Chapter 8: Black Back The Sixth

Chapter 8: Black Back The Sixth

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

Its said that there are times when grave robbers dont feel anything unusual when theyre in the tomb, but when theyre about to leave the grave robbers tunnel, they suddenly feel that someones hand is on their shoulder, and it cant 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 couldnt look back, or theyd see something unpleasant.

Black Back the Sixth was a very low-key person. Even my grandfather didnt know him very well. He only knew that he was a swordsman in Shaanxi before.

Lets 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 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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.

Im not robbing a grave. Instead, Im desperate.

Heres 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