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The Candle Stub
Teacher Zhou, knowing a poor boy reads by his school's candle-stubs, leaves one extra candle each night and sets out cakes blamed on mice. When Zhou grows old and poor, Wang—now a governor—returns in plain clothes to care for him to the end, saying all he has was lit by the teacher's stubs.
The Guardian Snake
The widow Chen lives alone; when a wicked youth climbs the wall to force her, a great snake from the beam winds his feet and drives him off. It guards by her stove each night; when she dies it vanishes, leaving a jade-like slough by the coffin, which the villagers hang in the shrine.
The Grateful Cow
Zhao Wu spends all his wages to redeem a sick cow bound for the butcher; it works his fields three years, then dies. Digging by its grave he finds a jar of silver with a cow's hoofprint at the bottom; the magistrate rules it his, and he uses half to free dozens of cows.
The Horse Spirit
Shen Yan, a young clerk from Liangzhou, once saved a dying foal as a boy. Years later he must escort an urgent dispatch across the snowbound Black Pine Ridge. His black mount, Zhaoye, speaks as an old man on the night of an ambush and warns him: the letter's recipient is his master's sworn enemy. The horse dies; only a black mane hair stays warm in his coat. A tale of debt and gratitude that outlasts the beast's breath.
The Monkey Spirit
Alone at the end of Misty Ridge Village, Granny Qiqiao sets a bowl of gruel on her windowsill each dusk — for the grandson a flood took long ago. One spring a one-eared grey monkey comes nightly to beg at the sill, uncannily like a child. When storms keep it away, she searches the woods by lantern and finds it hurt. Each year on the day her grandson vanished, the monkey returns through the mist with an orchid, then disappears. The hills, she says, are not empty — someone remembers them.
The Pig Spirit
At the foot of Qingscreen Mountain, widow Ahe buys a doomed black pig with a white brow-mark and names it Snow Slave. On a freezing night her daughter falls through the ice, and a brown-clad youth—the pig itself—silently splits wood and draws water to save her. An old debt repaid across a lifetime; afterward the pig stays, then leaves, and each New Year's Eve a gift appears at the gate. A quiet, untroubled bond between a household and the spirit it sheltered.
The Dog Spirit
Granny Zhou, alone in Meixi Village, has had no word of her son Lin in three years. On a snowy night she takes in a wounded yellow dog, Fule, whose uncanny wisdom lets him lead lost villagers home. In the fourth winter he disappears for eight days and returns limping, dragging home the son who had wandered lost above the mountain. A quiet, warm bond between a dog spirit and a hill household, lingering long after he is gone.
The Goat Spirit
In a drought-stricken village that sacrifices a living white goat to the White Stone Goat Spirit, an orphan girl hides her pet Snowball from the altar. The goat's spirit appears as a white-robed woman and teaches that the true offering is restraint, not blood. When the flood comes, Snowball leads the whole village to a hidden spring. The village then abandons the living sacrifice. A quiet tale of mercy over slaughter.