The Spirit in the Bottle

A poor student, gathering firewood in the forest to pay for his studies, heard a small, pleading voice calling from beneath the roots of an old oak tree, begging to be released. Digging down, he uncovered a sealed glass bottle with something dark and restless swirling inside, and when he pulled the stopper, a spirit burst out in a cloud of smoke, growing rapidly into a towering, menacing figure.

The spirit announced that as a reward for his long imprisonment, he would now break the student's neck rather than reward him, since that was the terrible promise he had sworn to whoever eventually freed him after so many decades of confinement. The student, thinking quickly rather than panicking outright, expressed loud, exaggerated disbelief that a creature so enormous could possibly have fit inside so small a bottle, insisting he would never believe it unless he saw it happen again with his own eyes.

The proud spirit, unable to resist proving his own claim, shrank himself back down and slid through the bottle's narrow neck to demonstrate — at which point the student immediately jammed the stopper back in, trapping him once more. Only when the spirit, now genuinely desperate, offered a real reward instead of a threat did the student agree to release him a second time, receiving in exchange a small cloth that could heal any wound and turn iron to silver with a single touch, a gift that funded the rest of his education and set him up for a prosperous life — proof that a threat made from a position of sudden, temporary power often has more bluff in it than the one who's actually trapped realizes.