Emperor Qin and the Mercury Sessions

So this was, what,
mid-year 209 BC and
I was just doing a lot of walking
back then.

I found myself on this island
in the eastern half of the Bohai Sea
near China.
I didn't realize it at the time, but
this place was thought to be the Island of the Immortals
by Chinese people. How ironic that I, an immortal ass-kicker,
would wind up there.

So one day, I see Emperor Qin,
the great unifier,
and a bunch of his emissaries
come ashore.

This guy Qin actually had his head on mostly straight.
When I first met him, I told him of my intense hatred of poetry,
and he agreed and so we ordered his soldiers to round up every
book in China and burn it.
And then he really lost his cool at the backlash, and
he beheaded all the scholars in the bloodiest dissolution
of established learning in all of history . . .
but I digress.

I'd met Qin a few years earlier, when
he was just a kid,
and he was trying to "unify" China,
like those people hadn't already been sold that bill of goods.

One night he came to me, and wanted to make love.
He was obviously drunk, and I said, "Qin, I don't screw dudes,
anymore." He broke down crying and started telling me that
one of his court scientists told him that if he made love to
an immortal, he could become immortal himself. (That's one thing
about court scientists, they're stupid.)
And this guy Qin was such a bitch about immortality.
That's all he wanted out of
life,
to live forever.
Imagine that. I was like, I'd give it to you if
I could. Anything to get me out of this miserable eternal hell.

We stayed up late, talking at length about immortality,
and he was so envious. He kept going on and
on about how he wished he could be a robotic
reconstruction of the Ancient Tau Ceti Architects
of Life and the Infinite. I finally got sick of
listening to his whining, and I said,
"Listen, Qin, the secret to immortality:
drink Mercury.
All you have to do is take a healthy dose
of mercury three times daily. It's that easy.
Hell, your court scientists can probably whip
you up a batch in no time."

Now, at this point I'd already done plenty of experiments with
Mercury, and I knew the stuff was toxic as hell and was really only
good for a decent high.

So, the next day, I sat in on what I like to refer to as "The Mercury Sessions."
Qin had his scientists
mix up a batch of liquid Mercury
combined with an integrated herbal
yellow rice wine,
and he and I started dropping shots like
sorority girls on Spring Break.

Qin got so fucked up he started talking about all the
monsters and shit that were coming to attack China,
and I was all "Yes, yes," because it's very becoming for
the leader of a unified empire to become a babbling idiot
before your very eyesssss.
So I encouraged him down this line of crazy thinking,
basically pushing him like a bulldozer,
and before I knew it, he was talking about building
this wall to surround China so the monsters couldn't get in.
Later, his court spin doctors claimed the wall was to keep
invading tribes out, but that was bullshit . . Qin was simply
afraid of the dark.

After a few weeks of the initial rounds of "Mercury Sessions"
I took off, it being a bit too annoying to me,
all this talk of armies of the undead and ghoulish hordes
of nightmare warriors and terra cotta cavalry.
I holed up in the Bohai, thinking
Qin was a goner. Mercury poisoning for sure.
I laughed myself to sleep every night for years.

I was surprised as hell the day Qin and his
emissaries showed up on my island. Turned out
Qin was taking a daily routine of mercury pills
along with large doses of fermented sticky rice wine.
The crazy thing is, the guy was obviously muddier than a puddle, but
his posse followed him around acting like he was clear as a
window.
And he'd gotten big as a 21st Century American.
I mean,
the guy obviously never hurt for food.

So he came into my hut (that's right I lived in a hut),
and sat down and told me that his Great Wall was being built
but that the nightmare warriors had found secret tunnels
in the underworld to track him down,
and that his search for immortality had sent him fleeing.
He must pursue immortality, now, he said, and achieve it, now,
before the fanged creatures could find him and
rip his living spirit from this,
his
dying womb. (at this moment, he rubbed his belly like an expectant mother)
Then we talked some more, and you know that crazy sonofabitch had gone
so insane that he had envisioned a world of microwave energy and
vehicles that could catapult men into space, and that he had recently
had his scientists make a new, more potent mercury concentration
and would I try it?

It seemed he'd discovered the art of surface area, and that
busting the mercury into infintely small
balls before consumption greatly increased it's absorption power
by the human nervous system.
We took probably four pounds of the stuff in the next several months,
and I'm certain that during that time, Qin convinced himself
he'd live forever,
his eyes had completely changed color, and
he'd gone blind,
but he still saw everything he wanted to see,
and his gums bled like the River Styx.

One night, he burst out of the hut, mad as a hatter
screaming that they'd finally discovered him, and
he just ran out past the fire and you could
see a funny little trail of gum blood spritzing along in
the wind behind him as he ran off.
I went back to bed, and
the next morning, at first light, his emissaries
found him dead, face down in a murky pool on the other side of the island.

The unifier, face down in a murky pool.