“Her soup is always exactly the right temperature.”
A River immortal of Diyu
3 known connections · an open question
The Old Lady of Forgetfulness, who ladles her soup at the Naihe Bridge and offers every departing soul a bowl before rebirth. Drink, and you forget your past life entirely; refuse, and the Bridge of Helplessness gets considerably less crossable. She has watched ten thousand years of goodbyes. Her soup is always exactly the right temperature.
She is ladling right now — steam rising over the bridge, the line of souls stretching back into the mist. One soul is refusing the bowl. She is waiting. She can wait longer than anyone.
One day a soul will drink the soup and remember anyway — the love too strong for forgetting, the grief too deep for the bowl — and Meng Po will ladle a second bowl, and a third, and finally sit down beside the soul and listen to the whole story. The soup has been waiting for that story for ten thousand years.
“She ladles for every soul at the Naihe Bridge, and the count is exact — it has been exact for ten thousand years. Except the junior attendant did the tally last month, twice, and came up one bowl short. One bowl, every night, poured for no soul in the line. Meng Po refilled the pot without comment. The stone by the bridge showed nothing. The stone shows everything.”
Meng Po's ladles never add up. One bowl a night goes unaccounted.
“Past, present, future — three lives in the grain, since the Tang dynasty, without exception. Last week a soul looked in and saw four. The attendants wrote it down before the image faded: the fourth life had no face, no name, no deeds — just a blank tablet, dark wood, no characters. Meng Po ladled the soup a little faster that night. The stone has not done it since.”
The stone showed a fourth life.
The ten Yama kings, the Black and White Impermanence, Judge Cui with his brush, Meng Po with her soup of forgetting. Justice here is thorough, the paperwork is eternal, and the bridge out is narrower than you remember.
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