Beneath the Peach Tree, I Wed a Ghost

For six silver dollars, I took a job guarding an orchard at a haunted manor.

They said no one who’d worked there before had lasted a month, and that you could hear a female ghost crying at night.

I wasn’t afraid. I was so poor even ghosts looked down on me.

Then one night, I saw her in a peach tree: dressed in white as bright as snow, with her tongue hanging three feet long.

She said her name was Wanqing. Her master had forced her to her death, and her vengeful spirit couldn’t rest.

My heart softened, and I gave her half a cold steamed bun.

She said she was the daughter of the orchard’s former owner, wrongfully accused and hanged beneath the peach tree.

She said that if I would wait eighteen years for her, she’d go reincarnate and come back to marry me.

I took her at her word and kept watch over the lonely orchard through the chaos of war.

Eighteen years later, after a bloodbath at the prince’s manor, I pulled a simple-minded girl from a heap of corpses.

She couldn’t speak. She only drooled and giggled foolishly at me.

On the night of the Winter Solstice, she suddenly came to her senses and took my hand, speaking softly:

“Brother, today is my eighteenth birthday.”

“I’ve come to marry you.”