Daji: The Fox Spirit of Xuanyuan Tomb (Part 2)

A story adapted from Creation of the Gods , based on the image I created for The Shadow’s Secret Challenge . My artwork submission: https://budgetpixel.com/p/62597 Part 1 The order eventually reached Su Hu, Marquis of Jizhou. Su Hu had a daughter named Daji, famed for her beauty, and Fei Zhong knew of her reputation. When Su Hu was summoned to court, pressure was placed upon him to offer Daji to the king. He refused. To Su Hu, surrendering his daughter merely to satisfy the king's appetite was intolerable. His defiance became rebellion, and in his anger he even left a verse upon the Meridian Gate denouncing the court before returning to Jizhou. King Zhou sent forces against him. War followed. Jizhou was surrounded, Su Hu's son Su Quanzhong was captured, and the marquis found himself facing the destruction of his household and the suffering of his people. Still he resisted until Ji Chang, the Marquis of the West, learned of the conflict. He sent his officer San Yisheng to Jizhou with a letter. The message was simple but difficult for Su Hu to ignore. By refusing the king over one daughter, Ji Chang argued, he risked losing his city, his ancestral house, his family, and the lives of countless soldiers and common people. If he submitted and presented Daji, the war could end without further bloodshed. Su Hu read the letter in silence. For all his anger toward King Zhou, he could not deny the consequences of continuing the struggle. At last he yielded. He ordered preparations for the journey to Chaoge. Su Quanzhong was released, the attacking armies withdrew, and Su Hu told his family that Daji would be taken to the capital as the price of peace. Daji wept when she received the order. Her mother wept with her. Su Hu tried to console them both, but there was little comfort to offer. The young woman was leaving her home to enter the palace of a king she had never met, and neither mother nor daughter knew whether they would ever see each other again. With three thousand soldiers and five hundred household retainers escorting them, Su Hu and Daji set out for Chaoge. Their journey took many days. They crossed rivers, passed through towns and climbed over mountain roads until, near nightfall, they reached Enzhou. The keeper of the government station came out to receive them but hesitated when Su Hu ordered rooms prepared. "My lord," he warned, "a demon appeared in this station three years ago. Since then, officials passing through Enzhou have refused to sleep inside. It would be safer for the young lady to remain with the encampment." Su Hu rebuked him. Daji was being presented to the Son of Heaven; how could a mere spirit dare approach her? He ordered the rooms cleaned and placed his daughter in an inner chamber attended by fifty maidservants, while his soldiers camped outside. Yet once darkness fell, the warning returned to his thoughts. Unable to sleep, Su Hu kept his leopard-tail whip beside him and read by lamplight. From time to time he walked through the station to inspect the rooms. Daji and her attendants appeared to be sleeping peacefully, and he returned to the front hall. Near the third watch of the night, a bitter wind suddenly swept through the station. The flame of the lamp shuddered. A maid screamed from the rear chambers. "A demon!" Su Hu seized his whip and rushed toward his daughter's room, but as he crossed the hall another gust extinguished his lamp. He turned back, called for a fresh light, and hurried once more to Daji's bedside. She lay beneath the curtains as though she had only just awakened. "My child," he asked, "did you see anything?" Daji shook her head. She had heard the maid cry out, she said, but before she could rise, her father had already arrived. She had seen no demon. Relieved, Su Hu thanked Heaven and his ancestors for protecting her. He told Daji to rest and spent the remainder of the night keeping watch. What he could not know was that his daughter was already dead. During the brief darkness, the thousand-year-old fox spirit had entered the chamber and taken Daji's soul. It did not create another woman's appearance or merely disguise itself as her. It borrowed Daji's body as its own, preserving the face and voice that her father knew. The young woman Su Hu had brought from Jizhou was gone. The thing that answered him from behind the bed curtains was the fox spirit of Xuanyuan Tomb. At dawn, father and daughter continued toward Chaoge. Su Hu arrived believing that the worst danger had passed. In truth, he was carrying the instrument of Shang's destruction into the heart of the kingdom. When news reached the palace that Su Hu had finally brought his daughter, King Zhou ordered her presented before him. Daji entered the royal hall. The king looked at her and whatever anger he still held toward Su Hu vanished. Her beauty surpassed everything he had imagined. The face he had longed for since standing before Nüwa's statue seemed suddenly to have appeared before him in living flesh. Su Hu's rebellion was forgiven, and Daji was admitted to the inner palace as Su Meiren, the Beautiful Lady Su. (To be continued in Part 3) Creation of the Gods (《封神演义》, Fengshen Yanyi ), also known as Investiture of the Gods , is a classic Chinese mythological novel set around the fall of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou dynasty. It blends history, folklore, Taoist mythology, magic, gods, demons, and legendary heroes into a vast story of war between the Shang and Zhou. The novel is traditionally attributed to Xu Zhonglin (许仲琳), a writer of the Ming dynasty, although its exact authorship remains uncertain and Lu Xixing (陆西星) has also been proposed as a possible author. It was probably written during the late 16th century, with the earliest known surviving editions appearing in the early 17th century, around the 1600s–1620s.