When the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Hanchun, I knew I had to go. Hanchun was where Grandpa was born, where he kept going back to, and where I spent so much time with him as a teenager, cataloguing plants and collecting soil samples. On our last trip before Grandpa fell ill, I’d asked why he became an amateur botanist and environmental advocate in his fifties, having been an engineer his whole life. He told me a strange story that his father told him, a legend about a ladder to heaven.

Forty kilometres away from Hanchun, the mountain road was blocked by landslides. Our volunteer relief team had to abandon the vehicles. Pulling one foot after another out of ankle-deep mud and looking at the open wounds on the mountainside, I started to recall vivid details of that story. Perhaps great-grandpa was telling the truth. Perhaps disaster had struck because of what we did to the Ladder to Heaven.

**

The story began in a distant world, when a plague devastated Underheaven. Villages and towns were emptied; bodies were left to rot in the fields; no cockcrow could be heard for a thousand miles.

Our protagonist was a young man named Yi. Death had come to his village. Though his family was still well, no one knew how long that would last.

Yi’s father was the head of the clan, as Yi was destined to be. Their bloodline traced back to An, who had called down a torrential rain to put out a mountain fire that threatened to wipe out the entire village. The legend of An had been told for centuries, with many believing him to be half-god, others a powerful wizard. Yi knew the truth, passed directly from father to son through generations: in times of catastrophe, the head of the clan could resort to a Ladder to Heaven. But where was the Ladder? What was the cost of reaching Heaven? The details had been lost in the maze of time.

Now, a catastrophe had befallen the village, but Yi’s father had to stay and lead.

So Yi bid farewell to his family, relatives, and friends. His little sister had just learned to talk. She didn’t understand why he was leaving. His ten-year-old brother insisted on joining him on his quest. His parents were distraught to send him away, but tried so hard to hold back their tears that they could barely speak. It was early morning. Houses, farms, and streets were shrouded in mist. They walked with him to the edge of the village. His brother kept following him with the stubbornness peculiar to their family, only to be dragged back by their father.

Yi marched into the wilderness, guided only by the vague knowledge that the Ladder was somewhere to the west. He wandered through villages where no living soul remained. He made it across a raging river tossed up and down on a small bamboo raft. Far had he travelled from any places he’d known, yet he could not find such a ladder.

“I’ll climb to the top of the highest mountain. That must be the closest place to Heaven,” Yi decided. That night, on a steep mountain slope, he stumbled into a blizzard. The wind was blowing as if Goddess Fei Liao was thrashing her wings at him. Snowflakes singed his exposed skin. Yet the peak was so close. He plunged into the snowstorm like a dagger. Finally, he reached the top.

Nothing, only the mockery of roaring darkness. Yi collapsed. For the first time, he longed to give up, to lie in the snow and embrace a painless death. As the cold closed in on him, his little sister’s carefree laughter echoed faintly in his mind, thawing his nearly frozen heart. He got up, found a cave and passed out like a rock.

A shaft of sunlight woke him. He walked out and saw a lush basin below. Warm air floated up, gently stroking his face. He found his way down into a forest, primordial yet strangely familiar. Something called to him, and led him to a giant sequoia. It was so wide that ten people could barely encircle it, so tall that Yi couldn’t see its top. While still, the sequoia stood like an emerald tower. Shaking in the wind, it became an azure dragon. Yi knew it was time to climb. The trunk was straight and branchless, but the tree allowed him to ascend. When he reached the top, he was above a sea of clouds.

One second, he was looking over the basin. Next, he was looking over the entire world: giant turtles holding up islands in the North Sea; snow-covered mountains in the south where Ice Fairies dwelled; the swamp in the east and the grassland in the west. Folktale wonders unfolded before his eyes, yet his thoughts soon returned to his family and clan. “Show me the plague,” he whispered, “Show me my home.”

The visions receded. Yi dropped his eyes. The sequoia leaves blink at him—dewdrops glistening under the morning sun. It should have been a peaceful sight, but the dew had a tremendous gravity that pulled at him. He wanted to resist but couldn’t. Looking into the iridescence of the dewdrop closest to him, he saw his home.

