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The Shadow-Play Captures
A wandering shadow-puppet troupe comes to a village and performs only one play—The Capture. One by one the villagers are dragged into the screen, their shadows flattened onto the cloth. The Midnight Record: some troupes borrow not light but the living.
The Coroner's Hut
The old keeper of Locust Coroner's Hut counts twelve coffins every night. After a snowstorm, alone, he counts thirteen—a plain pine box no one could have carried in, bearing his own name and face, clad in his lost jacket. The Midnight Record: the hut keeps the unclaimed dead, but sometimes the claimed as well; the extra coffin was never another's—it was kept for him.
Borrowed Life
To keep her dying husband alive, the child-bride Chun He secretly draws years from her mother-in-law's lifespan into a life-lamp fed with the old woman's blood. On the night the wick blows out by itself, the mother-in-law returns to collect her debt. The Midnight Record: a borrowed life is a loan with a lender who comes knocking the moment the light dies.
The Weasel's Boon
A weasel on the brink of immortality stops the drunk farmer Wang Er on the night of its asking, begging to be named. He laughs and calls it a chicken-thieving beast—shattering its cultivation. The Midnight Record: a word spoken in contempt is a seal that cannot be unspoken; what he denied the spirit, his own son must now repay.
The Water Ghost
A drowned peddler has pulled forty years of substitutes into Green Snail Bend to buy his own rebirth. When the old fisherman's granddaughter is seized by the pale hands below, he offers his own life in her place—and instead ferries the ghost across. The Midnight Record: some debts are paid not by drowning but by a lantern held out over dark water.
The Old Well
A new bride hears rice-rinsing sounds from a dry backyard well. Looking down, she sees not water but her own face from three years ago—the self that nearly drowned there. The sound follows her, and one night it rises from her own washing basin. The Midnight Record: a dry well shows no water, yet shows a shadow; what she saw was no mirror but a basin, and in it her self of three years before.
The Nuo Mask
A student returns to his fog-bound village for his grandfather's funeral and finds the villagers' faces fused with ancient nuo masks. The god invited into the mask will not leave, and the mask must pass from wearer to wearer. He flees—but the wood-grain spreads on his own cheek. The Midnight Record: not man wearing mask, but mask wearing man.
The Paper Figure
A miserly usurer dies and is given a grand paper procession. On the wake night the lead paper servant vanishes, and by morning the dead man's debt ledger—buried with him—is returned to the ruined family he destroyed, with a dab of the paper-maker's paste. The Midnight Record: some debts are collected by hands of paper.