🌊 Rising Stories

Pu Songling

A long-form fan adaptation of the classic tale 'Nie Xiaoqian'. A candidate for the civil examination shelters from the rain in a temple with no monks. The east wing has no door, and at night someone reads aloud from the room next to his.

👁 3 reads

Pu Songling

A long-form fan adaptation of the classic tale 'The Painted Skin'. A licentiate picks up a lost embroidered shoe on the road, and the woman who lost it is already waiting in his study. The evidence in the county court case says she never wore it.

👁 0 reads

Pu Songling

A fan work based on The Examination for the City God (聊斋志异《考城隍》). A licentiate lies sick in bed and hears hoofbeats no one else can hear. The horse has been waiting at his gate for three days. Someone is coming to take him to an examination—and his mother tells him: if you hear something, do not answer it.

👁 1 reads

Anonymous

When a deluge drowns the world under Emperor Yao, Gun is sent to stop it and fails, and his son Yu takes up the work. For thirteen years he digs channels instead of building walls, thrice passes his own door without entering, and guides the rebellious rivers home to the sea. An epic of labor, patience, and a father's wrong made right by a son's devotion.

👁 111 reads

Duan Chengshi

Long before the name Cinderella was ever heard in the West, a ninth-century Chinese girl named Ye Xian lost her parents, was abused by her stepmother, and found her only friend in a golden fish that came to her call. When the fish was cruelly killed, its buried bones answered her grief with a magic robe, golden slippers, and a path out of bondage — the oldest Cinderella ever written down.

👁 466 reads

Pu Songling

A bright and steadfast fox-spirit takes a reckless young scholar as her husband, and by wit and quiet magic shields him from his own folly and from a corrupt magistrate who means him ruin. When his own hot temper lands him in a dark cell, she must choose between hiding her true nature or breaking the rules of heaven to save the man she loves.

👁 401 reads

Pu Songling

A blameless scholar is summoned one twilight by two silent attendants and led, not to a county office on earth, but to a hall of judgment beneath the world, where the dead are examined and the virtuous promoted to spirit-office. When his essay on hidden virtue so moves the judges, he is given a post no living man would envy — and his family must learn to mourn a man who has not yet died.

👁 171 reads

Gan Bao

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

Pu Songling

A vain young man climbs Laoshan to beg an old Taoist to teach him the secret of walking through walls, convinced that applause is the only reward magic was made for. The master lets him learn, but warns him that the wall closes to the proud heart, and the young man comes home to prove the lesson at the worst possible speed.

👁 222 reads

Pu Songling

A gentle scholar shelters a beautiful runaway he finds weeping by the road, never guessing that the Taoist priest who warns him speaks of a thing that wears a painted human face like a garment. What follows is a slow, patient horror that ends in blood, and a demon's true face beneath the beauty.

👁 615 reads

Pu Songling

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

Shen Jiji

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

Yuan Mei

After a frontier battle, a young courier slips into his commander's tent and finds the impossible: the headless general seated at his desk, calmly brushing dispatches, his severed head resting beside him. The officer explains he is simply not finished, and the tale becomes a wry meditation on a duty that refuses to die with the body.

👁 322 reads

Ji Yun

When a young man dies unwed, his grieving parents do what the old custom allows: they find him a bride among the dead, so that he may not be alone in the dark. They do not expect her to come and thank them. They do not expect, either, to be so gently understood.

👁 435 reads

Pu Songling

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

Pu Songling

Four travelers, overtaken by a winter storm, beg shelter at a lonely peasant inn where the daughter of the house has died that very day. They mean only to sleep until dawn; the dead woman means to see them all on their way before the sun is up.

👁 272 reads

Wang Du

A scholar of the Sui dynasty, traveling through a broken age, is given a small bronze mirror older than any dynasty he knows. Held to a face, it shows not the skin but the truth within: the fox beneath the beauty, the demon at the sickbed, the illness hiding in the body. He uses it to unmask spirits and cure the dying, until the mirror itself decides to leave him.

👁 350 reads

Gan Bao

A young man on the road at dusk falls into talk with a pleasant traveler, and only slowly realizes his companion is no man at all. Most people would have run. Song Dingbo had a better idea: cheat the ghost out of its own shape, and sell it at market while it bleated.

👁 247 reads

Pu Songling

A young scholar, traveling alone through ruined country, spends a night in a derelict temple and meets the beautiful ghost girl who has been bound by a demon to lure travelers to their deaths. What she asks of him is no more than a grave, and what she gives him in return is a loyalty that outlasts the grave.

👁 690 reads

Anonymous

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

Pu Songling

Beneath the dripping eaves of a ruined mansion, a traveling scholar takes shelter from a storm and finds a household that should not exist: an elegant old man, his sharp-eyed niece, and a warmth that smells of woodsmoke and wild jasmine. When he learns they are fox spirits marked for destruction by a hunter's charm, he must choose between his own small future and a love that has already cost him nothing but his heart.

👁 532 reads

Li Gongzuo

A disgraced soldier, drunk in the courtyard of his decaying house, falls asleep under a great sour-date tree and is summoned by ant-messengers to the Kingdom of Huai'an, where he marries the princess, governs a province for twenty years, and tastes the whole of ambition's glory and its fall. When he wakes, the wine has not gone stale and the ants beneath the tree have been holding court all afternoon.

👁 296 reads

Anonymous

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