Crane

Farmers came crowding to the gates of Dragonbend Academy, hoes slung over their shoulders and babies in their arms, all shouting at once. The disciples of Dragonbend Academy were long used to scenes like this. Those reciting kept reciting, and those drawing kept drawing. Listen a little closer, though, and it became clear these were not hopeful students come in search of learning. They were villagers who had come to get their people back. One complained that his eighty-year-old mother went missing every afternoon. Another said that shambling old man had lured away her husband. Someone else said he had been filling her daughter's head with nonsense like, "If you don't study properly, your family fortune will fall apart." Roaming around in broad daylight, talking without any filter, and possibly having "carried off" half the village... for a dangerous figure like that, Dragonbend Academy really did have one. One disciple remembered how he had sweet-talked her master into letting them come down from the mountain to teach, making it all sound so grand that she and several of her fellow disciples had followed him here without a second thought, only to spend months out in the fields swinging hoes for the villagers. And when harvest finally came, he flatly refused to take any grain from them. When she asked why, he simply fished the last few grains of rice out of the pot into her bowl, drank the thin rice broth himself, and said with an air of mystery, "Just wait. I'm chumming the water." Easy for him to say. He wasn't the one doing all the work. Another disciple remembered the day he put on that robe he had conned out of Lone Cloud, tucked a borrowed scripture under his arm, and went around trying out the face-reading techniques from the book on everyone he met. By the end of it, he thought he'd gotten pretty good, so he went out to practice on real people. He talked one rich brute into spending money to ward off disaster, and talked one heartless man who had abandoned his wife and children into breaking down in tears. Then he came back, took the whole outfit off, shook his head, and said talking people into things was too tiring. Better to come back and nap. Those who had been with him longer remembered even earlier days, how he had "borrowed" a batch of books from Inkbound Order, and how he had "invited" a certain General Wang to send people to build the academy. They had thought that once the academy was built, things would get easier. If anything, that was when the hard days really began. If they would not take tuition, then they had to grow their own vegetables. If they would not curry favor with the powerful, then they had to go out into the fields and find students themselves. The disciples exchanged resigned looks, then led the whole crowd along a familiar path to the little stream behind the mountain. "Master Crane..." "Shh." The man sat there with a fishing rod in hand without even turning around. Beside him sat the very villagers he had supposedly "carried off," men and women, old and young, each with a rod of their own, all staring solemnly at the water. "I got one!" A child cried out in delight. The people around him hurried to help lift the rod, and up came a fat silver carp. "So this is what the teacher meant by 'When people pull together, they win'!" "No, no, this is more like 'With enough persistence, even metal and stone can be carved through'!" The fishers all started arguing at once, but the disciples who had come up behind them could not hold it in anymore. "Carved through stone, sure. You fed them full and threw in this much bait. Of course every fish in the stream came running." The villagers who had been "carried off" were still full of enthusiasm when they saw their families again, eagerly telling them about everything they had gained that day. It was not just the baskets of fish in their hands. It was the ideas behind the bait, the know-how of chumming the water, the things the books had said, the teachings the sages had left behind... and all kinds of knowledge they had never seen or heard before. They still had to come back tomorrow and learn more. Only then did the man turn around, smiling without a word. First you chum the water, then you set the bait. There was a lot more to fishing than most people thought. In these gentle hills and shallow streams, Crane was not going to fish up another King Wen of Zhou. But he could still reel in a few good young minds eager to learn, and with them, a better life for the whole village. Of course, fish take a long time to grow, and good days take even longer to arrive. But that was the thing about fishing. What mattered most was patience. Back then, didn't Jiang Ziya spend most of his life preparing before he finally hooked eight hundred years of flourishing rule? Only those who can endure wind and frost can hold on to a good place. And after that, let the fish swim out into the wide world of rivers and lakes. From here, learning would begin to spread beneath the sky.