Tang Gong

"Why is that person sneaking around? Is he here to steal grain from the fields?"

"Where?"

"There!"

"Hey, leave him be. You’re new, you don’t know. That’s Fu Zhihou, second son of the Fu family, thirteen this year. He was born slow-witted, a fool. Every year when summer comes, he gets up at the crack of dawn and lingers in the fields, babbling about mountains of gold and silver hidden among the crops! Ignore him. Folks in the village say his father became a merchant and this is his punishment..."

Outside a sprawling village, along a path skirting a patchwork of cultivated fields, three men with swords at their sides chatted idly, their eyes lingering on a figure moving through the weeds not far off.

"How pitiful. I heard the Fu family was once well-off. How did they end up sending someone into trade?"

"Who knows! All merchants are scoundrels, anyway!"

"Come, let’s not bother with that fool..."

Shaking his head, one of the men led the other two away, resuming their patrol of the fields.

After the three had left, the boy they called a fool by the fields scratched his tousled hair, plopped himself onto the grassy bank, and lay back with a sigh.

"One in thirty thousand... searching alone, I’ll never find it, not in a lifetime. And those in the far south, one in three hundred thousand! Heaven help me, I give up!"

Fu Zhihou closed his eyes. His face, scratched by wild grass, was marked with exhaustion and despair.

He had long lo