Kong Xueli was a descendant of Confucius, a scholar of elegant manner and good verse. A close friend had been appointed magistrate of Tiantai and wrote inviting him; Kong went, and arrived to find that his friend had just died, and he was stranded — no money, no way home — and lodged at the Putuo temple copying scriptures for the monks for his bread.
A hundred paces west of the temple stood the empty house of a Mr Shan, a gentleman ruined by a great lawsuit, who had moved with his small household to the country and left the place standing.
One day, in heavy snow, Kong passed the gate, and a young man came out.
He was extraordinarily handsome. He greeted Kong, asked after him kindly, and pressed him to come in. Kong liked him at once and went.
The rooms were not large but every one was hung with embroidered curtains, and the walls were covered in calligraphy and paintings by old masters. They talked, and the young man — whose name was Huangfu — asked whether Kong would take him as a pupil. Kong, charmed, agreed, and they became close.
In time Kong met the household: the old mother, and Huangfu’s sister Jiaona, who was about thirteen and could play the zither, and their cousin Songniang.
Kong fell in love with Jiaona almost immediately, and hopelessly.
Then he fell ill — a great swelling in the chest that brought him to the edge of death. Huangfu sent for his sister. Jiaona came, and Kong, dying, thought only that he had never seen anything so lovely. She took a gold needle from her sleeve and opened the swelling, and drew out the corruption, and the pain stopped at once, and he was well in three days.
“It was not worth crying over,” she said, laughing at him.
But because he could not marry her — her family being what they were, and he being what he was — Kong married Songniang instead, and was happy, and had a son, and the household and he were close for years.
Then one day Huangfu came to him white-faced and said: “We are done for. My family is not human. We are fox, and for centuries we have been cultivating ourselves toward humanity. Heaven has decided we are near enough to be dangerous, and the thunder is coming. If you will stand at the gate with a sword when it comes, we may live. If you will not, we will not blame you — but tell me now, before it is dark.”
Kong said: “Where do you want me to stand?”
At dusk the sky went black and the wind rose and the lightning began to walk around the house. Kong stood at the gate with a drawn sword and did not move. The thunder came down on the roof, and the house split, and he saw a thing like a great claw take Jiaona up out of the ruin and carry her into the sky.
He did not think. He raised his sword and threw it.
The lightning struck the blade and shattered it, and Jiaona fell out of the storm into his arms, dead, with the mark of it on her.
They got her into the cellar. And Jiaona opened her eyes and said: “I am dying. But you do not have to be.” And she took from her mouth a small red pill — her own essence, refined — and pressed it between his lips, and Kong’s heart, which had stopped with his terror, began again.
And she died.
They buried her. Kong wept for her for years and never stopped, and when he was an old man he used to say the thing that Pu Songling has made everyone remember:
To have a friend like Jiaona — one who will open your chest with a needle, and give you the pill out of her own mouth — is worth more than a marriage. I had the better thing. I would not trade it.
The story is the strangest love story in the collection, because it is honest about what love can be. Kong married the cousin, loved the sister, and was saved by both. And the fox family, having been saved by a man with a sword at a gate, went on cultivating.