Zuo Ci’s supernatural encounter with Cao Cao transforms a courteous exchange of oranges into a contest between imperial power and a Daoist wonder-worker whom force cannot contain. Through impossible feats, repeated escapes, and a final apparition, the episode strips Cao Cao’s authority of its usual certainty and leaves him collapsed from shock.

Diplomatic Gift and First Encounter

After a kind of peace has been established, Sun Quan sends forty loads of sweet oranges to Cao Cao’s newly completed palace as a gesture of gratitude. On the journey, the porters rest at the foot of a hill, where they meet an old man who is half blind and lame, dressed in strange, worn clothes. He offers to help, lifts one of the loads, and carries it some distance. When he leaves, the porters find their loads unexpectedly lighter. The stranger identifies himself as Zuo Ci, says he comes from the same village as Cao Cao, and asks the porters to convey his greetings. Then he disappears.

At the palace, Cao Cao eagerly peels an orange and discovers that it is empty. The head porter explains the encounter, and Zuo Ci is announced at the palace at that very moment. Summoned before Cao Cao, he cuts open an orange that proves full and ripe, while the fruit Cao Cao opens remains dried and hollow. The contrast makes the marvel personal: the gift that should affirm the relationship between rulers instead becomes a demonstration that Cao Cao cannot control what appears before him.

The Daoist’s Claim and Cao Cao’s Response

Before explaining the oranges, Zuo Ci asks for food and drink. He consumes large quantities without apparent ill effect, deepening Cao Cao’s bewilderment. Zuo Ci then recounts that, while studying on Emei Mountain in Shu, he heard his name called from within a stone wall. A clap of thunder split the wall open, revealing three scrolls titled the Supreme Revelations of the Heavenly Texts, devoted respectively to Heaven, Earth, and humanity.

Zuo Ci describes the scrolls as teaching such arts as riding clouds and winds, passing through mountains, and changing shape. He invites Cao Cao to join him on Emei Mountain and become his student, promising him the texts. Cao Cao says he would welcome such a retreat but cannot decide whom to trust with the court. Zuo Ci proposes Xuande, pointing to his membership in the imperial family, and warns that otherwise he may send a magic sword to cut off Cao Cao’s head. Cao Cao interprets the proposal as proof that Zuo Ci is allied with Xuande and orders his arrest. The encounter has shifted from spectacle to political challenge: the question of who should govern the court enters the magician’s invitation to withdraw from power.

Arrest and Banquet Performance

A dozen guards rush to seize Zuo Ci, but they cannot move him; he appears to be asleep. When they finally get him to a cell, the chains fall away, and seven days without food or drink leave him unaffected. Cao Cao has no answer to this failure of ordinary restraint. Later, while Cao Cao hosts a banquet, Zuo Ci appears again, this time wearing wooden clogs, and offers to fetch whatever the lavish table lacks.

Cao Cao challenges him to provide a dragon’s liver for a stew. Zuo Ci draws a dragon on the wall and waves his sleeve; the drawing opens, and a fresh, hot liver falls out. Cao Cao dismisses the feat as a trick concealed in the sleeve, but Zuo Ci continues, turning each skeptical demand into another test. When Cao Cao asks for a peony in winter, Zuo Ci has a bowl brought, splashes water into it, and produces a fully grown flower bearing two blooms. Invited to join the feast, he says the finest fish come from the River Song; from a pond beneath the window he pulls out two dozen large perch, which prove to have the four pouches he identifies as characteristic of fish from that river. When Cao Cao challenges him to supply the purple-sprout ginger needed to cook them, Zuo Ci produces it in a golden bowl. Nestled inside is The New Treatise of Meng De, a book Cao Cao reads and finds true to his own thinking.

Wine, Pursuit, and the Apparition

Zuo Ci next fills a jade cup with wine and promises that drinking it will bring a thousand years of life. Suspicious, Cao Cao insists that Zuo Ci drink first. The Daoist takes a jade pin from his hair, divides the wine in the cup, and drinks one half; Cao Cao refuses the rest. In disgust, Zuo Ci throws the cup to the floor, where it becomes a white turtle dove and flies around the hall. Zuo Ci then vanishes. The offer of long life ends not in persuasion but in another transformation that leaves Cao Cao unable to distinguish a banquet marvel from a threat.

Learning that Zuo Ci has left through the main gate, Cao Cao orders Xu Chu and three hundred soldiers to pursue and capture him. They see him walking just ahead, yet cannot catch up, however fast they run. When the pursuit reaches the hills, Zuo Ci appears among a flock of sheep. Xu Chu fires an arrow, but Zuo Ci disappears; Xu Chu then slaughters the sheep in anger, leaving their young shepherd distressed. One sheep’s head speaks, telling the boy to put the heads back, and another voice promises to restore the flock. The shepherd sees Zuo Ci do so before vanishing again. The episode carries the pursuit beyond Cao Cao’s control: the soldiers’ violence falls upon the flock, while the fugitive remains elusive and reverses its consequences.

Manhunt and Public Reversal

After the shepherd’s master reports what happened, Cao Cao has likenesses of Zuo Ci drawn and circulated throughout the country, ordering his arrest. Three days later, hundreds of men who look exactly like the Daoist are brought into the capital. The attempted identification turns into confusion, and Cao Cao orders the men taken outside the city walls and killed. The measure meant to make the elusive fugitive recognizable instead multiplies the spectacle and exposes the danger of treating an uncanny appearance as something a ruler can settle by decree.

As Cao Cao and five hundred soldiers watch, a thin black mist rises from each severed head, swirls upward, and merges into the figure of Zuo Ci. He summons a white crane, seats himself upon it, and declares that the “rats of the earth follow the golden tiger” but that one day the evil one will be no more. Cao Cao orders his archers to fire, but a strong wind scatters everything. The executed men rise, clutching their severed heads, and rush toward Cao Cao and his soldiers; the officials cower and faint. The narrative then sets political force against supernatural power: a powerful man may overthrow a country, it observes, but the powers of a Daoist immortal are greater.

Aftermath and Narrative Turn

Cao Cao watches the dead return to life and collapses from the shock. The wind then disappears, and the bodies disappear with it. He is carried back to his palace, but the usual efforts cannot cure the shock. His defeat is therefore not a change of office or territory but a collapse of composure: after issuing commands, sending guards, and deploying soldiers, he is left unable to master either the apparition or its effects on him.

The episode closes by leaving that collapse unresolved. It asks whether this is the end for Cao Cao, then turns to the next development: an imperial astrologer recommends inviting Guan Lu, an extraordinary diviner, to advise him. The supernatural encounter thus functions both as a self-contained demonstration of Zuo Ci’s power and as a hinge in the narrative, carrying Cao Cao’s crisis from failed coercion into divination.