Strange Tales

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.