In the Xuande reign the palace was mad for cricket-fighting, and every year the counties had to send up champions. The thing did not even grow naturally in Shaanxi, but a magistrate of Huayin, wanting to please his superiors, sent one up anyway — and it won. So the province made it a standing levy, and the levy fell on the village headmen, and the headmen fell on the people, and every cricket demanded cost some family its farm.
Cheng Ming was a poor scholar of the district, honest and slow, and the headmen, seeing he could be squeezed, made him responsible for the cricket. His savings went first. His wife’s hairpins went next. At last, guided by a diviner’s sketch, he caught in the weeds a great black-headed cricket, armoured like a general, and caged it as the family’s deliverance.
He left it one afternoon in the care of his nine-year-old son.
The boy lifted the lid to look, and the cricket leapt — and the boy, grabbing, crushed it. He knew what he had done. When his mother came home and heard, she said in her despair that when his father returned there would be a reckoning; and the boy, weeping, went out into the dusk. They found him at last at the bottom of the well.
They got him out breathing, barely, and he lay as if dead, and the parents sat by the bed past caring about crickets or the levy or anything at all. It was near morning when the father heard, faint in the courtyard, the chirr of a cricket — and there, under the steps, was a little one, short-tailed, black as ink, no bigger than the joint of a finger. A wretched specimen, the father thought; but the levy was due, and he caged it.
The village bully heard of it and came with his champion, the famous Crab-shell Blue, to laugh at the little thing. They put them in the basin. The little cricket crouched like a fool; the bully and his friends roared. Then Crab-shell Blue charged — and the little one sprang like a spark, and in moments the great champion was running for its life with the black mite riding its back, jaws fast in its neck.
Then the rooster came. Someone’s cock, pecking at the basin, struck at the little cricket — and the cricket leapt onto the rooster’s comb and held on, and the great bird flung itself about the yard, screaming, until the father managed to rescue it, and the little champion stood in the basin, wings up, singing victory.
They sent it up the ladder: county, province, palace. In the emperor’s own basin it defeated everything in the realm, and danced in time to music, and the Son of Heaven was delighted, and honours and gifts flowed back down the ladder — to the governor, to the magistrate, and down at last to the ruined scholar whose son still lay as if dead. The family that had been beggared by a cricket was made rich by one.
The boy woke more than a year later, weak but whole, and the first thing he said was strange. He had been, he told his parents, a cricket — a small, strong, quick one — and he had fought, and won, and never been hurt. He remembered the feel of it. His parents looked at one another and did not ask him any more.
The little champion had long since vanished. But Pu Songling, who tells the story, ends it with a sentence cold as the well-water: that an emperor’s whim and a minister’s flattery can, between them, put a child in a coma — and that the only justice the family ever saw came out of the soul of a boy, wearing six legs.