Xi Fangping lived in Dong’an. His father, Xi Lian, was a plain, stubborn, honest man who had quarrelled once with a rich family named Yang. Old Yang died first. Some years later Xi Lian fell ill, and as he lay dying he cried out that Yang had bribed the officers of the dead to have him beaten. His body swelled red all over, and he howled, and he died.
Xi Fangping stopped eating. “My father was a simple man,” he said, “and now a bully of a ghost is beating him. I am going down there to argue his case myself.”
After that he said nothing more. He sat, and stood, and wandered like a man whose wits are gone — and in truth his soul had already left his body and was on the road.
He came to the city of the dead and asked for his father, and was told his father was in prison. He went to the jail and found his father in irons, beaten beyond recognition. Xi Lian could barely speak, but he said: “The jailers have been bribed. They torture me day and night, and I have no one to complain to.” Xi Fangping flew into a rage and went straight out to the yamen of the City God.
“My father is innocent!” he cried. “Yang has bribed your officers to murder him!”
The City God, it turned out, had already been bought. He refused the petition. Xi Fangping went down to the magistrate of the dead himself, and was refused again, and then to the prefecture, and each office was worse than the last, until at length guards took him out and laid him on a bench and sawed him in two — for the crime of vexing his superiors. He woke on the road with the wound healed, and understood: they were trying to wear him out.
So he went up.
He appealed to the court of the King of Hell, the second of the Ten Kings, who has jurisdiction over the appeals of the wronged. And there — in the most horrible passage of the whole collection — the story stops being a courtroom drama and becomes a torture chamber. The King’s clerks take Xi Fangping and lay him on an iron bed and pass fire over him until his bones crack; then, when that fails to break him, they take him apart and put him back together in the body of a baby, and hand him to a noble family to be raised, and wait for him to grow up and forget.
He does not forget. He grows, and he marries, and when he is twenty he remembers, and he walks out of the house and goes back down to the courts of the dead and files the same petition, in the same words, against the same people.
And this time someone is watching. A god’s messenger, passing on the road, sees the young man standing in the dust outside the gate of hell shouting a case that has already been refused eight times, and carries the matter up out of the underworld entirely — to Er Lang, nephew of the Jade Emperor, before whom no clerk can hide a document.
Er Lang reads the file. He sends for the City God, for the magistrate, for the judges, for the bribe-takers and the torturers, and for old Yang himself, and he tries them all in one session. The judgement is a formal document, and Pu Songling writes it out in full: the City God degraded to commoner; the judges flayed and flogged and demoted to the lowest grade of the celestial service; the bribes confiscated and returned; the clerks who sawed a man in half sent to the earth prisons for a fixed term of years. And to Xi Lian, restored to his body and given a hundred years more of life, the court awards compensation for every day of his beating.
Xi Fangping walks home with his father alive beside him, and the story ends as these stories do, with a man in a village who was told he was crazy and was right all along.
But Pu Songling cannot resist one last line. He tells us that if the world above worked like Er Lang’s court, then the world below would have no work at all — and then he tells us, in his own voice, what he thinks of the courts of the living: that a poor man’s lawsuit is a fire, and the clerks of this world are the ones who carry the oil.