Daomu Biji: A Thousand Faces

It was late at night when the girl fell critically ill. Not even the moon could be seen in the sky as the girl’s mother accompanied her. The girl had already fallen into a deep coma when her heart suddenly started beating irregularly. The girl's mother hurried to find a nurse. When the nurse checked the girl's pupils, she immediately hooked her up to a respirator.

There was a moment when they were all out of the ward: the doctor was rushing over, the mother was anxiously looking around by the door, and the nurse was rushing to the nurses’ station to call more doctors and prepare the equipment. By the time they looked back in the ward, they saw a giant standing beside the girl’s bed like a god of death. He was running his hand over the girl's scrawny, cancer-ravaged body.

From lung cancer to bone cancer that had metastasized to her whole body, countless cancerous tissue was being squeezed out of her pores, causing the girl to twitch.

The scene was so horrifying that no one dared to approach for a while. The girl’s mother was the first to come to her senses, but by the time she rushed over to pull Long Immortal away, the man had already fainted to the ground and lost consciousness.

The girl recovered that very night. When she opened her eyes three days later, her body was extremely weak but she began to feel hungry. All of the follow-up tests showed no traces of cancer. After a month, the girl was discharged from the hospital and fully recovered.

When Long Immortal had fallen to the ground at that time, he ended up breaking his pelvis. During the week that he had cured the girl, he lost his healing ability and couldn’t heal his pelvis as quickly as possible. This led to him having a deformity that made it difficult to walk in the future. But during this week, he began to grow taller again and even grew a lot faster than before. According to the doctor who treated him at the time, his joints had expanded rapidly by a centimeter.

The girl didn’t know who had saved her, and the doctors weren’t exactly sure what had happened either. When Long Immortal was discharged and saw the girl again on the street, she was already back to the beauty she had been before. But the instant she saw him, her expression remained fearful and surprised. His love for the girl seemed to have been extinguished that day, so he left quietly. 

But it was because of that event that someone began to notice Long Immortal. This miraculous case was labeled as a misdiagnosis and somehow wrapped up just like that. But the girl’s doctor knew that it hadn’t been a misdiagnosis. This doctor’s name was Pan Boda. He became very interested in Long Immortal and started to pay attention to the giant.

Long Immortal returned to his village and began to live his tedious life again. As an adult, he knew that falling in love would pose a burden to the other person, so he never took the initiative to communicate with others. In those years, Pan Boda didn’t have an obsession with Long Immortal’s ability, and Long Immortal hadn’t really started saving people's lives. But in the end, the events of what happened to the girl were noticed by another girl who had been hospitalized in the same hospital at that time. When she learned that she had late-stage cervix cancer, she was full of so much despair that she attempted suicide twice. To encourage her, the nurse at that time told her about Long Immortal’s story. 

The girl checked the newspaper and the archives and found that the incident was real. When she went to find the girl that Long Immortal had cured before, she found that the other party had recovered completely.

After that, the girl disappeared from the hospital. Instead of continuing with chemotherapy, she found Long Immortal in his village. 

This girl was different from the other girl; she wanted to live and was willing to make any effort for it. When Long Immortal saw that this girl never once revealed fear in her eyes when she looked at him, he felt exceptionally curious about her. 

"I can marry you, but you have to cure me," the girl said to him.

At that time, Long Immortal had been living alone and meditating for a very, very long time. As a result, he was lonely.

He silently looked at the girl. His heart didn’t fluctuate and he didn’t love her, but he suddenly felt that she was very pitiful.

This brave girl, a symbol representing the universal value of "strength", caused Long Immortal to be filled with despair for the world. He suddenly burst into tears. It was as if he could see through everything in front of and behind the girl. These things—the interwoven pain, joy, and desires of the world that seemed to be complicated and colorful—were, in essence, barren and boring.

At that time, Long Immortal didn’t take possession of the girl. He didn’t even reveal his heart to her after she abandoned him. Although he suffered, he didn’t pity himself. He only felt that everything in the world was worth lamenting. 

He later described this as the moment he became enlightened. In other words, if he practiced Buddhism, then this was his satori (1). 

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TN Notes:

(1) Satori (悟り) is a Japanese Buddhist term for awakening, "comprehension; understanding".

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