned into a soil girls’ lair.

There was a baby girl among the corpses who smelled of alcohol and was barely breathing, so they rescued her.

At first, they thought that she was an immature soil girl who would grow up and eat people, so they wanted to wait until she grew older before they went to the city to sell her for money.

They didn’t expect that the longer they raised her, the more adorable she became. In the end, they developed feelings for her as they raised her.

After the girl turned into an adult, she was extremely beautiful and became a famous female bandit in the local area. She inherited all the skills from her adoptive fathers, and was cruel, murderous, and unpretentious.

Later, those bandits theorized that this girl was probably thought to be dead and was dumped in the mountains. Maybe someone from Shikong had traveled there to sell Huancao Shi and brought the bad habit of drowning babies with them. The baby girl was very healthy and had a large lung capacity, which was why she hadn’t drowned in the alcohol. Instead, she grew up and became a good drinker.

After she grew up, it was natural that she wanted to find her biological parents. So, she brought twelve people from the bandit gang with her and went to Shikong. For some reason, they killed all of the people in Shikong and burned the village to the ground.

The legend of Huancao Shi later turned into different versions that spread in Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan, and even the name of the herbal medicine varied.

Until now, people still didn’t know if such an herb really existed, or if it was just a folk scam. No one knew what truth the girl learned in Shikong that made her do such an extreme thing.

After that, the girl took her bandit gang to Xiangxi and started a business. They went from a gang of thirteen people to establishing the eighty-two villages. That was the origin of the eighty-two villages, which happened more than six hundred years ago.

These thirteen bandits were the original thirteen tusis in the eighty-two villages. Later, their descendants fought each other, which caused the political structure to change several times.

That girl didn’t have any descendants even though the remaining twelve people did. The most prestigious leader of this generation was the last of the descendants from those twelve bandits.

Since the power of the eighty-two villages was relatively stable in western Hunan, this story was still recorded in its entirety. In addition to this story, there were also several legends related to the whole thing.

One was that Huancao Shi would grow in places where there were soil girls.

Another legend was that the supreme leader of each generation from the eighth-two villages was assigned to worship something in the mountains. Only the most prestigious leader in the eighty-two villages was qualified to know what this mysterious thing was.

My heart thumped when I learned of this second legend. My intuition was telling me that Zhang Qishan going into the mountains had something to do with that mysterious thing, and this mysterious thing was also related to the baby girl of unknown origins from six hundred years ago.