The fox spirit Daji built a garden of ice sculptures in the Shang palace — frozen images of everyone who had crossed her. Each one perfect. Each one a warning.

But ice melts.

When the Zhou army entered the palace, the ice had begun to melt. And in the melting, secrets were revealed — including the location of the original Ice Mirror, which showed not the past but the truth of what each person truly desired.

Many who looked into the Mirror found things they did not wish to find.

Daji herself looked last. What she saw in the Mirror is not recorded. What is recorded is what she said before she vanished:

"I wanted to be loved. That was the only lie I ever told."

Then she became a fox again — the small, ordinary kind — and slipped through a crack in the palace wall. No one knows where she went. Some say she returned to the mountain where all fox spirits are born. Some say she was never real at all.

Most scholars believe the third option: she was both at once, which is the most dangerous kind.