Before the thirteen-year-old Ying Zheng ascended the throne, he had a dream.
"I need a drop of blood from between your brows... You will have a child named Ying Xiaomi, conceived when the blood from between your brows flows into an eggshell."
Ying Zheng frowned. "What's millet? Is there rice?"
"Young people shouldn't fuss over details. Your ancestor, the female Xiu, didn't ask me this sort of thing a thousand years ago." The black bird tossed the golden egg from its beak to Ying Zheng, then flapped its wings and flew away.
Xiu was the daughter of Zhuanxu. She had swallowed an egg dropped by a black bird beside the Ying River, and thus the Ying clan came into being. Ying Zheng thought he had dreamed this auspicious dream because he had conquered Puyang, the capital of Wei.
Puyang, originally called Diqiu, was where Zhuanxu had lived, after all.
So he gladly accepted the auspicious dream and slept happily until dawn.
But when he opened his eyes in the morning, he found himself wondering: Why was he actually holding an egg?
Ying Zheng tentatively called out, "Xiaomi." The golden-veined white egg, about the size of two fists, could even bounce around!
Just then, his astonished face was reflected in a glass mirror. A vivid red dot of blood had appeared between his brows.
Had he encountered a god or a ghost? Was his first child really going to be an egg?
And was it really going to have the tacky, awful name "Xiaomi"?
·
Xiaomi means millet. The sticky kind is called shu, and the non-sticky kind is called ji.
·
Ying Ji had no idea that after closing his eyes in Zhangtai, he would open them there again.
