Graeme Brandham - Tang Dynasty, China - Lin, an apothecary owner, living in a river village.
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 805ce LOCATION: Jiangnan (South of Yangtze) Waterways SIGNAL RESONANCE: Harmonic/Symbiotic OPERATIVE: Terra-Runner - Human empathiser
TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED ARTIFACT: A local legend that was later confirmed after a burial site was discovered with a detailed life story, and a human skeleton buried alongside a rabbit.
Legend speaks of an apothecary where a woman and a rabbit gave great blessings to their Zhèn.
The owner was a woman of honest means called Lin, who ran the store on the outskirts of Zhujiacun in Jiangnan, a small town surrounded by lakes, wetlands, and rivers. Her day consisted of collecting, trading, and crafting medicine in her mortar. She would walk and sail around the area, sometimes taking a small boat out far into the water, to find rare plants, clever roots, and spices that could cure people from a variety of ailments. Later she would grind them up in her small shop, sitting as close as she could to the little coal stove that kept her warm from the ever pervasive mists.
This routine of hers changed the day she walked into her shop, on a particularly damp and cold day, and found, sitting on her brass scales, a rabbit, wet and frozen from the cold. Shaking all over.
He didn’t scramble away, he seemed too cold even for that. Instead, he looked at the flue pipe running along the wall, the warmest place in the draughty shop, and then looked to Lin. She immediately went over and put down the sack of tea leaves she had been handling, placing it on the scales without thinking. The pan where the rabbit sat lifted up and he rose towards the stove pipe, he looked up longingly and then looked to Lin again, his eyes begging to get higher and closer still. But being a practical woman, she didn’t get his meaning right away. So instead he adjusted himself. He sat on his haunches, closed his eyes, and shifted his internal anchor. He made himself just light enough that the tea outweighed him even more, sending his brass elevator shooting up towards the heavenly warmth of the stove pipe. His shivering slowed, and he stretched contentedly out in the pan, rolling on to his back and letting his soft downy belly fur get the full blast of the warmth.
And this is how it stayed. At first Lin tried to get him down by removing the counterweights, but he was too canny, and would simply adjust his gravity to compensate. She eventually huffed up at him as she worked.
“If you are going to stay here, you will earn that warmth, mark my words.”
And so the game began. It became a game of thermal equilibrium. If Lin weighed heavy roots, Jing made himself heavy to stop from hitting the ceiling. If she weighed dried petals, he became light as thistledown to catch the rise. He worked for the heat to stave off the winter cold.
For the first month he stayed in the shop, he was just a peculiar, heat-seeking fixture. Customers at first were baffled, then bemused, and then finally they were just ambivalent towards the unusual weighing mechanism.
One day in late December Lin’s elbow knocked a jar of expensive, sun-dried Ginseng off the shelf. Before the glass could shatter, a blur of grey fur shot from the scales. Jing caught the jar mid-air, suspending it and himself in mid-air before setting it gently on the counter.
He looked at Lin, his nose twitching in annoyance.
“Waste... ful,” he clipped. The sound was staccato, melodic but sharp, like a stone skipping on ice.
Lin didn’t scream. This was the River Province, after all; the world was full of strange spirits. Instead, she offered him the best bok choy she had to try and please the gods for her saviour and began to ask him questions.
They struck a bargain then that kept them going for the whole of the next year. In exchange for the crispest greens and the warmest spot in the shop, Jing aided Lin in her work, keeping her company and being a very precise counterweight, whilst also opening up the rabbit network to her.
Humans see the forest; rabbits see the roots. While Lin slept, Jing and members of his family vanished into the undergrowth, trading with the warrens that ran beneath the great eastern cities and stretched as far as the Silk Road’s western border. He returned with treasures no human hands could harvest. Snow Lotuses from peaks too high for climbers, and the shimmering ghost fungi that broke fevers in an hour, found only in the deepest badger sets.
Lin’s shop transformed. The smell of damp wood was replaced by the rich, earthy scent of rare cures. She became wealthy. Her silk robes grew finer, and the coal stove was always lit. Jing and Lin became more comfortable than they ever could have imagined.
But gold is a heavy thing to carry in a small village. The neighbours, who once waved, now stared. They whispered that she had made a pact with a demon, that she was hoarding all the luck in the valley. The bell on the door rang less often. The shop was warm, but the air had grown cold.
Then came the day of the roses.
It was mid-winter when Old Madam Zhang pushed open the door. She was shivering, clutching a handful of copper coins that wouldn’t buy a single root of the medicine her feverish grandson needed. She asked for the dust, the sweepings from the floor.
Lin stood behind the counter, her heart sinking. She looked at the scales. She looked at Jing, dozing in the brass pan.
Jing opened one dark eye. He looked at the weeping woman, then he looked at Lin. He stood up.
Usually, for a small amount, he would make himself light. But as Lin reached for the scoop, he gave her a small wink. He was sitting perfectly still, but with each scoop of the medicine poured into the counterweight pan, he made himself by increments slightly heavier to balance the scale. Lin had to pour more than the coppers could have ever afforded, but it was enough to ensure Madam Zhang’s grandson would be well. She poured the expensive ginseng. She poured the wolfberries. She poured the ground pearl powder. Scoop after scoop, until the pan was a mountain of medicine worth a year of the old woman’s wages.
Finally, the scale tipped level.
“A perfect balance,” Lin said, her voice trembling just a little. “One ounce. Exactly what you paid for.”
The old woman left with a bag heavy with medicine, but all the lighter for the joy that poured out of her, baffling gratitude etched into her lined face.
They didn’t speak of it, but they did it again the next day. And the next. For the rich merchants who sneered at the mud on the floor, Jing was a precision instrument, weighing every gram to the letter. But for the tired, the sick, and the poor, he became the heavy rabbit. He tipped the scales of fairness, finding perfect balance every time.
The whispers in the village changed. They no longer spoke of a witch; they spoke of the Lady of the Green Dragon and The White Tiger. They said the shop was a place where the spirits judged your need, not your purse.
When Lin eventually passed, many years later, she left no fortune behind. She had given it all away, ounce by heavy ounce. She was buried on the hillside, her grave marked only by a carving of a scale. It was only as the years passed by that her grave became a symbol, adorned and celebrated. Some say Jing, when he passed away later on, was buried with her.
But to this day, the elders of Zhujiacun still quote the words she used to murmur whenever the brass pans clattered in the poor man’s favour:
“The fragrance of roses remains on the hand that gives.”
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:The Mechanic: The operative utilized variable Density Control. By increasing his internal mass without altering his volume, Jing effectively hacked the primitive weighing mechanism. The rabbit network mentioned is the precursor to our modern global supply chain, an ancient, subterranean barter system maintained by the Order to redistribute resources from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity. Historical Footnote: This story is often cited as the origin of the lucky rabbit motif in local commerce, though the original meaning, that luck is something you give, not something you get, has been largely lost to time. Cultural context: In China in the Tang Dynasty, Rabbits were not quite equals, we still kept ourselves relatively remote from human populations for fear of being hunted. But awareness of our intelligence and ability was more readily accepted as being something more than just folklore.
