Terrified his wife would notice, Zheng leaped from the bed, ran to the bathroom, and shaved.

What on earth is happening to me? he thought to himself. The answer was clear enough: he was losing his mind, just as his father had.

The next morning, he awoke to find that not only had his feet sprouted grass again, but long ropes of seaweed had grown from his armpits. He raced into the bathroom, tore the seaweed out—it was very painful—and shaved his feet a second time.

The following day he awoke with the usual growths from his feet and armpits, as well as a new wrinkle: his bedsheets were full of sand. It had oozed from his pores in the night.

He went to the bathroom, ripped out the seaweed and shaved his feet, still convinced it was nothing but madness. But when he returned the sand was still in his bed, all over his wife, and in her hair. She was awake now, and very upset, trying in vain to shake it out.

If she could see it, Zheng realized, it had to be real. The sand, the grass—all of it. Which meant he wasn’t crazy after all. Something was happening to him.

Zheng went to see the herbalist, who gave him a foul-smelling poultice to rub all over his body. When that didn’t help he went to a surgeon, who told him there was nothing to be done, aside from amputating his feet and plugging his pores with glue. That was obviously not acceptable, so he went to a monk and they prayed together, but Zheng fell asleep while praying and woke to find he’d leaked sand all over the monk’s cell, and the angry monk kicked him out.

It seemed there was no cure for whatever was wrong with him, and the symptoms were only getting worse. The grass on his feet grew all the time now, not just at night, and the seaweed made him smell like a beach at low tide. His wife began sleeping in a separate bed in another room. He worried that his business associates would hear about his condition and shun him. That he would be ruined. In desperation, he began to entertain the idea of having his feet amputated and his pores plugged with glue—but then, in a sudden flash of memory, the last words his father had spoken to him came ringing in his ears.

Don’t let grass grow under your feet.

Now that mysterious sentiment, which Zheng had wondered about for many years, made perfect sense. It had been a message—a coded message. His father had known this would happen to Zheng. He had known because it had also happened to him! They shared more than a face and a walk and a way of speaking—they shared this strange affliction, too.

Come and find me, he had said. Don’t let grass grow under your feet.

Liu Zhi had not gone off to seek a mythical fortune. He had gone to find a cure. And if Zheng ever hoped to rid himself of this strangeness and live a normal life again, he would have to fulfill his promise to his father.