Chapter 22 — The Night-Guarding Divine Statue Reveals Its Secret

uld keep the village safe and protect the lives of its people. The Night-Guarding Divine Statues were not carved in the image of a man, only after a human shape: the statue at the village's southern corner had a bird's head, crouched on a stone block, its two hands resting on its knees, and a pair of wings carved on its back, as if it were just about to take flight. The statue at the northern corner was a hunchbacked old man holding a horsetail whisk — yet the whisk was carved as a snow-white serpent, sliding out of the whisk handle to coil around the hunchbacked old man, its head raised to gaze far into the distance. The statue at the western corner was a woman's figure, a feathered coronet on her head and a tiger crouching at her feet. This woman's statue was also strange: in the middle of her brow was carved an eye, and inside the eye was carved a bird's nest, and in the nest were three little birds. And the statue before him, at the village's eastern corner, was a grotesque dragon-headed figure, a medicine basket strapped to its back, and in the basket were several plants. The Blind Elder wanted him to study this statue carefully, but Shen Mu had seen the statues more times than he could count, and had even scrambled over them to raise mischief; he truly could not see what was worth looking at. "Mu'er, can you lift this statue?" the Blind Elder asked, seeing his inattention. "No." Shen Mu shook his head. The statues were simply too heavy, too heavy for ordinary stone. A rock taller than a man weighed at most a thousand-odd jin, and with his present strength he could carry such a weight with ease; yet these Night-Guarding Divine Statues he could not move in the least. The Blind Elder guided him, step by step: "Do you know why these statues are so leaden?" Shen Mu shook his head again. "I don't." "In fact, the statues are not heavy at all — not the least bit heavy." The Blind Elder said with a calm face: "What is leaden is not the stone, but what the stone was carved into." Shen Mu was puzzled: was not what was carved from stone also stone? The Blind Elder: "For example, you study painting and writing with the Hard-of-Hearing Elder. The pictures you paint and the characters you write are sheer nonsense, not worth a single coin; but the characters the Hard-of-Hearing Elder writes and the pictures he paints cannot be had even for ten thousand taels of gold! Both pictures are nothing but paper and ink, so why is the Hard-of-Hearing Elder's painting worth so much more?" Shen Mu understood only dimly; yet there truly was an extraordinary spirit and resonance in the Hard-of-Hearing Elder's painting, far surpassing his own. The Blind Elder raised his bamboo staff and pointed at the statue. "Had these statues come from an ordinary hand, they would not be heavy at all. But the one who carved them is of too great a standing, and what was carved into them is even more awe-inspiring, so the weight of such statues can no longer be judged by common sense. To carry one statue is like..." His expression turned strange. After a moment, he said: "It is like carrying a god on your back!"