I, Shi Zundu, together with six others—Wang Chongfan, Sun Shaowei, Qi Pingzhan, Wang Ji, Cheng Zhao, and Li Yi'an—shouldering our satchels, journeyed eastward, gathering together from the four directions.
Passing through Pingxiang, we found the city put to the sword for three days, its moats and pools all turned red with blood. Corpses hung from the roof beams at even intervals, and passersby covered their noses and hurried past, none daring to look directly upon them.
Next, at Huaiyin, a great famine had struck that year—a picul of rice cost fifty thousand coins, and the common folk had nothing to eat. Fathers sold their own sons; children were bound and led to slaughter, butchered as one would sheep or swine.
In the wilds, abandoned infants wailed among the grasses; widows wept until their tears ran dry. By night, one could see ghostly blue-green flames flickering—travelers said they were born of human blood.
We lodged at an ancient temple upon a deserted mountain, where we heard the bell toll in low, choking sobs, as though weeping, as though lamenting. We stopped at a desolate roadside inn, where lamp-flames suddenly leapt up of their own accord, as though restless spirits lingered still, unwilling to depart.
Passing through Linqiu, we saw bamboo poles scattered and broken, and an old man weeping in grief. Upon asking, we learned that the year before, a person of noble rank had passed through, and two children, playing with bamboo poles as toys, had been accused of spreading heretical rumors to deceive the masses, and were both beheaded, their bones cast aside along the road, bleached white even to this day.
Upon reaching the old ruins west of Quanxi, amid crumbling walls and broken partitions, we heard an old woman tell her tale: once, a young bride, her wedding finery not yet removed, heard the sudden ring of a blade in the courtyard, and in an instant her head was severed from her body. Her sisters threw themselves into the well to follow her in death. Thus the whole household was extinguished, and now trees already grow tall upon their graves.
We also saw a performer, drunk, who in jest placed a melon upon his neck as a game. The onlookers egged him on, and someone drew a sword and struck it down, splattering blood across the wine cups and dishes upon the table. Yet the crowd only clapped their hands and laughed aloud, as though they had seen nothing at all.
We, ragged and gaunt as skeletons, wandered on like lost ghosts, as though fallen into some bottomless pit, losing all sense of day and night.
Now, in the time of trouble, when the sun and moon themselves grow dim and dark, we know full well that a single lone tree cannot hold up a collapsing mountain. And so we can only set down all that we have witnessed and heard upon these bamboo slips. We hope that men of virtue in ages to come, upon reading this, shall come to know the cruelty of these chaotic years, and mourn for the common people who hung suspended in such suffering. Should the Nine Provinces ever know peace again, should fortune's bright era return once more, sparing the people from blade and arrow, from cold and hunger, from being swept away and lost amid calamity—then even on the day we ourselves perish, it shall be as though we had lived on.
We beseech those who come after us: never forget this.
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