Xie Pengfei, a salaried student of Renhe, served as a judge in the courts of the dark. By day he was an ordinary man; by night he went to the offices of the dead and dealt with public business.
Many of his friends asked him to look up their spans of life. He always refused. People supposed he was afraid of revealing the secrets of heaven.
“Not at all,” he said. “In the yamens of the world of light, only those accused of a crime or caught up in a suit have a file that can be looked up. Otherwise, the common people are a vast, uncounted swarm, and who has the time to draw up a household register for them? The authorities let them come and go as they please. It is the same in the dark world. None of you are in litigation, none of you are wanted by the officers of the dead. When your allotment of breath arrives, you live; when it is spent, you die. I have genuinely no register to consult.”
“Then can those who die of plague be looked up?”
“That is one of the small calamity-cycles of yin and yang. Those who are due to die sit an examination at prefectural and county level, and there is a roll-call list, so that one can indeed be looked up. But only the entirely undistinguished go onto that list. A man with a background does not come and go on the rolls of the small calamities — any more than a boy with official patronage sits the entry examination.”
“Outside of plague, are there greater calamity-cycles?”
“Water, fire and war are the great ones. From these, the eminent and the conspicuous do not escape.”
“Which of the gods of the dark offices is the highest?”
“Since they are the offices of the dark, how can any of them be high? The high ones are the immortal officials of the upper realms. The posts of City God and Earth God are like the common functionaries of a prefecture or a county in the world of men — rushing about in the dust, and very hard labour — and no man of quality would take them. There was once the White-Stone Immortal, who boiled white stones all day long and would not go up to heaven. When he was asked why, he said: the jade halls are cold and strict, the tallies and registers bristle like hemp, and the immortals who staff the offices labour bitterly at it — and so I would rather wander free along the ridges and the riverbanks and be a loose immortal for good. It is the same thought.”
