Chapter One: The Resurrection Pill

My name is Tian Buer. I am a cook of the Five-Viscera Temple, trained under Zhao Haipeng, with Uncle-Master Zhao Haikun above him, and according to rumor, perhaps even a Grand-Master, Zhao Qingshan.

To be honest, the name "Five-Viscera Temple" is not a pleasant one. I have never liked it. It easily gives people the wrong idea, as though we were trafficking in human organs or were some kind of sinister monks running a black-market racket.

But in truth, we are only cooks, properly apprenticed cooks of the Five-Viscera Temple.

Is being a cook easy? If I am to speak honestly, I once thought it was; now I know it is hard. After I met that so-called fox-faced oddity nicknamed Old Nineteen, I suddenly realized... there could even be danger to one's life?

That freak with four eyebrows told me that, on our way to Shiren Mountain to find my master, we had accidentally blundered into a glutinous-rice table and thereby offended the demon beast known as Fire-Tailed Lian, a creature every cook in the trade avoided like the plague.

Legend says that thing leads a pack of feral cats and makes it its business to oppose the cooks of the Five-Viscera Temple.

If a cook offends this so-called Fire-Tailed God of Ruin, he has only two choices: kill himself, or hang up his knife forever and never cook again. Otherwise it will avenge itself upon three generations of his family, leaving him to watch his wife and children scatter and his home fall to ruin.

Sigh. It is hard enough to be a man; it is even harder to be a man who is a cook.

The white-feeding parasite poison that had been planted in me still had not been cured, and now this calamity had fallen from the sky: I had provoked a whole pack of wild cats. The damned thing even wanted revenge across three generations. What utter nonsense!

Yet what came next forced me to face reality.

Because our desperate clash with Fire-Tailed Lian, the cat-man, left my comrade Wang Hou stricken with a food curse and still unconscious to this day. My friends Zhao Hong, Ah Si, and Xian Hongye were all wounded, each bearing injuries, and more than once they had nearly lost their lives.

Before we had even reached our destination, Shiren Mountain's Zhao Family Tower, our group had already been reduced to a sorry rout.

Sigh. I have failed my comrades, failed the old squad leader, and failed the organization that raised me!

And yet I would not believe in bad omens, because I came from the army, and in my bones I believed in human power, believed that man can conquer heaven.

Besides, I still had the old squad leader to lean on. He was the finest abbot in the Five-Viscera Temple, a master of the ladle; whether cooking, divine feasts, ghostly banquets, or dispelling poisons and curses, nothing was beyond him.

So I firmly believed that once we reached the Zhao Family Tower in Shiren Mountain and found him, everything would be fine.

But when we truly arrived at Shiren Mountain's Zhao Family Tower Village, I discovered that things... might not be so simple.

Because when our pickup truck rolled into the village street of Zhao Family Tower Village, everyone immediately saw that... Zhao Family Tower seemed to be a dead place.

As we went along, I found that every household in the village was locked tight, every door shut. No matter how we shouted or searched, not a single living person could be found.

In that vast village, it felt as though only the four of us outsiders existed.

What had happened?

On the flat stone road, we were forced to stop the vehicle. For a moment we stood looking at the lonely, lifeless streets of the village, uncertain and at a loss.

Zhao Hong looked at the scene, scratched his head, and asked me, "Why is nobody here? Did you remember the address wrong?"

I shook my head and said there was no mistake. This was Zhao Family Tower. If they didn't believe me, they could check the navigation on their phones. I had never been here before, but before coming I had done plenty of homework, and my old squad leader, who was also my master, had carefully introduced me to his hometown.

Afraid they still did not believe me, I briefly told them what I knew.

I had heard the old squad leader say that Shiren Mountain was nothing more than an ordinary tabletop mountain, and around it lay three villages, four hollows, and one tower. That "tower" was the so-called Zhao Family Tower.

In fact, there had long been no tower in Zhao Family Tower anymore; there was only a small village of a hundred or so households.

