Yin Yang Diviner

A month later, I was setting up a stall with Old Zhang.

Before I had even finished setting up my stall, Old Liu rushed over to me in a panic and said, "Master Wei's daughter is missing."

It wasn't the kind of dramatic, earth-shattering way to throw it.

On Saturday afternoon, Xiaoman went to the market with Sister Chen. Sister Chen squatted down to pick out cabbages, and Xiaoman stood behind her, holding a cloth rabbit.

After Sister Chen finished picking out the cabbages and stood up, Xiaoman was nowhere to be seen.

She thought the child had gone to look at the live fish, so she squeezed around the seafood stall and looked around, but there was nothing there.

I thought I'd gone to the tofu stall next door, but they didn't have any there either.

I searched the market from one end to the other, and from the other end to the beginning, asking every shop owner, but they all said they hadn't seen it.

Sister Chen's legs went weak at the entrance of the vegetable market.

After receiving the call, Mr. Wei climbed down from the 30-meter-high tower crane and rode his electric bike to the scene.

He searched for three hours around the market, turning over every alley, every shop, and behind every trash can.

Xiaoman (the 14th solar term) is like a drop of water falling into parched mud; before the eyes can even see it, it has already seeped away.

In the evening, Master Wei stood in the living room of Old Liu's house.

The potted green ivy on the windowsill has grown again, its vines drooping to the floor and swaying slightly in the breeze.

Xiaoman's cloth rabbit sat on the sofa. She had been squeezing the rabbit's ears for over a month, and they were all wrinkled. The cotton stuffing in one ear was so tightly packed that it drooped flat.

Master Wei did not sit down.

His hands were rougher than a month ago, and the calluses on his knuckles, worn from operating the crane's levers, gleamed with a dull sheen.

Those hands that once carried steel bars and cement are now empty, hanging limply at their sides, like two wrenches with nothing to grip.

"Xiaoman never runs around." His voice scraped from deep in his throat, rough like sandpaper scraping against a rough wall. "When her mother squatted down, she was still holding onto her mother's clothes. When her mother stood up, her hand was gone from her clothes."

Old Liu stood to the side, clutching the copper coins in his pocket tightly. A section of hemp rope peeked out from between his fingers, dark and grimy, like a small piece of hanging rope taken from the stove.

He looked at me.

I took Zhenyuan out of my bag and held it in my palm. The golden light from deep within the mirror surface rose up and spread across the mirror.

The mirror reflected the living room—a potted plant, a plush rabbit, and the shallow nest Xiaoman had made on the sofa. Xiaoman's presence wasn't there. The child was alright.

"She's still at the market."

Master Wei suddenly looked up. "How did you know?"

"The cloth rabbit told me. Xiaoman clutched it for over a month, and the rabbit's ears were covered in her worldly air. The color of that worldly air was still warm—she hadn't gone far, and she wasn't afraid. She had loosened her mother's clothes herself."

Sister Chen stood up from the sofa, her lips trembling, "Where...where did she go?"

I did not answer.

Zhang the fortune teller taught me to "see" for a month, not to see the aura, but to see the characters.

Words are maps of the human heart.

Wherever a person gets lost, the words will turn there.

I took out my great-grandfather's small calligraphy brush from my bag. The brush handle was smooth and shiny from being worn by my hands, and the red string tied to the end had faded to a very pale pinkish-white.

He then took out a stone inkstone, pine needle ink, and half a sheet of rough-edged paper from his bundle.

The ink was ground on the inkstone a dozen times, producing a small pool of clear, bright ink.

The small calligraphy brush was stirred in the inkwell, and the tip was smoothed out.

"Sister Chen, write down a word. The first word that came to your mind when Xiaoman went missing."

Her hands were still trembling.

He took the pen and wrote a single character on the rough-edged paper—"full".

The character has three water radicals and two people on the right side, with the grass radical at the bottom.

