A boy cuts himself open to spare his parents, and his houseless soul comes back begging for a temple to live in. The witness is Myths & Legends of China (a compilation of Chinese myth, published 1922), in the story of the unruly hero No-cha. Having killed a dragon-king's son and drawn ruin down on his family, No-cha takes a sword before his accusers, sacrifices his own body, and dies — his soul "borne on the wind" to the cave of his master. There he is told his home is no longer among the living, and instructed to ask his mother for a shrine on Ts'ui-p'ing Shan, where after three years of incense he may be reincarnated.

What follows is the motif proper: the dead soul lodged in a built house of worship. Night after night No-cha appears to his sleeping mother, pleading, "since my death, my soul, separated from my body, wanders about" without a home; "Build me, I pray you, a temple on Ts'ui-p'ing Shan, that I may be reincarnated". She yields, the temple rises, and "his image was set up in it". The shrine is no empty monument — "Miracles were not wanting", and "the number of pilgrims who visited the shrine increased daily", for "the spirit of the temple on this mountain has continued to perform" wonders. The soul, denied a body, has found instead a dwelling of wood and incense, and a following.

The fragile tenancy is broken by the boy's own father. Enraged to find his cursed son worshipped, Li Ching "whipped the statue until it fell to pieces", and "the temple was burnt to the ground" — evicting the soul a second time and setting father against son anew. Thompson files this among the perils of the soul, and the peril here is precise: a spirit's afterlife depends on a house of wood that a single furious man can burn. The temple is at once refuge and hostage. If a soul with no body must borrow a home from the living, what does it owe to those who built it — and what can they take back?