The Bimo was a shaman of the Yi nationality, which still had seven factions to this day. The Bimo’s magic was all-encompassing and said to be very complex. Bimoism had a well-developed system and worshiped more than one god. The Bimo was also a tutor to the Yi slave aristocracy and was responsible for recording and spreading all knowledge.
According to the Yi epic “Leyoteyi” (1), a seed fell from heaven to the ground one year. After three years and nine seasons, it finally grew into a giant fir tree. But it was a foreign body that looked like a mix between a human and a tree. It was only by seeking the Bimo’s heavenly magic that it could bear human fruit, which turned into adults.
I used to think that the heavenly seed recorded in “Leyoteyi” was the meteorite of that year, but I was certain that I already knew where all the fragments were.
But Little Brother Zhang certainly wouldn’t go to the Bimo for this kind of matter. In fact, just as I expected, the Bimo’s greatest role at that time was to relay news. Back then, none of the Yi hunters could hunt in the Han areas, so they would explore the deep mountains and forests, using the Yi village as the boundary. You could often hear old people refer to some of those places as: Rotten Horse Mountain, Snake River, and Dwarf Ravine. It was the hunters who came up with those names. Any time they found unexplained natural phenomena or something they had never seen in the forest before, they would tell the Bimo as soon as they came back.
Poker-Face and his party went to find the Bimo that year because of a “discovery” a hunter had brought back from the mountains. That discovery turned out to be the colorful bugs. The man had obviously sold them to the Americans first, but the Americans probably didn’t know what they were looking for.
I didn’t need to know the whole process. Little Brother Zhang just needed to tell me what the hunter saw in the forest and I would be able to figure out what happened next.
I had experienced a lot of things, so I was able to guess some answers before he spoke. In the past, there were always various accidents that occurred every time I thought I could guess correctly, but after those ten long years, no one could tell me anything I couldn’t expect.
I was probably thinking this time would be like all the others, but his answer still managed to startle me.
“That Yi hunter was very strange,” Little Brother Zhang said. “He was called Zhige Ah Long. It was a name very sacred to the Yi people and couldn’t be used casually. I didn’t know why, but I could always speculate. This person was always able to go hunting in places that other people couldn’t. This time, he was gone for so long that many people thought he wasn’t coming back.”
The Yi people were very poor at that time. If they took dry food with them when they went to hunt, they often had to turn back after only two weeks. If they were willing to keep going after those two weeks, then they had to be highly confident that they could move forward while hunting for food. If they didn’t have the ability, then they would soon starve to death in the forest.
Zhige Ah Long could go past this two-week limit every time, but he would definitely return around the first of the month. This time, however, he had been gone for nearly a year, so most people thought he was dead.
In modern times, peopled who ended up in no-man’s land knew that they would definitely encounter roads or cities at the other end of the forest, since humans had already divided the land into grids. But at that time, the no-man’s land around the Yi people’s village was too wide to explore. It was impossible to determine what lay on the other side of that endless primitive forest. But Zhige Ah Long returned one year later and brought them the answer.
He told the Bimo that he had found an invisible wall in the forest after traveling for a year.
The wall stood in the middle of the forest and couldn’t be passed. After following it for a long time, Zhige Ah Long found that the wall seemed to stretch out infinitely on both sides. As a result, he firmly believed that he had reached the “edge” of the world.
Fatty wanted to laugh, but Little Brother Zhang spoke before he could open his mouth, “I didn’t believe it at first, either. Until I heard a detail. The hunter saw a lot of remnants of rusty iron birds as he walked along the invisible wall.”
<Extra 6.7> <Table of Contents><Extra 6.9>
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TN Notes:
(1) It basically translates as “Epic of the Yi Nationality”. According to Baidu, there are many different texts in the works, all of varying lengths. In addition to oral transmissions, there are also many Yi people’s manuscripts. The different texts can roughly be divided into two categories: detailed texts and sketched texts (basically pictures).
MereBear's Translation 