While Xing Xing is out gathering jujubes, she hears human and animal screams coming from the caves. She rushes back and sees that the raccoon has eaten two of the toes on Wei Ping’s left foot. Her stepmother beats the raccoon to death with a stick and tells her daughter to look at this misfortune as an opportunity: “[N]ow your feet will be much smaller than we’d dared to hope” (41).

Xing Xing’s stepmother orders her stepdaughter to bring her a cleaver. When Xing Xing doesn’t move, she threatens to cut her face for bringing the “demon” raccoon and the “demon” fish into their home. Weeping, Xing Xing runs outside and returns the carp to the pond. Behind her, Wei Ping shrieks in pain as her mother chops off two of the toes on her right foot so it will match her left foot.

.Xing Xing sits beside the pool and speaks to her mother’s spirit: “Mother, what can I do? Where can I go?” (43). She’s certain that her stepmother will kick her out of the family, leaving her with few options. The fish caresses her fingertips soothingly. Xing Xing blames herself for what befell Wei Ping, thinking that the raccoon must be the reincarnation of a wicked person and recalling that she didn’t trust the animal with the fish. Distraught, Xing Xing imagines herself as a frog swept out to sea by a “wild and swift” (43) river.

Some time later, Xing Xing’s stepmother, now washed and dressed in clean clothes, tells her to fetch the enslaved boy who works for Master Tang so that he can help Xing Xing carry Wei Ping. The stepmother announces that they’re going to visit her husband’s grave. She also tells Xing Xing to sell the bowl that used to hold the fish to Master Tang’s wife and warns her never to tell anyone what happened to Wei Ping’s toes.

Master Tang’s wife, Mei Zi, agrees to purchase the bowl as a gift for her daughter-in-law. She leaves the room to retrieve the payment, and Xing Xing gazes in awe at the luxurious furniture, elaborate art, and rows upon rows of beautifully painted bottles of medicine that fill the Tang family’s home. When Mei Zi returns, Xing Xing asks if she has any medicine for foot pain, and the woman explains that the bottles are empty decorative objects. Mei Zi gives Xing Xing a purse filled with copper coins and offers her one of the centuries-old pottery shards in her collection. Xing Xing humbly tries to refuse the gift, but Mei Zi insists that Xing Xing should have one of the artifacts because she recognizes their beauty and value. Xing Xing selects a shard with a picture of a frog and a carp on it.

Xing Xing, her stepmother, and Wei Ping gather at the shrine where they worship the ancestors of the Wu family. The woman presents an offering of rice and snake meat and beseeches the ancestors’ spirits to bless Wei Ping and Xing Xing so that the family can escape misfortune. Wei Ping is delirious with agony, and her mother urges Xing Xing and the enslaved boy to carry Wei Ping to Master Wu’s grave as quickly as they can.

At her father’s grave, Wei Ping cries out, “Stop this pain, Father, I beg you. I beg all my ancestors” (57). The stepmother apologizes to Master Wu’s spirit for her daughter’s blunt, emotional words. Xing Xing and the boy light candles and incense, which they believe will invite spirits to draw near. With great formality and humility, the stepmother reminds Master Wu’s spirit that their family performed all the proper funerary rites for him and that she will continue to dress in ugly and uncomfortable sackcloth until she has been a widow for three years, so they shouldn’t be haunted by harmful spirits. She also apologizes for Wei Ping’s suggestion that she remarry and states that she would sooner die than take another husband. She promises that, if Master Wu helps Wei Ping find a husband, she will raise her daughter’s second son as her own child, giving Wu the male heir that he didn’t have while he was alive.

The stepmother sets a sack of paper money on fire as an offering to her late husband, and Wei Ping voices her fear that the family cannot afford this. Xing Xing’s heart is filled with pity for her stepmother and Wei Ping. She blames herself for not sensing when her father’s death was near. He perished instantly when he fell into a ravine, so she never had a chance to hear his last words. Knowing that her father loved “little objects of beauty” (59), Xing Xing buries the pottery shard Mei Zi gave her beside his grave. She comforts herself with the thought that the friendship of the carp in the pool means more to her than an object painted with a fish.

The stepmother resolves to protect her daughter from demons even if she has to “fight with [her] very life” (64). She has Xing Xing and the enslaved boy construct bamboo walls and a bamboo corridor around the kang where the feverish Wei Ping rests because demons are believed to be unable to turn corners. The family also places a plate of pork on Wei Ping’s bed and scatters boxes of insects around the home to distract evil spirits.

The next day, the stepmother sends Xing Xing out into the summer heat to search for the itinerant doctor. She doesn’t give her daughter any food because she hopes that hunger will motivate her to move faster. Before Xing Xing leaves on her errand, she visits the carp and promises to return to it.

Xing Xing walks to the neighboring village, where she sees men betting on fights between insects. She asks a shopkeeper about the doctor and learns that he’s already gone to a town downriver that’s at least half a day’s journey away. She worries what the delay will mean for her stepmother and Wei Ping.