Xiaqiu Zhong was a native of Ning. He sold medicine in Ning for more than one hundred years, and people thought he had lived to an old age. When the earthquake occurred, houses collapsed; Zhong and several dozen families in his neighborhood whose homes were located by the water all suffered damage. After Zhong died, the common people took Zhong’s corpse, threw it into the water, and collected his medicine to sell. Zhong followed wearing a fur coat and went there to retrieve the medicine. Those who had abandoned Zhong were frightened, knelt down, and begged for mercy. Zhong said, “I only regret that you have made people know about me; I am leaving now.” Later he became an imperial messenger of the Fuyu Hu king and returned to Ning. People from the north called him a banished immortal.

Xiaqiu Zhong belongs to a cluster of medicine-selling immortals in the Lie Xian Zhuan who lived hidden in plain sight for generations. Anqi Xiansheng sold medicine along the Eastern Sea coast for a thousand years, while Gui Fu distributed cassia pills in the south of Jingzhou across generations — all three figures demonstrating that the Taoist sage does not retreat from the world but moves through it unrecognized.

His survival of death through shijie — transcendence via apparent death — connects him to Kou Xian, who was executed by a king yet returned decades later to play the zither at the city gate, and to Pingchangsheng, who died and came back to life multiple times. In each case, death is not an ending but a threshold — and the immortal’s only regret is being seen.

Xiaqiu Tongxuan, the banished immortal who concealed his traces. When a person dies, he is dead; how can one casually speak of regret? Roaming and observing transformation, why should one trouble the Hu imperial messenger service? If one does not see the root, who would know of his banishment.

The eulogy’s final line — “if one does not see the root, who would know of his banishment” — captures the deepest irony of Xiaqiu Zhong’s story. His true nature was hidden not by disguise but by ordinariness, much like Youbozi, whose strange appearance concealed centuries of cultivation from those who saw him every day. The banished immortal and the hidden guardian are two faces of the same Taoist truth: the sacred is always closer than we think.