4 pieces from Tales of the Marvelous — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
The first female sword-hero in Chinese fiction, and the story behind the film The Assassin. A general's daughter is stolen at ten by a wandering nun, trained for years in invisibility and the killing arts, then sent to murder a man — and chooses, instead, her own master and her own code.
One of the founding wuxia tales: the Three Heroes of the Wind and Dust. The slave-girl Red Whisk picks her own fate and elopes with the strategist Li Jing; on the road they meet a fierce curly-bearded swordsman who means to seize the empire — until he meets the true dragon and gives it all up.
A rooftop rescue-heist that reads like a film. Mo Le, the superhuman Kunlun slave, scales walls, kills the guard dogs, and carries his lovesick young master and a captive singing-girl over the roofs of the city to freedom — then pays for it when the secret gets out. Pei Xing at his most cinematic.
A second Tang sword-heroine. Hongxian, a warlord's quiet maidservant, is secretly a martial adept; to stop a war she slips by night into a rival general's guarded bedchamber and steals the gold box from beside his pillow — drawing no blood — then reveals what she is and departs to repay an old karmic debt.