The Eel Spirit

South of the river, by the Qingxi stream, stood the village of Reed Flower. There lived a young fisherman named Shuisheng, an orphaned son of the water, honest and dutiful; his father had died early, and he kept house with his blind old mother. On autumn nights he would take his bamboo creel and a pine torch down to the stream to trap eels, which he sold at market the next morning to buy rice for her.

One night the frost lay heavy on the water. In the deep pool Shuisheng caught a great eel, golden in color, thick as a man's wrist, weighing more than three catties. Glad of his luck he dropped it in the creel. On the way home a faint weeping came from the basket; at first he thought it the wind in the reeds, but listening closely he heard words. He opened the creel in fright and saw the eel raise its head and speak: "Young sir, I have cultivated the Way for a hundred years and fallen by mischance into your hands. Spare my poor life, I beg you, and I shall repay you."

Shuisheng nearly dropped the creel. His mother waited hungry at home; this eel would fetch a few hundred coins, enough for several days' meals. Yet he could not bear to kill a creature that spoke. After a long silence he sighed: "Though my mother hungers, how can I slay a speaking thing to fill our bellies?" He loosed the eel back into the pool. It turned and looked back at him three times, then sank from sight, the green water stirring and then still.

Five days passed, and a strange mist rose over the stream, so thick that day was like night and would not lift. Shuisheng went again to trap eels. He had not gone half a mile when a woman's clear voice came from the water through the fog: "Shuisheng, do you remember who you spared? The stream's yin runs wild against its yang; in three nights' time, at midnight, a great flood will come. Your house lies low—move your mother to the heights, and do not cling to your broken hut." Shuisheng stood amazed and doubtful; he looked about, but there was only the white mist, and far off, a golden shadow faintly turning in the water's heart.

He went home and told his mother. Blind, she did not doubt him. "Since you spared it, its word may be followed. I am old; I follow my son." That very night Shuisheng carried his mother on his back to an abandoned shrine on the high mound behind the village. The neighbors laughed at his folly and would not move.

On the third midnight, true to the warning, thunder broke and the stream swelled beyond its banks; muddy waves filled the air, and the low houses of the village were swallowed. When the water fell, many neighbors had been swept away, but Shuisheng and his mother, sheltered on the height, were safe.

Shuisheng returned to find only broken walls and cold hearths. Beneath a toppled wall he picked up a single scale, broad as his palm, the color of ruddy gold, warm to the touch, and in a dark room it gave off a faint, flickering light. The neighbors came to see and marveled that such a thing should be. Shuisheng kept it in a brocade pouch hung above his mother's bed. From that time the eels of the stream grew fatter and the village, through the lean season, went hungry no more.

A year later Shuisheng passed the deep pool and saw a woman in green standing at its edge; she turned and smiled at him, gentle of face. He would have stepped forward to thank her, but a light wind rose and she became a golden eel that swished its tail and slid into the water, leaving only a ripple that spreads, they say, to this day.

The Chronicler of the Strange says: The eel is a small thing. For a single meal's mercy it remembered a hundred years, and for a single merciful thought it spared two human lives. Among the upright men of the world who bite the hand that feeds them, how many would not blush before this golden scale? Yet Shuisheng's reward lay not in the scale but in his own kindness, which asked for nothing and was richly given. As for those who laughed and sharpened their knives—did they know the water was about to rise?