Mt. Lingmeng Gossip is a Book Collection found at Wanwen Bookhouse.
Vol. 1[]
Legend has it that in the depths of the mountains of Chenyu Vale, where the water lotuses and jade lilies thrive, when the rain falls and fog gathers in the dawn and dusk hours, looming shadows of the past will sometimes emerge.
According to the village elders, those who dwelled in Mt. Lingmeng once worshipped many supernatural beings, walking alongside the spirit elders of fairies, birds, and beasts within the wild mountain. But in that earth-shaking chaotic war a thousand years before, those gods, fairies, and former inhabitants alike disappeared. Even so, the sentimental mountains retained the echoing memories in the Ley Lines, and thus they sometimes repeatedly reappear at dawn or at night, when fog and rain blanket the land.
Sometimes, herb gatherers and jade artisans will lose their way in this fog and encounter these solitary shadows. As the village elders tell it, an encounter with the ancient fallen is often an ill-starred omen, a sign of unexpected disaster. The Ley Lines, having accumulated and accumulated until growing into tumors, bring forth these ancient regrets and miseries into the present world, and that is why there is fog and rain unceasing. And that is also why the mountain people avoid both like the plague, to avoid becoming entangled in spirit by those ancient sorrows.
Even so, after Rex Lapis completed his great deed of pacifying the land and sea, surveyors from Liyue Harbor would blunder into the fog and rain, disturbing those dreams of old... But that is another tale.
Vol. 2[]
In the days after Rex Lapis brought peace to mountain and forest, a mariner once entered the crisscrossed streams beneath the mountain and became lost in the damp dusk fog. On a bamboo raft, this person passed waterweeds that glowed a faint blue and purple, passed tree and bush bedecked in falling flowers, and followed azure avians never before seen even in dreams, before coming unto and into the cavern of slumber.
Through the jade glow and the ghostly light of fungi, the mariner gazed with entranced eyes upon the inhabitants of old. A veritable parade of mountain ghosts they seemed — in ancient cotton robes they were garbed, and the hems of their clothes were adorned with jade as clear as light playing upon the water, and with nameless fragrant plants. Lined up and standing on the bank of a deep pool, they sang a song the mariner had never heard before:
"How mine malice lurks lonesome in the dying light of day! How the hateful wind bears the rain, how the deep fog veils!"
"None remain save a lone lord lamenting lost years — alas, alas! You came too late."
Sad was the song and quiet, tinged with seeming resentment. The mariner looked closely at the faintly glowing figures in the cavern, and lo, one by one they removed their jades and threw them into the pitch-black pool, as if never having noticed the presence of a visitor at all. Descending despondency drove the mariner's paddle on the return journey to Qiaoying Village, but not before leaving markings along the path.
It is said that Yuehai Pavilion would later send surveyors here to search for any mysterious settlements, and some also say that the Millelith once deployed troops into the deep mountains to search for any hideouts of illicit nature, but all without success. When Lan Jing, the famed doctor from Yilong Wharf, was yet a youth, he entered Mt. Lingmeng to explore the legendary, mysterious cavern in search of ancient prescriptions, but after his return, he would never again speak of the matter. It was only following his passing that his family found an inkstone within his personal effects. Legend has it that it was the color of clear waters and bright as the high heavens, and yet, with the doctor's death, the origins of this inkstone could no longer be verified. Much later, the descendants of this famous physician would go bankrupt due to poor management of their merchant shipping business, and thus was this inkstone lost amidst the morass of humanity, its whereabouts unknown thereafter.
Vol. 3[]
Songs have long circulated in Chenyu Vale that tell of an ancient cave within which a demon lord from a past beyond reckoning once hid. They say that she wore a skirt of coagulated jade-blood, and leaned on the long-destroyed lunar chariot, submerged and slumbering beneath a black, bottomless pool of water. In these eons that memory has nigh forgotten, she was the mistress of Chenyu Vale, who ruled the birds and beasts and adepti of wild mountain nature, who controlled the ebb and flow of the Bishui River, who as an arbiter maintained the natural balance between mortals and animals. But those are tales from long ago, and though both folk indigenous and migrant tell tales of how she started a war out of incurable obsession, before ultimately being defeated, sealed, and plunged into deathly, dreaming slumber, the relevant historical details can now no longer be verified.
The sole piece of evidence that supports this tale is this song of lamentation that Chenyu Vale locals once sang:
"Though I wish to gift you herbs, who shall leave it at the sandbank amidst the waters?"
"Where now fly the godly banners? The chariot is lost in the lightless bamboo wood."
"How terrible the Xuanwen wail, who think upon the darkened pool."
Do the proud descendants of the mountain folk yet remember and memorialize their lost god? The most vivid tales have been eroded by flowing time, now only faintly visible in song, like green jade only faintly discernable beneath the waters of a stream. So perhaps, just as a lost boatman once witnessed, one might still hear an ancient heart beating, its jade blood pumping, echoing in those boundless depths?
Other Languages[]
| Language | Official Name | Literal Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| English | Mt. Lingmeng Gossip | — |
| Chinese (Simplified) | 灵濛山夜话 | |
| Chinese (Traditional) | 靈濛山夜話 | |
| Japanese | 霊濛山の夜話 | |
| Korean | 영몽산 야화 Yeongmongsan Yahwa | |
| Spanish | Fábulas del Monte Lingmeng | |
| French | Potins du Mont Lingmeng | Mt. Lingmeng Gossips |
| Russian | Слухи горы Линмэн. Slukhi gory Linmen. | |
| Thai | เรื่องเล่าแห่งภูเขา Lingmeng | |
| Vietnamese | Chuyện Đêm Khuya Ở Linh Mông Sơn | |
| German | Nächtliches Geflüster auf dem Berg Lingmeng | |
| Indonesian | Cerita Malam Gunung Lingmeng | |
| Portuguese | Conversas Noturnas no Monte Lingmeng | |
| Turkish | Lingmeng Dağı Hikayeleri | |
| Italian | Pettegolezzi del Monte Lingmeng |
