Fox & ghost

A stranded scholar befriends a fox family hiding in a borrowed mansion. The youngest daughter heals him with a kiss's worth of medicine. He loves her; she is promised to another. What comes after — loyalty, thunder, death, and a resurrection — is harder to name than love.

A poor scholar and a merchant's daughter fall in love through exchanged poems — never properly meeting, never allowed to marry. When she dies and he follows her into the underworld, love turns out to be stronger than the afterlife's bureaucracy.

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

Xi Fangping's father dies cursing the rich neighbor who bribed hell's guards to beat him. Xi decides to go down there himself and plead the case — only to find that hell's courts are bought just as cheaply as the living ones.

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.

The artifact-power tale at the root of the tradition. A magic bronze mirror passes from hand to hand, unmasking and destroying fox-spirits, serpents, and plague-demons across a linked cycle of hauntings. Wang Du's early chuanqi — the ancestor of every enchanted object that sees what wears a human face.