← All chapters
Chapter 23

The Fruit That Looks Like a Baby

萬壽山大仙留故友 五莊觀行者竊人參At Longevity Mountain the great immortal detains an old friend; at Five Villages Abbey, Pilgrim steals the ginseng.
世德堂本 1592, juan 5
Narration

The full-cast narration for this chapter unlocks with the book.

Longevity Mountain held an abbey called Five Villages, and the abbey grew a tree, and the tree was a problem waiting for the right idiots to walk under it.

It was a ginseng-fruit tree, and the arithmetic on it is the kind this book loves: three thousand years to flower, three thousand to set fruit, three thousand to ripen. Nearly ten thousand years for one crop, and one crop is thirty fruit, and the fruit look — this is the whole trap — exactly like newborn babies. Little limbs, little faces, eyes and mouth complete, hanging in the leaves. Smell one and you live three hundred and sixty years. Eat one and you get forty-seven thousand.

🔒

Chapters 13–78 are for readers

Chapters 1–12 are free. Unlock the rest of the journey—every chapter now, and every new one as it is written—for a single payment.

Already bought? Restore access