Under the old locust tree behind the village, the village chief rubbed his pipe while slowly telling a story about “Aikefei”.
“She is a woman who fell from the sky,” said the village chief, “wearing a cloak made of stars, holding a magic weapon in her hand, and said that we have to collect 168 crystal snails to find her name back.”
We half-grown children all giggled and said that this was just a new lie made up by the village chief. But later we learned that Aikefei was not a ghost or a god, she was a person who lived in the sky and on the earth.
When she was born, six “Ai Xu Bingyu” fell on her head, saying that it was the coldness in her life. The old Chinese doctor came to see her and said that this was an imbalance of the five elements, and that “Shiwada Jade Silver” had to be used to suppress it. But that jade silver was very rare, and it had to be exchanged for life in the “Deep Cold Secret Realm”. So the hunters in the whole village put on tattered cotton jackets, took rusty spears, and went to the snowy mountains to fight. Some people came back with three pieces of debris, shouting “She deserves it”. Some people did not come back, leaving only a vague shadow in the wind and snow.
She grew up very slowly and strangely. Other children drank porridge, but she drank the steam of the “Secret Source Gas Throat”. The steam sprayed out from the chest of the “Secret Source Robot”, and it burned people’s faces. The village chief’s nephew Xiao Liuzi stole a can and just unscrewed the lid, his face was stained, and he could never find his wife again.
Ai Kefei said it was the “smell of growing up”.
Her long hair smelled of the sea breeze, and her sleeves were covered with the powder of the “beryl conch”. The conch was to be collected in the Selo Sea, and each one was like a tear spit out from the coral dream. You have to dive into the seabed at night, and your fingers are frozen purple before you can pick one. She needs 168 to break the curse of her bloodline.
Someone laughed and said, “Do you really think she is a fairy?”
But later we saw her practicing magic in the moonlight, and the blue fire of “Philosophy of Justice” jumped out of her fingertips. That fire was not fire, but an idea, a spiritual light extracted from old pages and heroic stories. She read “The Teaching of Justice” 9 times, “The Guidance of Justice” 63 times, and “The Philosophy of Justice” 114 times every day. She memorized it by heart, as if justice was not a word, but a part of her body.
She said, “If I don’t have talent, I can only rely on repetition.”
Later, she wanted to refine a weapon named “Aroma Music Player”, which was an extension of her soul and a resonance between her music and the elements. But it was not easy to refine this weapon. It had to be quenched with “Sweet Spring of Pure Holy Dew Drops”, cooled with “polluted water”, and the bone marrow of “Other Sea Blocks” had to be added to the handle.
The blacksmith in the village said that this was not refining a weapon, but summoning spirits.
She refined it for a hundred days and a hundred nights. Her eye circles were dark and her lips were cracked, like an unopened flower in the wasteland. But her hands were brighter, like white bones on blue fire, emitting a weak and stubborn light.
When the weapon was truly formed, it rained for seven days and seven nights in the village, and the leaves of the old locust tree turned purple. She walked out, her sleeves fluttering like the wind, and said, “I can go now.”
“Where to?” we asked.
She pointed to the sky in the north and said, “To complete my unfinished breakthrough.”
The day she left, she left a piece of paper with a dense list of materials she needed – 36 meshing gears, 96 mechanical spur gears, 129 mechanical movement gears, 3 crowns of wisdom, 418 books of experience of great heroes… We had never heard of these words, but we knew she was serious.
She wanted to use these materials to open the way from the lock of fate to the door of self.
Later we realized that she did not collect these materials to become stronger, but because these materials themselves were part of her. Every snail, every piece of jade, every philosophy book, every battle, every failure, is the brick and stone of her soul and the skeleton of her body.
She is not getting stronger, she is piecing herself together with fragments. She is reshaping in the fragmentation and resurrecting in the materials.
Some people say she is crazy. Some people say she is “five stars”. But I prefer to believe that she is an elf struggling in the mortal world, writing a belief that has never been understood with repeated attempts, repeated dungeons, and repeated attempts rejected by the system.
I can still hear the song she once sang in the moonlight, like the echo of a faint magic weapon, rippling outside of time:
“Please give me a gear, I can turn the world. Please give me a drop of polluted water, I can purify my fate. Please give me three crowns of wisdom, I can wear it and return to the star where I was born.”
She didn’t come back after all. But everyone who strives to become stronger and constantly brushes materials is her incarnation.