The seat of Zhuji county is ringed by a lake, and a man named Lu lived on the causeway behind the county office, making his living by punching and cutting paper money.
One evening at dusk he had just finished work and, weary, lay down to sleep. His wife, pregnant and two months past her time, felt a stomach pain while her husband was still awake, and lay down beside him. After a while Lu fell asleep; waking, he found his wife gone, yet the door had never been opened — and he knew she had fallen into a strange realm. In alarm he took up a lantern and ran outside, calling and searching, and invited neighbors to hunt thoroughly.
Past midnight he heard a voice answering from within the lake; the moon was bright, and looking he saw it was his wife, with a young man, coming to fetch her. The wife grasped the young man’s sleeve and said: “Give me back my child.”
When they reached the shore and Lu took her home, the fetus was already gone. Only then could she speak. She said: “I saw several people come into the room and call me out, and they led me to a place and into a small chamber laid with mats like a birthing room; before I knew it I had delivered. After washing and swaddling, onlookers filled the front and said, ‘A boy — truly a joy.’ I had not yet gone to look when suddenly there was nothing. Thinking of it now, I was near to death, and fortunate to have survived.”
The next day she was calm and well, with no suffering. The lake is not wide, yet outside it connects to the river; the villagers suspected that when she had first conceived, she must have dreamt flood-dragons coming to lie with her, and would not say so. It was after the middle of the seventh month of the first year of Qingyuan.
