Ning Caichen of Zhejiang was a generous, open-hearted man, and strict with himself. He used to say that in all his life he had never looked twice at a woman other than his wife. Travelling to Jinhua on business, he came to the northern wall of the city just as evening was falling, and unpacked his bags at a temple on the outskirts.
The temple was grand once — you could see it in the halls and the great stupa — but the weeds had grown taller than a man and there was no footprint in the dust. The monks’ quarters stood with doors ajar and empty. Only one small lodge to the south was newly locked. To the east of the hall a grove of bamboo was beginning to thicken, and below the steps a wide pool was covered in blooming wild lotus. Ning liked the deep quiet of the place. The examination commissioner had just arrived in the city and the price of lodging had shot up, so he decided he would simply wait for a monk to return and ask to stay.
At dusk another traveller came and pushed open the south lodge. Ning hurried over to bow and explain himself. The man smiled. “There’s no owner here, and no abbot either — I’m only lodging myself. If you can put up with the ruin and the silence, I should be glad of the company. We can talk into the night.” His name was Yan Chixia, from the west, and though he had the look of an examination candidate there was something of the swordsman about him. They set their beds in the same hall and lay down.
Ning could not sleep. In the small hours he heard a low murmur of voices from the north of the courtyard, as though a whole household lived there. Peering through a crack, he saw by lantern-light a woman of about forty, and an old crone in a faded red gown, and — standing with her back to him, combing out her hair — a girl of extraordinary beauty. “Will Xiaoqian come tonight?” the crone was asking. The older woman answered that she had refused, and was angry about something. “She is no older than eighteen,” the crone said, “and lovely as a picture, but that temper of hers will be the death of us.” Ning assumed it was simply a family staying at the temple and turned away — and then the voices stopped, all at once, as though someone had heard him listening.
He had barely lain down again when he felt a presence at his door. There stood the girl, stepping lightly into the moonlight. She was smiling. “I couldn’t sleep either,” she said, “and a kind man deserves company.” Ning sat up. “It is the middle of the night,” he said, “and talk like that, overheard, ruins reputations. Please go back.” She did not go. Instead she laid an ingot of gold on the mat. Ning picked it up and threw it out into the courtyard. “Keep your money,” he said. “I would be ashamed to soil my hands with it.” For a long moment the girl stood silent, and then she gathered up the gold and murmured, as much to herself as to him: “This man’s heart is iron.”
The next day a scholar from the county, lodging with his servant in the east wing, was found dead in the night, his body untouched — except for a small hole in the sole of each foot, as though bored by an awl, from which the blood had been drawn clean away. No one could explain it. The following night his servant died the same way.
When evening came the girl returned. This time she did not smile. “My name is Nie Xiaoqian,” she said. “I died when I was eighteen and was buried beside this temple, and the old demon of the place has held me ever since. Every man I am sent to, it is not my wish. Last night I failed you, and so the demon has begun to drink blood in the way it prefers. You are the first man I have ever failed to catch, and because of that, tonight it will come for you itself.”
Ning was quiet for a moment. “And you are telling me this why?”
“Because you threw away the gold,” she said. “The demon cannot be fought by a man. But the guest in the south lodge — Yan — is not a man to be trifled with. Ask him for the sack he keeps by his bed and hang it at your door, and you may live until morning.”
So Ning went to Yan and told him everything. Yan listened without a word of surprise. “You have a steady heart,” he said at last, “and you deserve a straight answer. I am a swordsman. The thing that haunts this temple is old, and I have been watching it for some time.” He handed Ning a worn leather sack. “Hang this above your door and sleep. It will keep you safe tonight.” Ning asked what it was, and Yan only said that inside was something that ate demons.
That night, as Ning lay rigid in the dark, the sack swelled as though something were pushing out from within. There was a sound like a sigh, and then a shriek that did not seem to come from any throat. In the morning the temple was quiet. Yan was sitting up, inspecting a few inches of white hair and a snarl of something like twisted sinew that had fallen from the sack. “The old demon is crippled,” he said. “It will not trouble you again.”
Ning did not leave at once. He found Xiaoqian’s grave, wrapped her bones in cloth, and carried them home to his native place, building her a small tomb beside his study. And she came with him — not as a demon now but as something between a ghost and a guest. She served his aged mother and mourned her when she died; she managed the household and bore Ning a son. The neighbours whispered for years, but in the end they accepted her, as one accepts anything that has behaved well for long enough. As for Yan Chixia, he rode away the morning after the demon fell, leaving nothing behind but the sack, and Ning kept it all his life, and would tell anyone who asked that there was a time when it had saved him.
This is an original retelling from the classical Chinese text, in the public domain. The closing of the tale is condensed.