Zhu Erdian of Lingyang was a generous, loud, cheerful man — and, to put it plainly, a slow one. He studied hard and had never passed anything.
One evening, drinking with his literary club, someone said to him: “You have a reputation for nerve. If you really have it, go to the Temple of the Ten Kings at midnight and carry the judge from the eastern gallery back here on your back. Do that and we’ll all club together for a banquet.”
They meant it as a dare, and a cruel one. The temple’s gods were carved in wood and painted so lifelike that people were afraid of them; the standing judge of the eastern gallery had a green face and a red beard and a particularly savage expression; and it was said that at night you could hear the sound of interrogation from the side halls. Men’s hair stood up when they went in.
Zhu laughed, stood up, and walked out.
Not long after, they heard him shouting outside the door: “I’ve brought the bearded examiner!”
They got up, and there he was — and there, over his shoulder, was the green-faced judge, life-size.
They fell over each other getting out of the way. Zhu set the statue down and poured a cup for it and said: “I’m sorry to drag you out, sir, but my friends are cheap and I am not. Drink with me.”
And the statue, to everyone’s horror, drank.
His name was Lu. He was a judge of the underworld. And he and Zhu Erdian became friends.
It was Judge Lu who solved Zhu’s problem. “Your essays are bad,” he said, “not because you are lazy but because the organ is wrong.” One night, while Zhu slept, Lu opened his chest, took out his heart, and put in another one — found, he said, among a thousand in the storehouses of the dead, and a very good one.
Zhu woke cleverer than he had been. He passed the examinations. He became known for his writing. The change was total and everyone noticed it, and Zhu told no one the reason.
Then Zhu said, half in jest, that there was one more thing: his wife was a good woman, but her face was plain, and he had been unkind enough to mention it.
“You should not ask me for that,” said Lu. But he did it.
There had been a murder in the city — a young woman of great beauty killed in her own house, her body found with the head severed. Lu took that head, and in the night, while Zhu’s wife slept, he removed hers and put the other in its place, and closed the seam with a stitch that left no scar.
She woke with a different face.
The city was thrown into confusion: the dead girl’s family came and looked at Zhu’s wife and could not understand how their daughter was alive and married to someone else. Zhu tried to explain. Lu appeared to him in a dream and told him the truth to give to the family: their daughter’s body had been buried without a head, and her head was now on Zhu’s wife; let them open the grave and see.
They opened it. The body was headless. And so the matter was settled in court, with everyone agreeing that it was a marvel and nobody agreeing on what should be done about it.
Zhu lived long and did well, and when he died, Lu came for him — and it is told that years later Lu was seen in the temple at Lingyang, with Zhu beside him, and that Zhu was now a clerk of the underworld himself, which is the promotion these stories give to a man who was kind to a god when he was only a statue.