The Jade Fish
A drowned merchant is found with a jade fish that grows warm each night, keeping his body from rotting until he returns to life, who tells of a red carp that led him from the whirlpool. Later a carp with a jade-like mark is caught and released.
On the Yangzi and Huai there was a drowned man, surname Jiang, a traveling merchant, whose boat overturned on the river; his body floated three days, and in his bosom was a jade fish, warm and lustrous as if alive. His family bore him home and were about to lay him out, when they saw the jade fish grow warm each night, sending up threads of heat that moistened his face and lips, so the body did not rot and his color stayed as if living.
The family wondered, and dared not hastily encoffin him, but waited for him to return. Thus for three times seven days, when Jiang suddenly started up, vomited several pints of water, and lived. Asked what he had met, he said: in a daze I sank to the river bed, where a red carp led me out of the whirlpool and brought me to the shallows.
They looked at the jade fish in his bosom; it was gone, leaving only a thread of water-mark. The family, taking it for strange, cast it into the river as an offering.
The next year a fisherman, at the spot where Jiang had drowned, caught a red carp whose belly bore a jade-like pattern in the shape of a fish; he released it, and the carp entered the water, circling and not leaving, as if in thanks.
The Chronicler of the Strange says: The jade fish was the merchant's pendant, sunk with him in the water and thereby attuned to the spirit. That the body did not rot was not the fish's warmth, but that the man's thoughts were not yet cut off — at home there were those waiting for his return, and so the water could not drown his soul. The red carp was the spirit of the fish, transformed, leading him from peril to repay the old kindness of his pendant. Many are those who drown in gain, who drown in desire, their souls consumed and bones eroded without knowing it; Jiang drowned in water yet lived, by a single thought of return. The jade became a carp, the carp returned to the river, each thing going back to its root — can a man alone not return to his beginning? Sad, is it not!