(M115) A modern Chinese story tells how an habitual criminal used to take his soul out of his own body for the purpose of evading the righteous punishment of his crimes. This bad man lived in Khien (Kwei-cheu), and the sentences that had been passed on him formed a pile as high as a hill. The mandarins had flogged him to death with sticks and flung his mangled corpse into the river, but three days afterwards the scoundrel got his soul back again, and on the fifth day he resumed his career of villainy as if nothing had happened. The thing occurred again and again, till at last it reached the ears of the Governor of the province, who flew into a violent passion and proposed to the Governor-General to have the rascal beheaded. And beheaded he was; but in three days the wretch was alive again with no trace of decapitation about him except a slender red thread round his neck. And now, like a giant refreshed, he began a fresh series of enormities. He even went so far as to beat his own mother. This was more than she could bear, and she brought the matter before the magistrate. She produced in court a vase and said, “In this vase my refractory son has hidden his soul. Whenever he was conscious of having committed a serious crime, or a misdeed of the most heinous kind, he remained at home, took his soul out of his body, purified it, and put it in the vase. Then the authorities only punished or executed his body of flesh and blood, and not his soul. With his soul, refined by a long process, he then cured his freshly mutilated body, which thus became able in three days to recommence in the old way. Now, however, his crimes have reached a climax, for he has beaten me, an old woman, and I cannot bear it. I pray you, smash this vase, and scatter his soul by fanning it away with a windwheel; and if then you castigate his body anew, it is probable that bad son of mine will really die.” The mandarin took the hint. He had the rogue cudgelled to death, and when they examined the corpse they found that decay had set in within ten days.(400)