The Snake Spirit
In the depths of Green Vine Mountain, the herb-gatherer Zhou Shen frees an injured green serpent. Three years later, during a plague, a mysterious woman in green comes to his door by night, nursing him and the sick villagers back to health. Shen slowly realizes she is the serpent, repaying his old kindness. She leaves him three jade pills and vanishes into the mountain. He tends the sick for the rest of his life, and each spring a green snake waits by the stream.
Deep in Green Vine Mountain lived a herb-gatherer named Zhou Shen. Orphaned young, he was a silent, kindly man who supported his aged mother by gathering medicinal plants.
One spring, while walking beside a stream, Shen heard a rustling in the grass. Parting the leaves, he found a great serpent, some ten feet long, its green scales bright as jade. An iron trap set by hunters had wounded its side, and blood ran down its body. The serpent raised its head and looked at Shen; in its eyes was a plea, yet it did not strike. Shen sighed. "Though you are not my kind, pain is the same for all living things." He freed the trap, dressed the wound with herbs he carried, bound it with a strip torn from his cloak, and let the creature go. The serpent coiled about his feet three times, then slipped into the undergrowth.
Three years passed. His mother died, and Shen lived alone in the old mountain hut. That year a great pestilence came; the neighboring villages were strewn with the dead. Shen saved many with his remedies, but at last he too fell ill. For ten days he lay upon his bed, unable to eat or drink.
One night, moonlight filled the room, and he heard a knock at the door. He opened it and saw a woman in a green robe, of a beauty clear and cold. She said her surname was Qing, that she lived on the shaded side of the mountain, and had come to tend him when she heard he was sick. Shen feared she might be a ghost, yet she spoke gently, boiled medicine at his hearth, and fed him until his strength returned. From then on she came each day, tending his garden of herbs and gathering mountain fare; those villagers who drank her medicine all recovered. When Shen asked where she came from, she only smiled and would not answer.
They lived thus half a year. Shen began to notice strange things: whenever a storm came, the woman would vanish, and in the courtyard there remained only a shed green skin, bright as polished jade. He once saw her sit by the window at night, and faint scale-marks showed upon her fingers. Shen understood she was no mortal, yet grateful for her care, he never spoke of it.
When autumn deepened, the woman said to him, "Your sickness is healed, and your neighbors are safe. My task is done. The rescue by the stream three years past, I have remembered to this day. Now I repay it." From her bosom she took a small jade vial holding three pills. "These can recall three dying men from death. Keep them well." With that, a clean wind rose before the door; the woman became a trail of green vapor that circled the hut three times and entered the mountain. Shen ran out, but saw only fallen leaves across the steps and the stream murmuring as before.
Shen never married. He kept the herb hut all his life and gave his medicine freely to the sick. Each spring, a green serpent would appear among the grass by the stream, tame at the sight of people, as if it knew them.
The Chronicler of the Strange says: Most men fear whatever is not their own kind, and kill snakes and insects as pests. Yet a single act of mercy from Zhou Shen, given to a creature he did not know, won him his life three years later. We learn that kindness and resentment are not bounded by the line between man and beast. That woman in green came like a spring wind and left like an autumn leaf; she never held herself apart for being other, nor boasted of the great debt she repaid. Alas, among men who walk the world, how few can be grateful as the serpent, and look upon the strange without fear.