and I've only got one of those.
We've started calling his daughter Mulan (though Al Khidr is still also correct), though I grew up calling her Gramps. When children are abandoned in the wild there is often not any ceremony taking place to tell them why. The advanced cities that had polluted the earth to where those who did not live in the cities didn't evolve much were starting to have some genetic glitches that they attributed somehow to color phase shift. By the time Ling Shi was born the mutations had started to cause prolonged longevity, though he for a very long time thought he had become immortal because he lived entirely on young ganoderma mushrooms and had a sense of the energies of the earth and the ways of weather that he was able to follow them year round throughout the Himalayas by climbing and descending. He was the first to start talking about Qi and found the plants and mushrooms he eventually added to his understanding of medicinal food by observing this energy in his own body and in the environment around him.
I said that there were no advanced groups among those not living in the cities but Maat was the exception. She may have been reborn outside a city after conflicting with a decision that was made or abandoned as an infant for an anomaly. She invented agriculture though she also chose very different plants than what are cultivated widely today. Maat was Ling Shi's mother though she never knew about that, she must have been born in the city, and they kept her ovaries to try to winnow some functional people out of them, maybe they asked her what she felt about that at the time and she freaked out so they figured they didn't need her either and there was no ceremony then. Later she didn't have any inclination to try to be a mother but wouldn't have been successful if she'd tried. When accused of having abandoned children she thought people were just crazy.
Somehow there was still an egg later, maybe before Ling Shi was abandoned, and they discovered that the blue eyed trait was recessive when Mulan was born and for a very long time only Ling Shi and Mulan had blue eyes. Ling Shi pretended to be blind but didn't want that for his daughter. He was eventually sought by people who knew of his ability to heal and who sought immortality and he became a sort of king in an area of China, before he eventually retreated to the Altai and Himalaya mountains alternately depending on politics and world events. Though he also took a short trip to Japan where he encountered Dad when he was being stupid and became a man known to him for not taking advantage of him and restoring him to the utmost of his capacity to the ultimate ruler of the planet, though that didn't work out directly and got a little twisted. Ling Shi (Go Shirikawa) thought that Yoshitsune should be left in Japan to take it over, but Yoshitsune understood he wasn't regional. By the time Ling Shi understood this Yoshitsune's full sister also Ling Shi's daughter by the daughter of Frogman and Commando had sold him to the Turks.
Frogman was also a descendant of Ling Shi, and Commando was his half sister by the same father, probably Ling Shi somehow this became obvious in a way that caused a rift between the two of them, only because of dishonesty, the rest could have been worked out.
It was a very long time before there were any more blue eyed people. Mulan remembers seeing the Clovis people pass through North Asia as an adult. Ling Shi postulated that the blue eyed trait and immortality were linked, until he met his son, but by then there was significant need to reclaim investment in mistaken paths.
Anyway, my grandfather forbade the unrelated people who learned medicine from him from teaching me anything, because he wanted me to learn to find Qi and because our family has no health problems except for inflammation caused by contamination and secondary problems that occur if inflammation goes untreated. The techniques that we learned to deal with inflammation and associated problems had other uses and allowed people with more significant problems to live longer and breed more successfully. It also developed that the ability to buy expensive medicine was seen as a mark of status. After inadvertently establishing TCM, Ling Shi went on to teach shamans how to be healers, as more and more human beings developed the genetic alignments to perceive more energies around us which is really a very recent thing, not much older than blue eyes. Humans may have eaten many medicinal things, but it wasn't by design. Few had any wherewithal to premeditate beyond opportunity and remembering seasonal and geographical availability of calories. There were traditions about seasonal states of mind but they weren't linked to understanding food as the cause.
This was stuff that Maat and Ling Shi and those who came after them began to observe and think about, but before them it was not known.
