At the end of "Ghost Blows Out the Light: Wuxia Coffin Mountain" there is a side story called "Golden Dots". In reality, it is the story of the protagonist Hu Bayi's grandfather Hu Guohua fortune-telling and "looking at Feng Shui" for people. The book describes people who make a living by fortune-telling for others. Because this kind of thing is relatively technical, it is often honored as "Golden Dots". This is actually my conjecture. According to the storytelling master Lian Kuoru, "Golden Dots" is a general term for fortune-telling and face-reading by Jianghu artists, like a unified group noun.
These fortune-telling teachers are divided into good and bad. The highest level is the thirteen golden points. These fortune-telling teachers always speak with hidden meanings and set traps for people. This trap is called the "head of the spring" in the jargon. Today, I will not talk about other ghosts coming out of the coffin , but only talk about the first spring of the thirteen springs: the geography spring.
What is geography? Actually, it is Master Jindian asking the fortune teller where his hometown is. You should know that China is vast and has a huge population, but each province and each place has its own special talents and can even develop special professions by running around: Shanxi and Shaanxi go to the west, Shandong and Hebei go to Guandong, Fujian and Guangdong go to Nanyang, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou go to the Yangtze River, which are all known to everyone; to be specific, in the old days, most of the people in Beijing's dried fruit shops were from Wenshui, Shanxi; in the grain shops, it was basically the world of people from Yuci, Shanxi; the ghosts in Zhangqiu County, Shandong, had two ways out in the old days: one was to work as a clerk in silk and satin shops with Xiang characters such as Ruifuxiang; the other was to work as a blacksmith. Anyway, they were all recommended by relatives and friends in the local area, and they knew each other when they went in and out. There were also people who did other jobs, but they were few. If the fortune teller Jindian knows this, when someone from Zhangqiu County, Shandong comes to have his fortune told, he will know that he must have these two behaviors. Then, when he sees that he is well-dressed and looks like a shop assistant, he will congratulate him and say, "You should enter the business world." Isn't this just the right idea? The other party will definitely be convinced that this fortune teller is a skilled person, and the money for the fortune telling will be naturally taken out.
Although this is a story about the past, it still has some truth in it. For example, most people in Beijing are migrant workers from Hebei, Henan and Shandong, and most people in Guangdong are migrant workers from Hunan and Jiangxi. This is common in our daily lives. Most of the Chengdu snack shops in Beijing are from Kaixian County, Chongqing, and most of the Guilin rice noodle shops on the streets of Shenzhen and Guangzhou are from Qinzhou, Guangxi. Not many people know this, but I am not telling you this to tell fortunes or cheat you out of money. I am just saying this as a topic of conversation. When you chat with people, you can have fun.