of Red Mansions

What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?
Though the answer to this question may at first seem to border on the absurd, reflection will show that there
is a good deal more in it than meets the eye.
Long ago, when the goddess Nu-wa was repairing the sky, she melted down a great quantity of rock and, on
the Incredible Crags of the Great Fable Mountains, moulded the amalgam into thirty-six thousand, five hundred
and one large building blocks, each measuring seventy-two feet by a hundred and forty-four feet square. She used
thirty-six thousand five hundred of these blocks in the course of her building operations, leaving a single odd
block unused, which lay, all on its own, at the foot of Greensickness Peak in the aforementioned mountains.