Tales & Legends

A scholar takes in a beautiful stranger, and learns too late what wears her face after dark.

A penniless traveler shelters in a crumbling temple where the other lodgers keep turning up dead by morning, a small hole bored in the sole of one foot. Then the loveliest girl he has ever seen comes to his door after dark, offering herself, and a bar of gold.

A solitary scholar swears he fears neither fox nor ghost. Then two women begin visiting his lamplit room — one warm, one cold — and each insists the other is quietly killing him. To live, he must learn which of the women who love him is not entirely alive.

A lovesick scholar tracks a girl into the mountains for the way she laughed at him on the road. He finds her, her strange old mother, and a household where no one will say what she is — or why she never, ever stops laughing.

A pampered young man from an old family climbs Lao Mountain to study with an immortal, then balks at the chores. When he finally bullies the master into teaching him one trick, he learns the cost of wanting magic without the work behind it. Pure Pu Songling.

When the Ming throne grows fond of cricket fights, a whole county is taxed in insects. A struggling village clerk is conscripted to supply one, on pain of a flogging — and as the deadline closes in, the hunt for a single champion cricket comes to cost him his savings, his peace, and nearly his only son.

A stone on a mountaintop splits open and a monkey climbs out. He dares the waterfall no one else will, wins a crown for it — then, at the height of his joy, the one thought he cannot fight comes for him: that even a king must die.

The monkey who could not bear to die crosses two oceans to find a teacher, and finds one who hides the whole secret of immortality inside a riddle and three taps on the skull. What he learns will make him a god — and get him thrown out for showing off.

Home from his lessons, the Monkey King wants one thing the world hasn't got — a weapon that can match him. So he walks into the dragons' palace under the sea and asks to try everything. What he carries out, and the second errand he runs that same night, will put two complaints on heaven's desk before morning.

Heaven cannot beat the monkey, so it tries to hire him — and learns the hard way that an immortal you cannot kill makes a very poor employee. He eats the peaches, drinks the wine, swallows the elixir, and dares the whole court of the sky to stop him. One being can.

An emperor wants the souls of his war dead set free, so he sends one gentle, fearful monk west to fetch the scriptures that can do it — a road no man survives alone. Five hundred years after heaven buried him, the strongest creature alive is still pinned under a mountain, waiting for someone to come by.

A rich farmer has a son-in-law problem. The strapping young man who married his daughter three years back has turned out to be a long-snouted, big-eared monster who eats like a famine and has locked the bride away. The farmer wants him gone. The monk and the monkey are happy to oblige.

A river so heavy a feather sinks, and a monster wearing nine skulls who has eaten every pilgrim before this one. Two of the travelers can fight in water and one cannot, which turns out to be the whole problem — and the river will not be crossed by winning.

A corpse-fiend who wants the holy monk's flesh comes at the pilgrims three times wearing three borrowed faces — a girl, an old woman, an old man. Only one of the travelers can see what is under each disguise, and seeing it is exactly what gets him thrown off the road.

A child hangs tied in a pine by the road, sobbing for rescue, and the kind monk cannot walk past him. The monkey smells a demon and is overruled. What follows is a fire ordinary water cannot quench, a monkey nearly killed by his own cleverness, and a child too dangerous for anyone but mercy to subdue.

A whole country without a single man, a river that conceives children straight from a cup of water, and two thirsty monks who drink before they ask. The only cure is guarded by an old enemy with a grudge — and that is the easy half of the trouble waiting in the capital.

Banished again for killing what his master would not, the Monkey King goes off to nurse the insult — and a second Monkey King walks in, identical down to the last hair, and takes everything. Two Wukongs, same face, same rod, same powers, and no one in heaven, hell, or earth can tell which is real.

The road west dead-ends at eight hundred li of unbroken fire, and the only thing that can put it out is one banana-leaf fan — held by the wife of the Bull Demon King, who happens to be the mother of a boy Wukong got hauled off to serve the Bodhisattva Guanyin. She is not in a lending mood.

For once the monk begs his own meal instead of sending a disciple — and walks straight into a house of seven smiling women who are not women at all. By the time the monkey finds the trail, the only thing between his master and the cookpot is a pig with no shame and a monkey with too much pride.

Fourteen years and ten thousand miles, and the pilgrims finally stand at the foot of the mountain where the scriptures wait. The last stretch is the strangest — a bottomless boat, a corpse in the river that no one will name, and a heaven whose clerks have their hand out. The road is almost done teaching.

A general's wife carries her child for three and a half years, and what she delivers is a ball of fire. The boy inside grows up reckless and divine, kills a dragon prince for sport, and when the price comes due, pays it with his own body — flesh to his mother, bone to his father.

An eighty-year-old man sits by a stream with a fishing line that ends in a straight needle, held above the water, baited with nothing. He is not fishing for fish. A king has dreamed of a winged tiger, and the diviners say it means a sage waits somewhere in the wild.

He was the one general the dying Shang dynasty did not deserve — upright where the court was rotten, brilliant where it was blind. So heaven sent three hundred thousand men west with him, and a road that ended at a ridge named for the dying of dragons.

Tongtian has hung four heaven-forged swords at the four gates of a killing array no single immortal can survive. The only counter is three sages of equal rank entering together — so the old Daoist masters send west, to the doorstep of the Buddha, and ask him to step into the dust of the world.

The Shang has fallen. The fox who wore a woman's face for thirty years is dragged to the executioner's block — and the soldiers cannot lift their swords, because even now, bound and condemned, she is the most beautiful thing any of them has ever seen. And on a high tower, the king she ruined waits for the fire.