They grow closer and she becomes enchanted with her playing and her company, but are punished for being more than their goddess wanted. Her growing interest in the pipa player makes it easy to fall out of their goddess’s will for them. Then, she begins to talk about her friends in the Shang Era. Human achievement and progress force her to move from China. Instead, she begins to speak about how her immortality makes time seem circular.

She gives four different versions of what could be the reasons she and her husband married, but confirms none. They are at a housewarming party for one of his friends where she observes what they seem to think of her–beautiful, maybe shallow. She strikes up a conversation with him about an old friend who played another instrument, the pipa, and speaks until he looks uncomfortable. She remarks that her advancing age is the culprit for the lapse of judgement, then goes on to tell that her husband is in love with his best friend, who is in turn in love with a musician. “The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains” by Jane Pek opens with the narrator, an immortal who has married a man in order to tether herself in the world, saying she has made the wrong choice in doing so.

Water nine tailed fox