Supernatural Mystery

For generations, the villages of Ye have drowned a young maiden every spring to wed the River God and keep his waters calm. When the new magistrate Ximen Bao arrives, he pretends the chosen bride is too ugly to please the river — and sends the sorcerers and corrupt elders themselves to make the delivery. A tale of courage that unmasks a cruelty hidden behind piety.

👁 579 reads

On a quiet autumn morning, two scholars visit an old temple, and the younger of them leans too close to a faded painting of a heavenly maiden on the north wall. The wall opens like a door, and he steps through into a painted country where a perfect hour waits for him, and his friend is left outside calling a man who is not yet ready to come back.

👁 499 reads

An orphaned cowherd, left nothing but an old ox, is told by the beast that the youngest daughter of the Queen Mother of the West comes down to bathe in a heavenly river. He takes her robe, wins her, and they live in perfect love — until the Queen Mother draws the Silver River across the sky and parts them forever, save for one night a year, when the magpies build a bridge. The Qixi legend.

👁 376 reads

On the night before the autumn exam results, a scholar's wife performs the old rite of listening at the mirror: a mirror set in a sieve, carried by a child, and the first overheard words are the prophecy. What she hears sounds like the language of a man who has fallen, and she grieves through the long dark before she learns, at the door, what the gods meant her to hear.

👁 198 reads

Weary and bitter by a roadside inn, a traveler named Lu Sheng accepts a porcelain pillow from a wandering Taoist while millet cooks over the fire. In the moment of a dream he lives a whole lifetime of wealth, power, exile, and age — and wakes to find the grain not yet done. A Tang-dynasty fable that asks what a life is really worth.

👁 142 reads

The young daughter of Yan Emperor, playing by the Eastern Sea, is drowned by a wave and never returns home. But her will will not suffer the darkness; she is reborn as Jingwei, a small bird patterned like a magpie, who flies back and forth forever carrying twigs and pebbles to fill the sea that took her. A myth of a tiny, unyielding will set against an endless ocean.

👁 57 reads