A poor man of Tanzhou died and his wife took his two daughters and remarried. When they were grown she sold them both as concubines.
The younger went into the house of Zhao the registrar of Xiangyin, and when her term was up she was not allowed to return. Her stepfather died, and her mother went to the officials to get her back.
While she was at the Zhaos’ she had been seduced by the registrar’s son, and after she left he still came to her secretly. Her mother lodged at an inn under the city wall with no rent money, and the owner drove them out, and they moved to the shop of Yi the Twenty-third on East Street. The Zhao son stopped coming, and the woman was pregnant.
The wife of Yi asked: “You have no husband. Why are you with child?”
She said: “I was sold by my stepfather, and embraced vapour and became a worm, so my belly is swollen. It is not pregnancy.”
After a few months her belly grew larger, and her mother still could not pay the rent, so she went to the prefecture and accused Yi, saying his son had raped her daughter.
The prefecture arrested Yi and the daughter and put them in the prison of the Right Court, and they were beaten and tortured for over a month and would not confess. But the daughter was heavy with child and could not be questioned.
One day at noon the prisoners were dozing, and the daughter was asleep too, when she suddenly woke — and there was a great white snake coiled round her belly three times, head and tail raised facing each other. She could only cry out for help.
Those in the same room looked at each other in terror, and an old woman attendant went out and told the jailer, who examined it and believed it, and ran to tell the judicial officer, who put on his cap and robes, burned incense and paper, and bowed and prayed. The snake loosened and climbed the wall and up onto the roof and was gone.
She then gave birth to a son, named Fangben. And Yi was released. The mother was beaten, and the daughter escaped punishment because of the birth.
This was in the intercalary fifth month of the sixteenth year of the Chunxi reign.