Half of the village was dead. His mother was calling his name in a fever. His sister wept, his brother holding her while wiping his own tears. His father, ever-bright eyes now glazed, stood hunched beside a burning stack of bodies. One face after another, wretched in sickness, withered in death. Yi saw all the families suffering from the plague around Underheaven.

“Stop this!” he cried, “Please give me the cure, I need to save my mother.”

A voice spoke to him, echoing the wisdom of the oldest man and the innocence of a newborn baby; soft like mother’s lullaby, resounding like father’s speech to the clan.

Partake of the pain, the lone way to heaven

Light as a dewdrop, heavy as a mountain

Yi understood what he must do. He carefully held up the leaf, a little green feather too frail to carry all the anguish, and steadied himself to partake of the heavenly condensation. Whatever might happen to him, he would take it. If it meant being crushed by a mountain, so be it.

But there were more dewdrops, resting in quiet despair like tears that refused to fall. Yi couldn’t help. He turned to another and looked in. The things he was shown he didn’t understand at first.

Wide streets between tall buildings shooting into the sky. Vehicles whizzing past, flashing blue lights. A woman, unconscious in a white bed, tubes snaking from her nose to a box that beeped with red and green lines. Outside the room, a baby girl leaned in a window, her teary face seemingly pressed against air. Then he saw familiar scenes: thousands of bodies covered in white sheets, orphans crying for their parents, widowers crying for their wives. It was some other world, Yi reckoned, another plague.

He trembled. The branches trembled with him, and the rustling leaves sounded like the wails of countless souls.

“No,” he shook his head, “This is beyond me. I have my own people to care for.”

Giving himself no time to hesitate, Yi bent towards the previous leaf and poured the dewdrop into his mouth. A scorching heat crawled from his stomach to his chest, arms and legs. Groans and cries inside his body fought for a way out, but an all-encompassing weight tightened around him. He was the mother suffocating her newborn son before she died, so that he wouldn’t be left alone. He was the hoary grandpa who had buried all the black-haired youths in his family, now wandering the empty fields talking to himself. The relentless pain squeezed the breath from Yi’s lungs. He did not know how long it had been before his vision started to blur. Before losing consciousness, he reached out, straining, and plucked the leaf that bore the other plague. If one drop was already so much, how could he leave the others behind? The tree shook violently, and Yi fell into darkness.

He woke up at home. His mother, recovered from her illness, had stayed at his bedside for three days. The village erupted in celebration. There were fireworks, dragon dances, and feasts that lasted for days. Though mourning for the dead continued, people looked into the future with joy.

Yi was hailed as a hero, but he did not join the happy crowd. Sometimes he strayed into the woods and stayed from sunrise to sunset. Sometimes he fell into a trance when everyone else was chatting and laughing. The sequoia leaf with the dewdrop remained in his hand, invisible to others. But whenever Yi looked, it was there. Again and again, he saw the girl outside the sickroom, her eyes full of fear and confusion. In his dreams, her face blended with his sister’s until he could hardly tell them apart. Families and friends tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t explain what he’d been through. One night, he left a note and left home quietly. Casting a melancholy glance at his family, he feared a parting for life.

Alone in the woods, he swallowed the dewdrop in his hand. When he woke up, he was in the other world, our world. He located the basin and went back to the sequoia, but the tree became unresponsive – there was no way back.

Yi lived another fifty-three years. He stayed in the basin, but after his son was born, he stopped asking the tree for a way back. In the eyes of his wife and son, he had led an uneventful life, until one day, he disappeared. A week later, social workers sent him home, explaining that he had intruded on a mine opening project. They urged my grandfather to find a psychiatrist for his deluded old father, who had stood between the chainsaws and a sequoia, yelling something about a ladder to heaven.

