I Work as a Taoist Priest in Xi'an to Earn Money for Tuition

My name is Xia Tian, my courtesy name is Jiangnan, and my Daoist name is Yichen. My master is the Perfected Qingxu of the Qingxu Temple on Zhongnan Mountain in the Qinling Range. Everyone else calls him Perfected Zhang, but I call him Old Daoist Zhang. I’m an orphan with no parents, whom Old Daoist Zhang found at Louguantai at the foot of the mountain. I grew up with him. To feed me, he caught all sorts of mountain animals: tigers, wild goats, and sika deer, and had me drink their milk. That’s why I’ve always been very brave. As far back as I can remember, the animals in the mountains were my friends. They could understand me, and I could understand them. Old Daoist Zhang taught me the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams, the Book of Changes and its mysteries, feng shui secrets, as well as Daoist culture and medicine. I could read feng shui for people at the age of three, and cast divinations to predict their fortunes at six. Now I’m eighteen. Old Daoist Zhang told me to go down the mountain, saying he had nothing left to teach me. Through his connections, he had already found me a university, so I could go straight to school. And that’s where my story begins.