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CooLWJ Library Original fiction inspired by poetry

Stories in poetry

Follow a line of poetry into a story.

A light by the ferry, an unsent letter, and moonlight on ordinary lives.
Take the time for a cup of tea and open a story of everyday life.

Browse the shelves 118 works waiting to be read

THE COLLECTION

On the shelves 118

Choose a book and let its story unfold.

Moonlit Lamps on Both Banks

Social Life in an Ancient SettingComplete

Moonlit Lamps on Both Banks

Zhang Ming stamps the moon lantern his younger brother sent into pieces, yet the new quilts prepared for his brother’s family remain in the room. They have gone twenty years without seeing each other across the river. This time, the ferry has finally been allowed to open for three days, but the letter still says he cannot return. Beneath the broken lantern, a six-holed copper plate remains intact. On Mid-Autumn night, mist suddenly rises over the river, and from midstream comes the sound of an empty barrel, three beats at a time.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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A Home for Every Season

A Novel of the Supernatural and Rural Life in an Ancient SettingComplete

A Home for Every Season

A Cen borrows a night of winter scenery from the mountain temple, wanting only to let his feverish mother sleep peacefully. After the rooster crows, he still asks for one more night; by the seventy-third day of autumn, the peach trees blossom again, but one strange thing after another happens to the fish and grain. The room remains cool, and the mountain temple is only ten li north of the village, yet he dares not tell his mother where the half-bowl of cool water delivered each day truly comes from.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 36 chapters

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A River Journey at Spring’s End

Romance in an Imagined Ancient WorldComplete

A River Journey at Spring’s End

As the last peach blossom falls into the water, Lin Xiaoman unwraps the bundle she has kept packed through three years of waiting for someone, leaving behind three hundred copper coins and a river-route map pieced together on the backs of old account papers. Just then, Lu Yan comes ashore with news that his mother is willing to meet her. She ought to be happy, but hears plans for her to learn needlework and change her accent; suddenly she wants to travel for herself along the waterway on the wall that he once laughed at as incorrectly drawn.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Seeking Passage on the Cold River

Adventure in an Imagined Ancient WorldComplete

Seeking Passage on the Cold River

On the anniversary of his father’s death, Pei Du takes aboard an old man who cannot pay the full fare, simply because he hears a trace of his hometown in the man’s final syllables. Once the boat leaves shore, the old man speaks his father’s name and recognizes his habit of bracing the punting pole with his right foot. An old affair he has spent years asking about rises to the surface. A surge of cold water is coming downstream, the long, narrow bundle still lies across the old man’s knees, and this boat has little room for an easy turn back.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Autumn Whispers in a Green Cage

Ancient Chinese–Style MysteryComplete

Autumn Whispers in a Green Cage

A parrot with a bald tail suddenly repeats the words A-Qing’s elder sister once used to coax her into drinking porridge, and every birdcage in her hands falls to the ground. Six years ago, her sister left to marry. Her husband’s family said only that she and her dowry had disappeared on the way; there had been no news since. The bird’s delivery tag leads to the secluded Zhou residence. Autumn grass pushes through the brickwork, and a zheng sounds behind a window. A-Qing calls out to her sister, and the woman behind the curtain raises her head.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Lingering Shade at Ba Bridge

Social Life in an Ancient SettingComplete

Lingering Shade at Ba Bridge

Liu Niang can sell the same willow branch three times. The blessings offered at Ba Bridge have always been her means of paying her debts. A distinguished visitor from the capital offers twenty taels to dig up the roots of the old willow behind her shop. This one deal would clear the debts her father left. She accepts the deposit and waits for clear weather to take up the axe, but a lame old man blocks the tree. After nightfall, a patch of ground behind the shop collapses, and a faint sound of water rises from below.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Chronicles of the Spring Mountains

Strange Tales in a Historical SettingComplete

Chronicles of the Spring Mountains

After Xu Jue sneaks a cup of spring wine, a little peach tree grows from the flatbread tucked against his chest. At the feast, the person undoing his clothing is his father, dead for seven years. Someone below the mountain waits for him to return home and brew wine, yet in the mountains there always seems to be a reason to stay another half day. New flowers appear as the old ones fade; when the food is gone, another round of wine arrives. At the end of the table sits an old man who never agrees to touch his chopsticks.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Fragrance Fades, Swallows Return

Ancient Chinese–Style MysteryComplete

Fragrance Fades, Swallows Return

The third batch of ever-burning incense goes out before dawn again. Shen Xiao is drenched in cold ash, and both the remaining three hundred taels and her prospects of entering the marquis’s household hang in the balance. She remembers the two fingers her mother wore away at the grindstone, yet cannot bear to part with the jade earrings the young marquis gave her. But a fine thread missing one knot in the ash, and a fleeting cry beside the burner, make this respectable business increasingly difficult to contain.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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A Young Lotus Conceals Its Edge

Adventure in an Imagined Ancient WorldComplete

A Young Lotus Conceals Its Edge

When the bronze key used to open the irrigation channel goes missing, the upper and lower villages quarrel all the way to the well. The late-planted rice seedlings cannot wait three days. A-Jian’s father lives in the lower village, her maternal grandfather in the upper. The adults tell her to stay out of it, so she returns to the little pond she knows so well. After a rainless night, the first lotus leaf has tilted. When a blue-tailed dragonfly lands, a fine hemp thread beneath the water sinks with it. A-Jian picks up a grass stem to hook the thread that should not be there.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Lingering Notes of a Lotus Night

Social Life in an Ancient SettingComplete

Lingering Notes of a Lotus Night

Whenever the lotuses bloom, Shen Wujiu, who is deaf, sets out his qin and wine in the southern pavilion, waiting for He Ting, who has not come for years. A young man brings news of his old friend, but his first request is to buy the score of “Lotus Night,” the piece the two never finished. Its coda remains blank, and where the youth places his hands differs from the old fingering Shen knows. Across the silent qin table, Shen Wujiu refuses to discuss a price first, or to admit that perhaps he has long since missed something.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Watermarks on a Lotus Screen

Social Life in an Ancient SettingComplete

Watermarks on a Lotus Screen

A farewell screen covered in painted lotuses will earn Shen Ou three months’ wages, enough to repair her mother’s boat and send her younger brother to learn to read. Yet sixteen households behind the screen must move out within ten days, and the Shen family is among them. She is accustomed to painting the silvery gray undersides of lotus leaves and knows every waterline along the foot of the old walls; the farewell banquet presses her to finish the painting, but the pond-dredging plan at the government office does not match those watermarks.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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The Uneven Flute

Ancient Chinese–Style MysteryComplete

The Uneven Flute

On cool nights by the painted bridge, A-Yu can always recognize Uncle Hong’s old flute: its third hole leaks air, and it cannot reach the high notes. When a grain boat is robbed, the flute’s sound suddenly becomes evidence of collusion with bandits, and a sack of new rice appears beside the old man’s bed. A-Yu remembers that the last note that night was too straight, but everyone else will believe only the rice sack before them. As he questions people door to door, the trail leads ever closer to the sickbed he once repaired for someone.

Ku Wuji · AI Writing · 1 chapter

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Stories and poems lead back to one another.Find inspiration in the poetry collection

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