Gu Daosheng’s heart was beating like crazy.
Ah, !
In the next second, a dizzying surge of power hit as if the world were turning upside down, and the low blow struck its target solid.
Gu Daosheng’s heart trembled; he was secretly regretting that his kick had been so harsh that it deprived such a handsome man of his virility. But before he could even balance himself, he was startled into a stumble by a blood-curdling scream.
Then he froze.
He saw that this was not a bustling, crowded night street, nor was the person he had kicked the handsome, suit-clad man.
Instead, it was a middle-aged man clad in a bright red wedding robe. At this moment, he was curled up on the floor near the doorway, clutching his private area tightly with both hands, groaning in agonizing pain with a face as pale as gold leaf.
An exhibitionist.
Gu Daosheng looked down and noticed that he was also wearing a bright red wedding robe. Suspicion and uneasiness rose in his heart, leaving him utterly confused.
Looking up again, behind the door stood a full-length mirror, half of which had shattered like a spiderweb.
An attempted force of intimacy that failed.
The moment his eyes met those of the youth in the reflection, Gu Daosheng instantly broke into a cold sweat.
Who else could that youth be but the bride he had seen today?
No wonder he looked so familiar,
Who else could that face belong to but himself?
Gu Daosheng was born on a mountain and grew up on a mountain.
It was a fine mountain, endowed with extraordinary natural beauty and spiritual essence.
It was just completely isolated from the outside world.
Before the age of eighteen, from the time he could remember, he had only ever seen one person: his master. He and his master were entirely dependent on each other.
Perhaps because he learned to meditate before he even learned to walk, rolling and crawling at the crack of dawn to mess around with the trees and grass, practicing martial arts diligently despite his fragile health, he had absorbed an abundance of essence from the sun and moon.
He possessed a face sculptured by heaven itself, with not a single feature that was not striking.
His long eyebrows reached into his temples, and a deep crease pressed over his eyelids, adding a touch of profundity to his appearance. Logically, he should have looked stern and solemn, but the corners of his eyes tilted up slightly, as if turning into a heart-snatching hook that seduced people into losing their sense of direction.
His pair of eyes were not starkly black and white, but rather a clear, moist gray, resembling the surface of a river on a damp, foggy day.
If the color were any lighter, those eyes would be white pupils; with this hazy touch of gray, when he stared intently at someone, no one could pull their eyes away.
Gu Daosheng looked straight at the shattered mirror… and even he couldn’t pull his eyes away.
His face was reflected inside, warped and distorted by the fractures in the glass, yet he could still clearly discern the slightly messy hair loosely veiling his eyes, a faintly bewildered expression, and the rest of his semi-long hair tied loosely behind his neck, brushing against his shoulders, framing his delicate features, red lips, and white teeth as bright as the moon.
…What kind of ghost place is this? Was that ghost infant a jinx?
Did he really manage to get himself stuck in here?
Mr. Lou! Mr. Lou, are you all right?! Mr. Lou, please get up quickly! Just then, two young male servants suddenly rushed over in a panic. Their voices were so loud that if they were any louder, the other unbroken half of the mirror would shatter as well.
It startled Gu Daosheng.
They did not look very old, just teenagers. Positioning themselves on either side, they hurriedly and clumsily hauled Mr. Lou up.
It was slightly better than an eight-bearer sedan chair, lifting him up like a two-man stretch.
Scattered on the ground was a piece of white gauze, the bride’s white veil, torn violently into two pieces that meandered across the floor like a pool of spilled moonlight.
The door was broken.
A sliver of the bright moon peeked through the door top, casting shadows that illuminated the courtyard outside, which was vast beyond sight.
Truly a wealthy household’s grand courtyard.
Looking at Mr. Lou, who had been lifted up but couldn’t stand straight and seemed nearly at death’s door, the name Lou Guangrui inexplicably popped into Gu Daosheng’s mind.
This baffling, extremely eerie scene felt creepy. Gu Daosheng’s cold sweat had not yet receded, but not a single trace of panic showed on his face.
His master had once said: Ghosts possess heavy yin energy, while humans possess yang energy. Ghosts are actually afraid of humans because when yang flourishes, yin wanes. However, once a human displays fear, the ghost ceases to be afraid, as yin then overcomes yang.
Gu Daosheng wasn’t afraid at all.
A Taoist master’s vision is far superior to that of ordinary people; they can see both humans and ghosts.
However, if a ghost disguised itself as a well-behaved human, he couldn’t immediately distinguish whether the person in front of him was human or ghost without external aid.
Hiding his hand inside the sleeve of his wedding robe, Gu Daosheng formed a ghost-identifying hand seal.
…They were surprisingly all living people.
Ah! Twelfth Young Master, how could you treat your husband like this? What are you going to do if you’ve broken his roots?! One of the male servants flipped out again, crouching down to lift the front curtain of Lou Guangrui’s wedding robe to check.
The fabric had barely brushed against his skin when Lou Guangrui gasped heavily, trembling and rolling his eyes in agony.
