All of this struck like a lightning bolt. During the ensuing quarrel, all the villagers took the side of Mu Xi's friend. Old Mu Xi knew that the villagers sided with his partner because he himself was a widower and without family. In the countryside, a widower was an ill-fated figure. Ultimately, Old Mu Xi watched his friend claim all of the harvest and also threaten Mu Xi not to get close to this piece of land-since the harvest belonged to him, the land naturally was his also. All the villagers supported Old Mu Xi's friend.
After several sleepless nights, Old Mu Xi killed his friend with a sickle and began his prolonged life as a fugitive.
He always chose to travel on mountain paths, especially those that ran through dense, primitive forests. He was not afraid of losing his way. As a matter of fact, so much the better if he lost his way, because then nobody could find him. Over several months of rain and wind, he gradually developed a pair of iron soles and an animal's stomach-now he could survive by eating leaves. During that period, the shadow of horror forever hung over him, forcing him to flee frantically. Surprisingly, the animals in the forests never harmed him. Instead, they all went their own way and coexisted without any trouble.
One evening when he had just emerged from a forest, he vaguely heard a gong. He thought it was sounded by people trying to catch him, so he quickly hid in the bushes. The people passed him by, however, laughing and talking. They turned out to be a troupe of acrobats traveling by night.
Perhaps people had already forgotten about the murder he had committed. Perhaps nobody in the village had ever thought of either reporting or capturing him. Perhaps the mountain forest he was in at the moment was far, far away from his hometown. It could be anything. But not once had Old Mu Xi pondered these possibilities. He considered what he had done to be so serious that he didn't believe there could be any pardon. Holding such a belief, he walked hurriedly through the bushes, his body scratched bloody. This character trait was destructive, driving Old Mu Xi to hide out and separate himself from other people.
Several years of dining on the wind and drinking the morning dew passed. Long thick hair grew on Old Mu Xi's body. His clothes had been worn out for some time, and long brown hair sneaked its way out through the holes. One day when he was taking a bath in the river, he was startled to see the reflection of his body. After careful thought, he felt greatly relieved: from then on, he no longer wore clothes. When he met up with people, he didn't feel so frightened because he figured nobody could recognize him. But in his stubborn mind, he refused to accept the possibility that he might get away with his crime. By now, he had become set in this way of thinking.
Life in the forest was extremely monotonous. He couldn't get used to eating meat, particularly raw meat, so he never caught small animals. His daily task was to find tender tree leaves to eat, and he disliked staying in one place-his imagination needed constant refreshing-so he was constantly on the move, picking leaves along the way to keep up his strength. He frequently encountered people as he went; without exception, they screamed and ran away, and at that moment he would feel an unreasonable satisfaction.
Yet the nights were hard to endure, and this hardship had nothing to do with the weather. Old Mu Xi had long adjusted to wind and rain, scorching heat and freezing cold. In winter, there were fewer tender leaves, so he had to eat old ones, but his stomach had become strong. The hardship derived from his feeling of suspension.
Whenever he fell asleep, he felt clearly that he was suspended in midair. Beneath him, the villagers were busy working their fields, barefoot children ambled along the bank between the plots, chimneys gave out a light-gray smoke; yet all of that had nothing to do with him. Hanging in midair, he felt dizzy; it seemed as if his innards were flying out of his body. The nightmare would continue until he was startled awake by his extreme terror. Since fleeing into the forest, he had spent every night this way. Mornings when he arose, he would be pale, his body shivering like a typhoid victim's. Each step was agony. He would struggle to collect a large quantity of leaves to compensate for the strength he had lost during the night. Slowly, he would recover his energy, and toward afternoon he would have regained his vitality almost fully.
Old Mu Xi passed one month after another, one year after another in such a pattern. In moments of desperation, he often dreamed of finding a place that no one could think of or remember. There, one would neither hear the wind chimes echoing in the mountains nor see the leaves changing color with the seasons. The earth and sky would merge. Perhaps in such a place, he would no longer feel suspended in midair, and he wouldn't have to eat all those leaves.
