The River Lantern
On the fifteenth of the seventh month, a youth sets river lanterns adrift and meets the drowned Lady Liu come to claim one.
By the Huai River lived a young man named Shen Yan, orphaned early and dwelling alone in a small hut by the water. Each year upon the fifteenth of the seventh month, the villagers would set forth river lanterns to succor the departed; Yan, too, would fashion dozens of paper lamps and float them upon the stream, their trembling light like stars fallen into cold waves.
On the mid-July night of that year, the moon washed the world in silver. Yan walked alone to the river bend and set his lamps adrift, one by one. Suddenly a pale-green lantern came against the current and halted before his skiff, its flame still and unwavering. Beneath it loomed a slender figure, a woman standing upon the water yet not sinking.
Yan asked in alarm, "Who are you?" The woman gathered her sleeves and said, "I am surnamed Liu, and drowned here last year. I saw that every lamp you lit was meant for your parents, and none for me. Tonight I have come to claim one." Yan was stricken; then he recalled that last autumn a daughter of the Liu family had indeed thrown herself in—villagers said she had quarreled with her mother and drowned in wrath.
Yan took a fresh lamp, lit it before her, and pushed it into the heart of the current. The woman smiled her thanks; the lamp bore her away and faded into the deep reeds. In a daze Yan saw her reflection in the water turn and bow, her clothes soaked through yet no trace of tears upon her face.
The next day he went to seek the river bend, and found only a few trails of sand and a pinch of grey ashes, green as the lamp of the night before. An old villager said, "Many drowned ghosts haunt this water, begging lamps of men year by year. He who receives a lamp is spared the water's peril the following year." Yan fell silent; ever after, each mid-July, he made one extra lamp, inscribed with the characters for 'Lady Liu,' and floated it behind the lamps of all others.
The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: Men say the dead have their demands—no more than a single lamp; yet what the living ask of the dead exceeds ten thousand pieces of gold. Faint the flame and weak the light, yet it illumines the two realms so neither owes the other—who then would say the dead are without feeling?