A son of a certain family on the Coin-Vault Street of Jinling, whose line had been scholars for generations, gave up study because it could not make him rich, and became a merchant. Once, sleeping alone in his shop, he heard sighing by his pillow; he shouted at it and it stopped. After that he heard it every night, and took no notice.
One evening a figure in a square cap and vermilion shoes stepped slowly out from behind the bed, brows furrowed, face clouded, plainly displeased. The merchant asked who he was.
“I am the God of Books,” it said. “Since taking lodging in your house, your grandfather and father looked favourably on me. But it has come down to you: no friendship renewed, and now an outright refusal. Still, there was no enmity between us — yet now I am bound by a money-slave, and my spirit is crushed. Unless you soon get the silver off your waist, the stink of copper will press in and refinement will be drowned. Disaster will reach you. Do not say you were not warned!” With that it vanished.
The merchant leapt up, took a candle and searched everywhere, and found several old volumes bound up with a string of coins and thrown by the bed, untouched for more than ten years. Hating the books as the source of the haunting, he took fire to them. At once the ash flew up and the flames spread, burning down the house and its buildings; nothing within survived. In the end he died poor.