The strokes are crooked, like a person walking on a muddy road, sinking in with every step.

Zhang the fortune teller taught me that when interpreting characters, you shouldn't look at whether the strokes are beautiful or not, but rather at the thoughts hidden within them.

When Sister Chen wrote the character "满" (full), she paused at the last dot of the three-dot water radical, causing the ink to bleed into a small blotch on the paper.

The two vertical strokes of the grass radical are arranged so that the left one is thinner and the right one is thicker.

The vertical stroke in the middle of the character "两" at the bottom is skewed to the left—towards the direction of the water radical (氵).

The character with the water radical (氵) is called "river" (河), and the character with the grass radical (艹) is called "grass" (草). It refers to grass by the river.

There are two people below, one on the left and one on the right.

The person on the left has solid strokes, while the person on the right has ethereal strokes, so ethereal they look like they've been half blown away by the wind.

"Xiaoman is by the water." I turned the rough-edged paper to Master Wei. "West of the vegetable market, there's a river. Grass grows along the riverbank, and there's a bridge in the grass. Under the bridge arch, Xiaoman is squatting there. She wasn't taken away by bad people; she walked there herself. She's waiting for someone in gray clothes to pass by on the bridge."

Master Wei's pupils contracted sharply. "He used to work on a construction site in the west of the city. Every day he would wear gray overalls, cross the bridge, and go home. Last year, that construction site was completed, and he switched to this one. Xiaoman doesn't know he changed construction sites."

She took the bridge her father had crossed as the road he was still walking.

Master Wei turned around and walked out.

Old Liu followed, the copper coins in his pocket clinking against the inkstone with a clang.

Sister Chen picked up the cloth rabbit from the sofa and held it in her arms, the rabbit's ears pressed against her chin.

The room quieted down, the ivy vines swayed on the windowsill, and the sofa cushions that Xiaoman had sat on were still there.

About forty minutes later, Lao Liu called.

Xiaoman has been found; she's under the arch of the old bridge in the west of the city.

She squatted there, hugging her knees, her eyes fixed on the bridge.

The bridge was empty; no one in gray overalls walked across it.

She had been squatting there for a long time; her trouser legs were soaked by the grass by the river, and her shoes were covered in mud. She didn't cry; she just squatted there waiting.

Master Wei ran down from the bridge and picked her up.

Xiaoman hugged his neck and said, "Dad, you've changed your clothes."

Master Wei was wearing dark blue overalls that day.

After he changed construction sites, his work clothes were changed from gray to dark blue.

Xiaoman loosened her mother's clothes at the market because she saw a figure in gray clothes through the water tanks at the seafood stall, the steam from the tofu stall, and the gaps between the legs of the shoppers.

She chased after him, her back to him as she squeezed through the crowd, left the market, walked west to the river, and onto the bridge.

Xiaoman chased after him to the bridgehead, but his figure disappeared from sight.

She thought her father had gone home first, so she squatted under the bridge arch and waited for him to walk across the bridge again.

She didn't know that the person in the gray clothes wasn't her father.

All she knew was that the gray overalls belonged to her father, and that her father would cross the bridge.

She crouched under the bridge, waiting for something she had lost.

That night, Mr. Wei and his family returned to that house.

Xiaoman sat on the sofa holding her cloth rabbit, while her father squatted in front of her and wiped the mud off her shoes bit by bit.

Sister Chen was cooking noodles in the kitchen, with a poached egg on top. The steam made her eyes red.

I sat in Lao Liu's living room and unfolded the character "满" (full) on the rough-edged paper again.

Chen Jie paused at the last dot of the three-dot water radical, the ink spreading into a small blot—that wasn't hesitation, but a mother's heart skipping a beat the moment her child went missing.

Below are two people, the one on the left is real, and the one on the right is blurry—the one on the left is Xiaoman, and the one on the right is the gray overalls figure she lost.

When she wrote the character "满" (full), was she thinking of "满" (full)? No.