But if one were to speak of the village's origins, one had to begin with the vanished ancient Zhao Tower.

Legend says the founder of Zhao Family Tower was a cook surnamed Zhao from the imperial court of the Ming dynasty. His given name, however, has now been lost to history. When the old squad leader told me about this ancestor, he only said he was a cook with the nickname Zhao Chicken-Slayer.

Zhao Chicken-Slayer was an imperial cook in the court's Bureau of Imperial Kitchen, but his status was very low, so low that all he could do was wield a knife to slaughter chickens. For more than ten years, though he had served as an imperial cook and killed chickens year after year, he had never once seen a supervising eunuch or official, let alone the emperor himself.

During all that time, because he spent year after year doing one thing—slaughtering chickens—the nickname he was given was Zhao Chicken-Slayer.

That life did not change until he was already past fifty.

That year, the reigning emperor suddenly fell ill with a strange malady: at times conscious, at times faint, now drenched in sweat, now babbling nonsense, yet medicine and food had no effect, acupuncture was useless, and rituals failed as well. It was truly as if he had been possessed, leaving everyone helpless.

The emperor's condition grew grave, yet the imperial physicians and medicine attendants at court could do nothing about his bizarre illness.

In desperation, the empress accepted the ministers' advice and issued an edict to the whole realm, offering a great reward to any famous doctor who could cure the emperor. She promised that whoever cured the emperor's strange affliction would be granted fertile land and a lifetime of glory.

But more than half a month after the imperial edict was announced, no physician came forward to take up the case, much less cure the emperor.

Of course, there were many reasons for this. The emperor's condition being strange was one factor; the risk the doctor might bear was another.

After all, that was the emperor's life and death. It was no trivial matter. If he were cured, all would be well. But if he were not, responsibility would follow.

Perhaps because of this fear among the famed doctors of the realm, the emperor's illness worsened day by day, yet not a single physician dared step forward to examine him.

At this point, Zhao Chicken-Slayer, who had spent his whole life killing chickens, suddenly stepped forward. He boldly announced to the officials, to the empress, and to the world that only he could cure the emperor's mysterious disease, and that only he possessed the miraculous elixir capable of treating it.

Thus, he was urgently summoned into the palace by the empress and the ministers.

In the court, Zhao Chicken-Slayer slowly took from his robe a pill that was apricot-yellow, half jade and half wax in appearance.

Then he shook that pill before the civil and military officials of the court and said, "Only the medicine in my hand can save the Son of Heaven's life!"

As for the origin of that remedy, Zhao Chicken-Slayer also offered a brief explanation.

He told the officials of the court that the pill had been passed down through his ancestors and had, by chance, once been obtained from an immortal. It was a resurrection elixir that could bring the dead back to life and strengthen the body. In short, it was extraordinarily beneficial. Taking it would surely restore the emperor's soul and make him vigorous again, ten years younger.

His words immediately split the court into two factions.

One faction consisted of officials who, in their desperation, would try any cure for illness. They believed that the emperor had only half a breath left and that every possible method had to be tried, for who knew—it might actually save him.

The other faction believed Zhao Chicken-Slayer was making a complete fool of himself. Besides, the emperor had taken plenty of elixirs before. Their names alone were all immensely grand and mysterious: Great Return Pill, Longevity Pill, Rebirth Pill, Bliss Pill, and so on, each more impressive than the last. The Daoist alchemists who refined them all claimed to be immortals, half-immortals, or at the very least earthly immortals. And yet had any of them cured the emperor? Those things had not worked, and now he was supposed to take the medicine of a chicken-slaughtering cook? That could only become a laughingstock.

So the two sides began debating back and forth over whether the emperor should take the medicine.

In the end, however, the conclusion was: treat a dead horse as if it were alive.

After all, the emperor had only half a breath left. If they kept discussing it, the issue would no longer be whether to take the medicine, but whether there would be anything left at all to take.

