The Evening Song of the Earth in the Sichuan Vein

A young man with blocked meridians froze an entire lake with three words. He could hear what others couldn't - the bottom of the lake was cracking; the earth was breathing; the center of the earth was saying: I'm going to die, and you are the one watching me die. The water faded from peacock blue to grayish white. The earth's veins in the center of the lake were cut off, and the tribesmen fled in all directions. The dignitaries of the plains took away everything they could. When he recited "Lake Bone Cold", the wind stopped, the fog froze, and the ripples of the entire lake instantly froze. Those words are not poems, but talismans - each stroke can lock the "image" of heaven and earth, and can also shorten one's life. Every time he used it, he was one step closer to death. But he said: I want to write every wound in this land into poetry. He walked between the snowy mountains and the abyss, and saw the echoes of thousands of years later: the purple air floated from Hangu Pass, the Qin army crushed the earth's veins, the Sichuan army came out of Sichuan, and the archaeologists dreamed of his poems under the pine trees in Qingcheng Mountain and burst into tears. "If I can't change the world, why am I still alive?" He found no answer. But he found that he was still walking. Still hurting. Still asking. With his life, he planted three thousand years of Bashu cultural heritage into this land word by word. This is an epic about "keeping" and "passing on". Guard the lake, guard the mountain, guard the pulse, guard the lamp. Keeping those things that are destined to be lost is not because you can keep them, but because "keeping" itself is the most affectionate echo of this Shu land. "Shu Pulse: Evening Song of the Earth" is the first part of the trilogy of Brother Hezhi's novel "Shu Pulse".