What she was thinking about was "finding".

But her hand wrote "full".

Because her heart is more honest than her hands—what she truly wants is not to search, but to fill.

With my daughter back, the house is full again.

The first lesson Zhang the fortune teller taught me was: fortune telling isn't about guessing, it's about observing. It's about discerning thoughts that people themselves aren't even aware of.

Doorbell rang.

Old Liu went to open the door. First, a smell of smoke squeezed in through the crack, then a face appeared—a square face, thick eyebrows, and two dark circles under his eyes, the result of many sleepless nights.

He was wearing a gray jacket with the collar turned up and the left cuff frayed.

He stood at the door without coming in, his gaze passing over Old Liu's shoulder and landing on the rough-edged paper on the coffee table in the living room.

"Excuse me, is there a fortune teller here?"

The voice wasn't loud, but every word was like a screw being tightened with a wrench.

"I searched for him for three days."

He walked in.

The hem of the gray jacket was blown up by the wind, revealing something else tucked into his waistband—not a gun, but a polished bronze plaque with a single word engraved on it.

I couldn't make out what the characters were, but the aura emanating from the bronze plaque seeped out from under the gray jacket and was reflected in the mirror of Zhenyuan, giving it an extremely deep indigo hue.

It's not evil, it's not malevolent, it's a deep blue color that comes from walking on the edge of a knife for a very long time and being worn down by countless brushes with death.

He said his surname was Zhou, but didn't say what he did for a living, only that he wanted to have a character analyzed.

I took out some rough-edged paper from my bundle and laid it in front of him, then dipped my small calligraphy brush in ink and handed it to him.

He took the pen; the shaft seemed very thin in his palm, like holding a matchstick. His wrist was suspended as he wrote, the veins on the back of his hand bulging slightly.

The pen tip lands on the paper, one stroke, one line, and another.

He wrote the character "卧" (lying down). The left side is "臣" (minister), and the right side is "卜" (divination).

The last vertical stroke of the character "臣" is very long, like a person sticking their body to a wall, and eventually embedding themselves into it.

The dot in the character 卜 (bu) rests on the shoulder of the character 臣 (chen) – like a hand pressing down there, saying: Don't move.

I looked at the character "卧" (lying down).

He paused twice while writing.

One time it's at the beginning of the character "臣" (chen), and another time it's at the end of the character "卜" (bu).

The pause at the beginning of the stroke indicated that he had been standing outside the door for a long time before he stepped through it.

The pause at the end of the stroke indicates that after he finished writing the character, his fingers were still pressed on the pen handle, not released.

He wasn't someone who came to me for character analysis.

He is a man whose shoulders have been held down for many years, until his bones are embedded in the wall, and he is still waiting for a signal.

I turned the rough-edged paper towards him, and pointed my fingertip at the dot of the character "卧" (lying down).

The person you're waiting for is almost here.

He stared at that spot for a long time.

The collar of his gray jacket trembled slightly, not from the wind, but from his breathing finally slowing down.

He put down his pen and stood up, the bronze medal swaying slightly at his waist.

He turned and walked to the door, then looked back.

"I'll come find you when I get there."

The door closed. The hem of the gray jacket flashed through the crack in the door and disappeared.

Old Liu squatted beside the sofa, copper coins dangling from his pocket, the hemp rope swinging back and forth. "Who exactly is he?"

I folded the rough-edged paper with the word "lie down" written on it into a small square and put it in my handbag.

It was quiet inside the handbag.

Deep within the yang membrane of Zhenyuan, golden light shone steadily, and the grayish-white gas on the bronze mirror at the wellhead gathered on its surface, like a curled-up sleeping cat.

Four rough-edged paper packets are stacked together—"Mirror," "Mirror," "Wait," "Lying Down"—each stroke hidden in the creases, like four seeds that have not yet sprouted.

"A person who would risk his life on the wall."