Original Text
Mi Buyun of Zhangqiu was skilled in planchette divination. Whenever his friends held elegant gatherings, Mi would summon immortals to compose verses in response. One day, a friend, seeing faint clouds in the sky, composed an opening line: "White as lamb's fat, the jade sky." He asked the immortal for a matching line. Mi performed the planchette ritual, and the response read: "Ask Old Dong of the southern city." The company suspected the immortal was speaking nonsense. Later, Mi happened to go to the southern city on business and came upon a place where the soil was the color of cinnabar, which struck him as strange. He saw an old man herding pigs nearby and asked him about it. The old man replied, "This is 'Pig's blood red mud ground.'" Mi suddenly recalled the planchette's response and was greatly astonished. He asked the old man his surname, and the man answered, "I am Old Dong." That the immortal could match the couplet was not so remarkable, but that it could foreknow Mi would encounter Old Dong of the southern city—truly this was a wondrous thing!
Commentary
If the planchette immortal had directly responded with "pig-blood red mud ground," the immortal would have appeared quite mediocre, and the tale would have been flat. But now, by taking a detour and asking "about Old Dong from the south of the city," the immortal becomes witty and clever, and the story itself turns winding and delightful.
However, this tale has likely been in circulation since the Ming Dynasty, as it is recorded in both Yu Bian's "Idle Words of a Mountain Woodcutter" and Feng Menglong's "A Compendium of Ancient and Modern Tales," though the plots and characters differ slightly, with the matching couplet being "Eel blood and yellow mud ground." It is estimated that "The Divine Immortal" is an adaptation based on a widely circulated story.