Not long after, Yi fell ill. On his deathbed, he told the story to my grandfather. While drawing his last breath, he mumbled some ancient verse:

A human’s life is fleeting, like the passing of dew
Heaven stays the way it is, far and aloof

I asked Grandpa if he believed in the Ladder. He was silent for a long time before answering, “I want to believe my father.” And finally I understood: all the conservation work he did was to prove the story, or to preserve as much as the area so that the story might be proven hereinafter. He also showed me old newspapers from the year of Yi’s alleged descent, which documented a mysterious disease that infected around twelve thousand people before coming to an abrupt end. Still, the story seemed like coincidence and fantasy to me, but I missed the summer holidays with Grandpa in Hanchun. He taught me so much about wildlife. He was so well-liked by local farmers and miners that I’d always get free snacks and handmade toys, sometimes a slingshot, sometimes a bamboo figurine.

That was over twenty years ago, when Hanchun was still a fledgling mining town. I hadn’t been back since, but occasionally saw it on TV, a shining example of rural development, with dozers, drills and cranes constantly at work, transforming the secluded mountain basin into a bustling commercial hub. Some geologists had warned about mining too deep, but their voice was drowned in the symphony of modernization.

**

When we finally arrived in Hanchun, we heard piercing cries intermingled with the clanking of excavators before the doom came into sight. It was as though the ground had opened a gargantuan mouth, chewing up the whole town in a purposeless rage, spitting out chunks of concrete, leaving behind only jagged walls and twisted steel rebar. Before I could even take it all in, a soldier ran up to us and urged us to get to work. We threw ourselves onto the rubble, but couldn’t stop the death surrounding us. I salvaged food from the less-damaged houses, where family photos and faience bowls lay shattered on the floor. I carried the wounded to the medical station, many of them giving out before reaching the doctor. I placed shivering children in tents, and told them their parents would come. I walked past a man kneeling by the ruins of a building, begging people to help dig out his wife. But his wife was already dead, and we barely had time for the living. I turned away, and rushed to the soldiers with newly arrived shovels.

At dusk on the second day, someone set up a makeshift altar and lit incense for the dead. When the warm smell of sandalwood touched my nostrils, I dropped the supply box in my hands and ran into a clearing. I never believed in any gods. Nor did I know any prayers. But at that moment, I fell on my knees and prayed with all my heart. For mercy? For strength? For a miracle? I didn’t know. I just wished I could do more. I wished there really was a ladder to heaven, so I could stop all this.

In the distance, a woman was crying. I looked around for a giant sequoia, or any tree, any plant at all, but there was only the sundered earth and the grey, indifferent firmament. “Great-grandpa, help me,” I implored.

Something glimmered in the sky, a speck of green. It found its way to me through the crust of dust and smoke. I held out my palm, where a sequoia leaf landed gently. So bright and uncontaminated, like a feather from another world. But where was the dew? Why was I deprived of the chance to take upon myself the world’s suffering?

I held the leaf tightly and prayed more. But heaven was silent.

At the corner of my eye, dots of lights appeared. Three, five, a dozen, floating in the murk like fireflies guiding the dead to the afterlife, like a tree of glimmering dewdrops. I stood up in wonder, before realising it was the makeshift altars set up among the ruins. Soon they were joined by torches and camping lamps. Beams of light swept across the ruins, searching for souls hanging on the precipice of death.

The sequoia leaf glowed softly. Warmth flowed through my body.

Perhaps the way to heaven wasn’t a lone one. It would be a blessing to save the world as easily as drinking a dewdrop, but we must carry on even if it means chiselling away at a mountain. Closing my hand, I walked back to join the others, letting the leaf melt into my skin.

About the Author:

Yuqing Weng is a writer from Shanghai, now based in London. She studied history and economics before turning to fiction, and continues to see storytelling as a form of historical narrative and a vehicle to address inequality in all forms. Her stories are published and upcoming in Oxford Review of Books, The Selkie, Bluebell, Covert Magazine,and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also shares commentaries and reviews on her Substack Ramble&Scribble.

Feature image by Karacis Studio on Unsplash