Under the Zhou king Mu, a man with the power of transformation appeared from a country in the far West. He entered fire and water, passed through metal and stone, turned over mountains, changed the course of rivers, and moved walled cities. He rose into the void and did not fall, passed through the solid without encountering obstacles, there was no end to his thousands and tens of thousands of transformations. He changed both the shape of things and the thoughts of people.
King Mu revered him like a spirit, served him like a king, gave him the royal chambers, treated him to the meat of bulls, rams, and pigs fed for the victims; to entertain him, he selected the best female singers. However, that man could not live in the royal chambers, finding them low and ugly; could not eat the dishes of the royal cuisine, finding them raw and fetid; could not approach the royal concubines, finding them ugly and smelly.
Then King Mu began to erect a structure for him, calling on all the skills of his craftsmen in clay and wood, in painting red and white. All five treasuries were emptied by the time the tower was completed. A thousand ren high, it towered over the top of the Southern Mountain and was called the Sky-Rising Tower. For the tower, they chose the most beautiful maidens in the Kingdoms of Zheng and Wei, anointed them with fragrant oils, painted on their eyebrows with “butterfly antennae”, put up their hair with hairpins, put earrings in their ears, dressed them in the thinnest canvas, and decorated them with jade pendants and various fragrant herbs. Having filled the tower, the beauties played many melodies to cheer up the man who possessed the power of transformation.
Every moon the king brought him precious clothes, every morning - delicate dishes. The same one condescended to everything as if reluctantly.
After living in the tower for a short time, the man invited the king to take a walk. Holding his sleeve, the king flew up with him to the very Middle Heaven and found himself in his palace. The palace was built of gold and silver, studded with pearls and jade. It rose above the clouds and above the rain, but on what it rested is unknown. From a distance it looked like a fluffy cloud. Everything here for sight and hearing, smell and taste was different than in the human world. The king, believing that he was truly in the abode of his ancestors - the Purest Capital of the Purple Star, enjoyed the breadth of the melody of heavenly music. Bowing his head, the king saw his palace and terraces below, looking like lumps of earth and heaps of brushwood. It seemed to the king that he had lived here for decades without remembering his country. But then the man, who possessed the power of transformation, again invited the king to take a walk, and they came to a place where neither the sun nor the moon was visible above, and below - neither rivers nor seas. Light and shadows blinded the king, and he could not see anything; the sounds and echoes deafened the king, and he could not hear anything. All his bones and internal organs began to tremble, he could not concentrate, his thoughts were darkened, his vitality was depleted, and he began to persuade the man to come back. He pushed him, and the king fell like a stone into the void.
He woke up in the same place as before. The retinue included the same people as before; The wine in front of him had not yet dried, the food had not yet cooled.
-Where did I come from? - asked the king.
“The Emperor sat deep in thought,” answered the left and right.
Here King Mu fell into unconsciousness. He came to his senses only after three months and again asked the man who possessed the power of transformation. He replied:
- Did the sovereign and I move? No! We wandered in our minds. Isn’t the place where we lived other than the palace of the sovereign? Weren't the places where they wandered different from the sovereign's reserve? Having become accustomed to the constant, do you doubt the possibility of forgetting yourself for a while? With the highest change, all possible forms can be exhausted in an instant.
In great joy, the king stopped caring about state affairs, enjoying his concubines, and devoted all his thoughts to distant wanderings.
He ordered eight of his good horses to be harnessed to two chariots. They rushed a thousand miles and arrived in the country of the Huge Hunters. Huge Hunters brought the king and his people on two chariots the blood of a white swan for drinking, the milk of a cow and a mare for washing their feet. Having drunk, we drove on and spent the night on the slope of the Union of Big Brothers mountains south of Krasnye Vody.
The next day, we climbed to the top of the Elder Brothers Union Mountain to admire the Yellow Ancestor's Palace, and built a hill to leave a memory for future generations. Then they went to visit the Mother of the Western Kings and feasted over the Lake of White Jade.
The Mother of the Western Kings sang to the king, and he echoed her, but the words were sad. Watching the sun set, having passed tens of thousands of miles in a day, the king said with a sigh:
- Alas! I am a person who did not possess the completeness of basic properties, but was carried away by pleasures. Descendants will judge me.
Is King Mu sacred? After all, he managed to exhaust the pleasures in his life and still died, having lived to be a hundred years old. The world believed that he had risen to the top.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru