The Master Craftsman

In the first year of the Zhengtong era, in Xiangshan, Suzhou, Zhu Mo was seventeen, the son of an artisan household. His fate was written in four words: the son takes over when the father dies. He was born with a strange pair of eyes. Without a ruler, he could tell when a beam was off by a fraction or a brick fell half an inch short. People thought he was a monster, but they also prized him. A bridge his father built collapsed, and people died. Zhu Mo went to the capital to take his father’s place on the work rotation, starting at the very bottom as a laborer. On construction sites in the capital, he endured the turmoil of Tumu, the bloodshed in Beijing, and the blades of the Seizing the Gate Incident. Inch by inch, he corrected the flaws nobody else could see. Someone asked him what he was doing it all for. He said, “My grandfather left behind a drawing. He only finished half of it, and then there was nothing more. I want to build what he drew.” No one has ever seen that building, because it was burned down three hundred years ago.