After many, many years, he finally returned to his hometown. He didn't choose the way home purposely. He never chose his way. This homecoming could only be called a coincidence. Even he was surprised for a long time.
On a familiar little hill, he saw the small tile-roofed house where he had once lived, and a few of the same villagers. Like one transfixed, he stood there for a long time, thinking how awkward it had been to be among them back then, when every day had seemed as long as a year. He didn't feel like going home to have a look around, even if they pardoned him; for him, returning home was meaningless, and he could no longer participate in that way of life. Calmly, he jumped into a stream at the entrance to the village to take a bath; then he returned to the mountain.
Many people saw him, yet nobody recognized him. In fact, the incident had happened so long ago that nobody connected him with it anymore. That night, people in the village closed their doors very early and stayed inside. And the topic they discussed was the wild man. Old Mu Xi stayed for a few days in the mountains near his hometown, but he soon became bored and headed north, where the forest was denser. As he left his hometown, he heard deafening firecrackers, which the villagers, fearing the wild man, set off to boost their courage. Old Mu Xi laughed and walked quickly northward through the smell of gunpowder.
One rather strange thing was that his fellow villagers had already forgotten the murder case. They had also forgotten the position they had taken in the dispute, yet they had never forgotten Mu Xi as a person. In folk legend, he had been gradually elevated to a hero of the forest, a powerful and unconstrained hero like a heavenly steed soaring across the skies. One day, they put up posters inviting Old Mu Xi to return, to come home, to return to the people, but he had gone far away and did not see those notices. Even if he had, he would not have believed in the pardon because he was confident he had seen through the people's hearts and minds. Home would not be the place for him. He wanted to go where people had totally forgotten, a place where the sky and earth had merged.
He found that lately, his capacity for food was growing and the blood in his veins had turned green (he scratched his finger once on a thorny vine). Nights had become more and more terrifying. The clear-cut separation of sky from earth forced him to struggle desperately since he felt suspended between them. Old Mu Xi was both startled and scared.
When Old Mu Xi had begun living in the forest, he often mumbled to himself. The language he had used in society obviously was strongly rooted in him. With passing time, Old Mu Xi's desire to speak grew fainter and fainter. One day, he discovered he could not speak a single word. He tried to use the language that had served him in the past for thinking, but it had escaped him. The sound he produced after much effort turned out to resemble baby talk. Quickly, Old Mu Xi discovered the benefit of losing his linguistic memory. His throat became coarse and natural. Often, he didn't need to think to express his urges accurately and easily. Thus he roared, cried, and shouted at will day and night, feeling completely free. One day after several years in his dream world, he felt extremely lucky that he had not gone home, because he could not have endured the sounds those people made. To him, they were shrill and irritating, a completely senseless display of technique. Even little children would twist their lips strangely to make outlandish sounds. Now that he was hidden in the forest, whenever he recalled that he used to talk like that, he would blush with shame.
Although the murder had occurred years before, the image of his victim was still sharp in Old Mu Xi's mind, for he was a born bearer of grudges. Numerous times in those moments before falling asleep, he engaged his enemy in bloody battle, emitting heroic roars. Numerous times, he experienced the pride of triumph and the humiliation of defeat. In these moments of half sleep, his brief human life repeated itself. When Old Mu Xi woke up, his desire for battle had disappeared completely. He would think of the foe he had killed years before and be somewhat surprised: could it be that he had not killed him? Was that forcible seizure of the cropland some kind of illusion? But regardless of the event's authenticity, it or something like it had forced his departure. Old Mu Xi was certain about that, and he felt himself very fortunate indeed. In the same way that he refused to believe in pardons, the stubborn Mu Xi would not make peace with his enemy. In the dim night, as he floated in midair, facing his opponent across two isolated realms, his emotions were clear and unambiguous. On such occasions, he would devise all kinds of unrealistic schemes for murdering his foe, maneuvering again and again, dismissing the idea, then maneuvering again, and then dismissing the plan again in order to conceal his inner horror, to forget the feeling of being suspended in midair.