2 pieces from Tales of the Marvelous — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
The ancestor of every cultivation trial. A ruined spendthrift is bankrolled twice by a mysterious alchemist, then asked to repay him by guarding an elixir furnace through a night of hell's illusions — forbidden, on pain of failure, to make a single sound. He endures every horror but the last: a mother's love.
The 1,200-year-old ancestor of every 'lived a whole other life' story. At a roadside inn a discontented young man borrows a Daoist's porcelain pillow, sleeps, and lives an entire ambitious lifetime — high office, disgrace, wealth, sons, old age, death — then wakes before the innkeeper's millet has finished cooking. The transmigration tale that started them all.