Daomu Biji: Wu Xie’s Private Notes

Before I talk about Black Back the Sixth, there’s a story that people need to know.

It’s said that there are times when grave robbers don’t feel anything unusual when they’re in the tomb, but when they’re about to leave the grave robbers’ tunnel, they suddenly feel that someone’s hand is on their shoulder, and it can’t be pulled off.

This was how the name “Black Back the Sixth” came to be. There was a black handprint on his shoulder, which people said was from something putting its hand on him.

Whenever grave robbers encountered this kind of thing, they had to close their eyes before they could turn around and blow a puff of air at it to try and blow the hand off of their shoulder. The greater the strength, the higher the success rate. After that, they couldn’t look back, or they’d see something unpleasant.

Black Back the Sixth was a very low-key person. Even my grandfather didn’t know him very well. He only knew that he was a swordsman in Shaanxi before.

Let’s take a look at a section of the Shaanxi county records:

The Swordsmen Association was a chivalrous organization unique to the lower classes in the Guanzhong area. Its members usually carried a kind of “Guanshan Machete” made in Lintong Guanshan Town (Guanshan Town was now in Yanliang District). The machete was about three feet long and less than two inches wide. It had a special shape and was extremely sharp, which was why people called them swordsmen.

The swordsmen were around in the early years of Xianfeng Era in the Qing Dynasty, but there was no fixed organizational form or strict disciplines. There was only a figure similar to a leader, who everyone called Brother XX. The people below him were like brothers and worked hard for him.

The swordsmen were scattered into groups of different sizes. They were self-proclaimed and distributed in areas west of Tongguan and east of Xi'an along the banks of the Weihe River, and more in Weibei.

Swordsmen had the spirit of resisting and rebelling against the ruling class, and they also had the loyalty to fight injustice and draw swords to help each other. During the Revolution of 1911 (1), a large number of swordsmen participated and stepped onto the stage of history. They were heroic and brave as they devoted themselves to the revolution.

In today's Weibei Plain, the swordsmen had become a distant history, just like what the Guanshan Machetes had been through for more than a hundred years. The legends and stories of the swordsmen also slowly faded away and lost their original appearance.

Most of the Mystic Nine leaders had a common attribute, which was wisdom. When it came to conspiracies or normal strategies, these people were sophisticated. It was a necessary skill in the environment at the time, but Black Back the Sixth didn't seem to have stories in this regard. He was the only one who was born as a thug.

You didn’t need a brain to be a swordsman, since swords were always faster than the swordsman’s brain. When Black Back the Sixth was in the northwest, he lived a dangerous life trying to survive based on the old way of doing things. It was really like he pinned his brain on his waistband every day, and even after coming to Changsha, this was the only way he knew how to do things.

The speed of his sword was so fast that it was like he could pass by a busy street, and people's heads would start to roll. He could walk by you on the street, and your head would fall off, but no one would know who swung the knife.

I didn’t know if this was an exaggeration, but Black Back the Sixth was very unpopular in Changsha, because he did things in the northwestern style, was taciturn, and couldn’t communicate with others at all.

His goal was to take things and sell them. He had no apprentice and was all alone, which caused people to suspect that he would hack the zombies underground on his own.

Such a lonely knight would often be immersed in the gentle arms of one or two people, and he would get jealous and fight for them. This was also the case for Black Back the Sixth. A woman was truly a hero's grave.

He smoked opium and lived in a brothel all night, providing for a prostitute. When she was forcibly sold later, Black Back went six thousand miles alone before getting her back.

Because of the fact that he took opium, he often entered a state of madness and had to practice swinging his sword every night until he was exhausted. During the day, he shrank aside on the street like a beggar. The whole person gave off a lunatic vibe.

In the second half of his life, he was accompanied by a prostitute and a sharp sword, which was what happened in a lot of martial arts novels. It was impossible to guess whether they needed each other or if there was something else.

Grandpa said that the name “Black Back the Sixth” might be the reason why he was sixth in the Mystic Nine. In the beginning, they even called him The Sixth. Although Black Back the Sixth was a very taciturn person, his special character made him stand out. All kinds of people knew him and dared not provoke him. But it was also because of his character that people had no reason to hurt him, either. As a result, he became a big alien.

In the late liberation period, the Red Guards tried to criticize him. At the age of seventy, he killed three people in a row and was later shot by the army. He was the only one in the Mystic Nine who had no family and had a miserable ending.

But it was rumored that he was already crazy before he was killed. He never took protective measures when he was in the tomb, so his body had deteriorated before he was fifty years old. In his last years, he was a mixture of a beggar and Kong Yiji (2). Every few days, he would have some scraps to exchange for wine and food, and when opium was banned after liberation, he took to sucking rusty iron nails.

It could be said that this man may not be a tomb robber, but he wasn’t a drifter or a ranger either. No one could define what exactly he was.

Black Back the Sixth was a weird existence. He was a typical kind of person from the old society who had no pursuits, desires, or wisdom. If there had been someone he could work for, Black Back the Sixth would have been a good underling. Under the arrangement of his master, maybe he could have gotten married, and would have slowly learned to love. Especially after having a child, he would have had a relative sense of life.

But it was a pity that Black Back the Sixth didn’t have that kind of life. His boss died when he was in the northwest, their swordsmen group was disbanded, and he became a ship without a helm. After that, he had nothing in his life, and all he was doing was just trying to stay “alive”.

I thought that the prostitute was his interface with the real world, and he might have only felt his existence when he was making love to her. After she died, however, he disconnected with the world and could only live in his own world, which was why he went crazy.

“I’m not robbing a grave. Instead, I’m desperate.”

Here’s to Black Back the Sixth.

TN Notes:

(1) The 1911 Revolution, also known as the Chinese Revolution or the Xinhai Revolution, was a revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty (the Qing dynasty) and established the Republic of China (ROC). Wiki link

(2) Kong Yiji, a character from a short story by Lu Xun, was an alcoholic failed scholar who frequented the tavern where the narrator worked when he was a boy. Wiki link