Soon the old emperor was forced, with the help of the inner servants pinching his nose, to swallow that somewhat hard yellow pill.

After the emperor took the medicine, that very night it indeed took effect—but not the kind of effect they had hoped for. Rather than healing, it brought no benefit at all.

According to what the inner servants later whispered, once the emperor had swallowed Zhao Chicken-Slayer's yellow resurrection pill, he immediately began vomiting and purging. After the vomiting and diarrhea ceased, he suddenly started coughing up blood, expelling more than two liters of dark blood, and then... his eyes rolled back and he fainted.

When the emperor fainted, the inner officials panicked and hurried to feel for his breath. Then they discovered... the emperor had no pulse.

This time the matter truly blew up.

Zhao Chicken-Slayer was already a cook; offering medicine was itself a transgression. And now not only had he overstepped, he had also killed the emperor. It was simply unforgivable.

Enraged, the ministers threw Zhao Chicken-Slayer into prison. That very day he was sentenced for the heinous crime of regicide, with immediate execution, and all that remained was to wait until the next morning to accompany the emperor in death.

But just as the hour of execution approached on the third quarter past noon the next day, a ray of hope suddenly appeared.

Before the blade fell, one of the emperor's inner attendants rushed breathlessly to the execution ground, rescued Zhao Chicken-Slayer, and announced an astonishing piece of good news.

He told the ministers that the emperor... had suddenly returned to life.

Afterwards, the revived emperor praised Zhao Chicken-Slayer, made him a dedicated imperial cook, and granted him official rank. Only then did the Zhao family slowly begin to rise as a clan of hereditary cooks, growing prosperous day by day...

When I got to this point, Xian Hongye looked at me skeptically and asked, "Really? Is there truly a pill in this world that can bring the dead back to life?"

I smiled faintly and immediately shook my head. "There isn't. The emperor came back to life purely because Zhao Chicken-Slayer was lucky."

Then I told them the other side of the story, the so-called truth, as the old squad leader had related it to me.

I told them that Zhao Chicken-Slayer had no ancestral miracle pill at all. What he used to treat the emperor was simply a medicinal substance called chicken spirit treasure.

"Chicken spirit treasure?" Hongye and Ah Si exclaimed in unison.

I nodded and told them that when a living creature grows old enough, it absorbs the spiritual essence of heaven and earth and occasionally forms a half-jade kind of calculus. This stone, unlike ordinary stones, is something akin to a pearl, possessing a certain spirituality and medicinal value. The conditions for its formation are also extremely demanding.

When such a thing forms in a human body, it is called a relic. When it forms in cattle, it is called ox gallstone. When it forms in pigs or horses, it is called pig treasure or horse treasure. And when it forms in chickens, it is called chicken spirit treasure.

After hearing what I said, Hongye suddenly understood and said, "So that means... the miraculous medicine Zhao Chicken-Slayer offered the emperor was actually the chicken spirit treasure he happened to discover during the more than ten years he spent slaughtering chickens."

I nodded and told them that this was the fortune of the foolish. After Zhao Chicken-Slayer obtained the chicken spirit treasure, he learned that it had the power to expel illness and detoxify, so he gambled his future on it. Unexpectedly, he hit the mark by sheer accident.

And so Zhao Chicken-Slayer became prosperous, serving as a cook for the emperor. In his later years, he returned home in glory to his old family lands in southern Shandong. There, beneath Shiren Mountain, he bought land and houses, then spent a great sum rebuilding the three-story Zhao Tower, settling down his entire clan. From that point onward, generation after generation followed the same path.

"So that means everyone in Zhao Family Tower Village is surnamed Zhao?" Ah Si asked me.

But I shook my head and said, "No. The old squad leader said that in today's Zhao Family Tower, only one household still bears the surname Zhao, and the Zhao family has long since fallen into deep obscurity, far from the splendor of their ancestor's day."

And all of it began with the disappearance of the emblematic building known as the Ancient Zhao Tower.