4 ideas
A woodcutter named Wang Zhi comes upon youths playing Go on a mountain, stops to watch, and is given something like a date pit that stops his hunger. When one of them asks why he has not left, he finds his axe-handle has rotted away. Back in his village, no one from his own generation is still alive.
Time in the immortal realm runs at a different rate from time in the human world. A short stay in one equals generations in the other.
The tale presents deep absorption in watching a game as something that makes time disappear. The observer's sense of time stops while the world's time keeps running. The rotted tool shows the cost: the work and life the spectator left behind decay while his attention is held elsewhere.
Zhiguai collections present strange events as terse factual records, not as invented fiction. They give named people, specific places and plain outcomes without moralizing or explanation. This documentary framing gives the uncanny the weight of history and invites belief rather than interpretation.