Magic

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 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.

A beloved Tang fantasy romance. The failed scholar Liu Yi meets a dragon princess herding sheep in the wilds, cast out and abused by her husband's family, and carries her letter down to the lake-palace of her father the Dragon King — where her uncle, the Qiantang dragon, erupts in a storm of war to bring her home.

The companion to the pillow-dream, and a wry ancestor of isekai. Drunk under an old pagoda tree, Chunyu Fen is carried into the Kingdom of Huai'an, marries a princess, and governs a province for twenty years — then wakes to find the whole kingdom was an ant colony among the roots of the tree.

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 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.

A scholar stares too long at a temple mural — at one loose-haired maiden in particular — and finds himself on the other side of the plaster. What happens there is real enough. Whether any of it matters is the monk's problem to explain.

A Daoist monk in rags asks a market merchant for a single pear. The merchant refuses — rudely, repeatedly. So the monk borrows a pip from a stranger's charity, plants it in the road, and grows a pear tree on the spot. The crowd gets the fruit. The merchant gets the lesson.

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.

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.

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.

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.