The Mushroom Spirit

The ridges of Cang Mountain are wrapped in mist, and where the mist settles, mushrooms rise. At the foot of the mountain lived Old Ke, who gathered fungi for a living and was nicknamed the Mushroom Fool. His son had died young, leaving a grandson named Little Fungus; the two kept house together, with a cold hearth and thin clothes.

Old Ke kept a rule in his gathering: he would not take the small ones, he bowed before every fungus-bed, and he cut no more than a few, leaving the nest so the next year might come again. The village laughed at his folly. "Mushrooms are cheap things," they said. "What is there to honour?" Old Ke only smiled.

One autumn the rains would not stop, and the mountain breathed out a strange warm mist with a faint, earthy smell — the people called it the Mushroom Mist. One night the fog poured down like milk, and Old Ke lost the path on the ridge. All around was white; underfoot the ground was soft as trodden down. Then he saw a few faint lights ahead, like stars fallen among the grass. Drawing near, he found mushrooms breaking the soil everywhere, their caps luminous, light spilling from the gills.

In the deepest of that light sat a child upon a mushroom, his body wound about with pale silk, a red cap upon his head, his eyes like held dew. Seeing Old Ke, he neither started nor fled, but said, "Old man, you have come." Old Ke marvelled. "What are you?" he asked. The child said, "I am the spirit of this one nest of fungi. Year by year you left the nest, year by year you bowed; we have known you long." Then he slid from the mushroom and led Old Ke walking through the mist.

The fog held a hundred false turnings, but the child used the mushroom-light as his mark. Where the glow was blue and dim, the fungi were poison, and he shook his head; where it was warm and gold, they were good. Old Ke stored this in his heart, and thought to himself: I once believed each mushroom its own life, but now I see a whole bed is joined like brothers, and where the light agrees there is safety, where it differs there is death.

They walked perhaps half a li, and the child stopped by a rotten log. "Here is a spirit-mushroom," he said. "Take but one stalk, and leave the rest to the mountain." Old Ke parted the rotten leaves and found a cluster of termite-mushrooms, fat and white as jade. He would have taken more, then remembered the child's words and broke off only one. The child laughed. "You are indeed not greedy." And he led Old Ke back to the old road.

When the mist broke and the sun hung pale and yellow, Old Ke looked back at the ridge: the mushroom-light was gone, and the child with it. Only fresh fungi covered the slope, no different from common ones. Old Ke carried his mushroom home and sold it in the market, and the coin was enough for Little Fungus's schooling the coming year.

From then on, on every night the Mushroom Mist came, Old Ke set a bowl of new rice at the old fungus-bed, and made a custom of it. Years later Little Fungus grew up and learned to know the fungi too. One autumn in the mist he climbed as his grandfather had taught him, and came to the old bed; the rice-bowl was still there, and a faint light moved among the mushrooms. In the fog a small red-capped shadow flickered, as if the child nodded to him from afar, and then was lost among the stalks. Little Fungus went home and told his grandfather, and Old Ke's eyes filled. "The Mushroom Elder has come to see you home," he said.

The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: A mushroom is a lowly thing; men tread it underfoot without a glance and boil it into broth. Yet the spirit of a single nest could find the way, could tell poison from food, and could leave a man his living without asking a return — a friendship clear as water, here and gone without a trace. The men who call themselves noble, when gain is near they scramble, when danger comes they flee; set beside this red-capped child, are they not ashamed? Therefore we know the spirit in a thing is not bound to its rank, but to the meeting of hearts.