The Farmer’s Crown Prince

All his life, Li Shuqing knew only three things: hoes, rice, and the faces of his creditors. On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, the Kitchen God Festival, he was repairing the collapsed stove in his ancestral home when a bronze-rusted diamond-shaped mirror suddenly rolled out from between the bricks. As his fingertip brushed the words “Don't trust what the books say” carved into its back, the rust flaked away, and the mirror suddenly showed a woman in a red wedding dress. She wore a locust-wood hairpin and a bone ring on her left hand. The arc of her falling tears made Li Shuqing's heart ache for no reason, as if one of them had traveled through a hundred years to strike him. That night, thunder and rain raged, and the bronze mirror glowed an eerie green in the lightning. When Li Shuqing opened his eyes again, his coarse hemp clothes had become a gold-embroidered dragon robe, and rain ran like blood across the glazed tiles of the imperial palace. More horrifying still, the “calamitous beauty” Su, whom the history books said had long since been executed, was smiling at him with the same features as the paper talisman doll his mother had cut out to ward off evil. When her fingertips brushed his palm, he felt the exact same searing pain as in the vision in the mirror that day. And the first words out of her mouth were the opening line of the Li family's ancestral Disaster-Warding Incantation. When the court officials discovered that the crown prince had suddenly mastered farming and cured a plague with a folk remedy for locusts, seven paintings quietly appeared in a secret chamber of the Eastern Palace. In each, a “crown prince” in simple clothes and barefoot led a pale, paper-doll-like “consort.” In the blank space of every painting were the words: “The twenty-third day of the Locust Moon, the soul returns to the mirror.” Consort Su always burned incense before a withered locust tree at midnight, and Li Shuqing gradually realized that the things she did, dismissed as madness…