The Sleeping Hermit

The collected disciples hushed.

The bravest among them rose to her feet. “The Green is still spreading, Jiwuba. How will you stop it?”

The harvest feast was ending, and what they had stored would need to sustain them until the fields awoke again. The Shovel Skulls were lucky. Not all sects were as adept at cultivation on such tight mountaintops.

Jiwuba, his dark visage seeming to fade back in the candlelight like a statue, sat still and quiet for a long moment. Then he smiled.

“I don’t know.”

When the Green came, it choked all life in the valleys and lowlands. All the works of mankind were lost under its thick toxic fog, and every living thing inside was changed in strange and terrible ways. Since then, survivors had prospered—or endured—in the mountains. Under Jiwuba’s leadership, his school, latecomers to the sanctuary Spires, had encamped on the most barren of the peaks. Only with his knowledge were they able to grow their bountiful paradise.

Jiwuba remembered his childhood. Oh, to know nothing and thereby be wise! The humble act of shoveling boar muck had allowed him to meditate on the fertile bed from which springs life. And now he was first among masters here, and he knew nothing.

He remembered loved ones. His sister, who had gone back for their grandfather and never rejoined them. He remembered her and many others.

I cannot think. Too distracted by all the wonderful lives my friends have built. I would give mine to save but one of theirs! It is too much. One cannot work a long year while daydreaming the sweetness of harvest. The goal will wait. I must only find the way. What the body cannot withstand, the mind will hold strong against...

He turned to Kaly, the disciple, and admitted, “I won’t lie to you—I’m not sure I’ll ever know! But when the problems of the world become too vexing, sleep brings new answers.”

And so they resolved to dream on the Green. Though the other elders awoke with ideas to temporarily stall its spread, Jiwuba slept on. And slept he has since. Though his disciples moved heaven and hell to rouse him, he slept. Though his simple room fell into the abyss as centuries gnawed the mountain, he dreamed, uninterruptible.

Who knows what he might say, if anyone can wake him?