Li Yu - The Carnal Prayer Mat

On hearing these words, Vesperus felt as if resurrected from the dead. Before he could so much as reply, he found himself on his knees, pleading, "If you can do this for me, you will be restoring me to life!"

The adept quickly helped Vesperus to his feet. "You need only recognize me as your teacher. Why this elaborate ceremony?"

"Your student has a highly lecherous nature and regards sex as life itself. Unfortunately I am handicapped by a natural endowment that prevents me from fulfilling my aspirations. This meeting with an immortal is the luckiest encounter ever! I wouldn't dare give you anything less than a royal obeisance before imploring you to help me." He then called to the page to bring forward the gifts, which he proffered with his own hands. "Just a few unworthy presents to mark your acceptance of me as a student. After the restructuring, I shall make every effort to reward you. I will never go back on my obligations."

"But what I told you is only the way it works in theory; there is a ninety-percent chance that it won't be possible. I'm afraid I cannot accept your magnificent gifts without further assurances."

"But it has to be possible!" exclaimed Vesperus. "It's my nature to disregard life itself for the sake of lovemaking. If, by the grace of Heaven, the restructuring turns out well and a puny groin is transformed into a mighty part, I shall of course be immensely grateful to you and sing your praises everywhere. But even if there's a mistake in the course of the operation and a slip of the scalpel costs me my life, that will be the fault of my destiny and I'll bear you no ill-will from the Nine Springs. [51]Please, venerable sir, there's no need to hesitate a moment longer."

"If I weren't familiar with this procedure and confident of the outcome, I wouldn't dream of gambling with a man's life! What concerns me is not the danger but the three drawbacks that result from restructuring, all of which will give you trouble. That is why I don't take this decision lightly. Let me explain those drawbacks, for only if you consent to all three of them will I accede to your request. If there is a single one you don't consent to, I shall be unable to proceed."

"What are they? Please tell me."

"The first is that you must wait a hundred and twenty days after the operation before having sex. If you have sex just once within that period, it will damage you internally and cause the human and canine parts to rupture. And not only will the implants fail to take, your own penis will fester and drop off. That was why I raised the question of whether you could bear it. What I meant was not whether you could bear the pain but whether you could bear to abstain from sex.

"The second drawback is that only a woman in her twenties or thirties will be able to accommodate you. A girl under twenty, even if she has lost her maidenhead, will suffer terribly during her first encounter with you, unless she has already given birth. The same caveat applies with even greater force to virgins, needless to say. You will be killing every one of them that you sleep with. There will be no chance survivors. Unless you undertake not to marry a virgin and not to sleep with any young women, I shan't proceed with the operation. Otherwise, not only will your moral credit be damaged, I, too, as your accessory, will be guilty of a grievous sin.

"The third drawback is that, although your acquired strength will be more than ample, some of your innate supply of vital energy will inevitably escape during the operation. There will certainly not be enough left, and hence no guarantee that you will ever be able to have children. Any children you do have will tend to die young. That is what I meant when I spoke of making a sacrifice. I was not asking whether you were prepared to sacrifice your life, or even whether you were afraid of death, but whether you would sacrifice your chances of marrying a virgin and having children.

"I've observed that you are a young man of great ambition. In the first place your sexual desires are too urgent to allow you to go three months without sex. Secondly your sexual appetites are too great for you to guarantee not to sleep with a virgin at some point. And thirdly you're still very young. I daresay you don't have any sons yet, or at least not more than one or two. That is how I know that these three things will give you trouble. When you first heard of the operation, you thought only of its benefits, not of its dangers, and you got excited and wanted to start at once. Now that you know the dangers as well as the benefits, you'll not be so quick to experiment."

"None of those drawbacks troubles me in the slightest," said Vesperus. "Set your mind at rest, my good sir, and get on with the restructuring."

"How can they not trouble you?"

"I'm living in rented rooms," said Vesperus, "which is very different from living at home. If I don't have the operation, I'll still be sleeping on my own every night, so if I do have it, what will I be giving up? Your first drawback doesn't bother me and is no reason for not going ahead. As for women, it is only one's first wife who has to be a virgin; with maids and concubines it doesn't matter. Since I already have a wife, there's no need for me to worry. Moreover, virgins make the least satisfactory sexual partners. They know nothing whatever of sex or passion, and the men who sleep with them are just trying to make a name for themselves; they certainly derive no pleasure from it. For real enjoyment you need a woman in her twenties who will know something about opening, development, reversal, and closure. Because sex is really like an essay, in which each section has its mode of organization and each stage its type of parallelism. This is well beyond the capacity of a child just learning how to write.

"Thus your second drawback doesn't bother me either; in fact it suits me. It is certainly no reason for not going ahead. As for sons, other men may set great store by them, but I don't. Worthy, filial sons are far fewer than the unworthy, incorrigible kind. How many sons are there like King Wu, who excelled at continuing the family line? How many sons are there like Master Zeng, who scrupulously honored his parents' wishes? If I were lucky enough to have a good son, I'd give him a free start in life and he'd support me in my old age, but that would be merely a fair exchange-nothing out of the ordinary. If I had an unworthy, unfilial son, he'd lose the property and make me die of apoplexy, and when that happened, I'd bitterly regret having had sex once too often, emitting my sperm and blood to such a sorry end.

"That is what happens to people with sons. However, at least one or two men in every ten will have no sons at all, because that is their fate. You're surely not going to tell me it's because all their vital energy escaped during penile reconstruction? The mere fact that I have this wish is a sign that I'm not due to have any sons. I am quite prepared to have none, I definitely want to have the operation, and I assure you that I'll have no second thoughts. Obviously Heaven and Earth, as well as my ancestors, are aware that it's my fate to have no sons, so they're not trying to stop me. It's yet another sign that I'm not due to have any.

"And if I'm not fated to have sons, it doesn't make any difference whether I have the operation or not. If by some chance I should be fated to have a son, my vital energy may congeal during the operation and not escape completely, and I may still father a child who will survive to maturity. These are things that cannot be anticipated, and I won't set my heart on them, just resign myself to being childless.

"So as to your two requirements, sir, I can bear to wait and I am willing to make the sacrifice. In my eyes your drawbacks are actually advantages. There is no need for any further doubts about me. Please go ahead with the restructuring."