At this point, he certainly regretted wearing a wedding robe to get married, trying to play around with ancient style and romantic ambiance.
What Twelfth Young Master? I have my own name, Gu Daosheng said unhappily, looking calmly at the people in front of him.
He was going to see where on earth this place was.
captured by shock, the servant’s lips trembled as he blabbered frantically: Don’t you want your future happiness anymore? You were the one who cried and begged to marry Mr. Lou, and now that you’ve just stepped through the door, you’re putting on airs? You won’t even let people call you Twelfth Young Master, do you want to be the First Wife instead?! What are you doing out of bed in the middle of the night? Not even taking off your clothes, aren’t you ashamed to let word get out?
His posture and tone made it seem as if he were the real Twelfth Young Master and Gu Daosheng was an imposter who had usurped his place.
Ashamed? What is there to be ashamed of? Am I bringing shame to my master? Gu Daosheng was certainly not afraid when seeing humans.
What was there to fear about humans?
He stripped off the wedding robe and threw it onto the ground. The suffocating feeling of his body being restricted and his neck throttled by marriage instantly vanished. Taking things as they came, he pointed at Lou Guangrui with proper decorum: Given Mr. Lou’s situation, letting word get out about him would be far more embarrassing.
Haven’t seen you for two days and you’ve gone mad? Where did you get a master or a master’s wife…
Slap!
Lou Guangrui slapped the servant, brushing him aside like a tumbler toy swaying back and forth. Refusing their help, he struggled to straighten his back, standing firm with his knees turned inward and toes pointed in, and sternly scolded: He is the young master, and you are a servant. If you dare to speak to him like this today, will you dare to disrespect me tomorrow?
The servant fell to the ground, bearing a five-finger print on his face. He crawled on his knees to the edge of Mr. Lou’s legs, grabbing a piece of his hem while looking up with a flattering expression.
Where was this attitude earlier? Why wait until after he finished his disrespect to strike? Gu Daosheng watched coldly from the side.
layout of the room was brightly lit, and Lou Guangrui stood at the doorway. His face was as pale as if it had been soaked in water, but after hitting the servant, it flushed red, smoothing away the natural shadows and flattening his features, nose and all, onto a single plane, as if drawn on a piece of white paper.
His back was almost entirely swallowed by the shadow of the moon, impossible to see clearly.
He wasn’t angry with Gu Daosheng. Compared to his rage when slapping the male servant, his expression took a complete turn, even smiling kindly: Daosheng, I was too impatient. I hope I didn’t scare you; please don’t blame me. I won’t sleep here tonight, so you can rest peacefully early. Tomorrow morning, I will have someone wake you up and take you to meet the First Wife and the others.
Daosheng?
He called him by Gu Daosheng’s actual name.
What, was the name ‘Daosheng’ sold in wholesale? To run into someone with the same name right after coming down the mountain, Gu Daosheng thought unhappily.
However, at a time like this, the more one said, the more mistakes one would make; it was better to just observe.
As soon as the master and his two servants left, the entire courtyard quieted down, turning as silent as a graveyard.
Only Gu Daosheng was left; not a single servant remained.
How could he possibly sleep? He immediately went into the courtyard to investigate the situation.
The dim moonlight poured down, gently caressing Gu Daosheng’s semi-long hair tied casually behind his neck. He reached up to feel it; the gold cord binding his hair was still there, allowing him to breathe a sigh of relief.
The gold cord was a treasure given to him by his master, a magical artifact used to store items. Following Gu Daosheng was truly a waste for it, as it didn’t even have a name.
It wasn’t even as good as the wholesale name Daosheng.
Usually, when nothing was happening, he used it to tie his hair like a hairband. When something happened, he would pull it off, shake it, and flick it out, transforming it into a golden flag net.
All of Gu Daosheng’s magic tools were inside it, several hundred items in total. The spirit-binding pouch containing half a ghost was one of those tools.
Gu Daosheng closed one eye, opened the spirit-binding pouch, and peeked inside.
The 0.5 ghost wasn’t lost; it was still there.
Gu Daosheng didn’t need any magic tools for the time being. He only took out a yellow talisman. With a loosen of his hand, the gold cord returned to the end of his hair, serving once again as a wasted hairband.
The courtyard was very large. It took several dozen steps just to reach the wall, covering an area of nearly an acre.
He picked up a few rugged, oddly-shaped stones, they would have to do, and carefully arranged a small magic formation in the center of the yard. He then pinched the yellow talisman, channeled Qi into his fingertips to ignite a flame, and tossed it into the stone formation.
Gu Daosheng barked in a low voice: Identify!
The yellow talisman spun in circles, bobbing up and down, turning left and right in an attempt to break out of the stone formation. However, blocked by the invisible walls of the array, it kept floating and spinning in the center, striving to identify the current situation.
Finally, the glowing ashes revealed the result: Ghost Trace.
Tsk… this is troublesome. Gu Daosheng regretted not studying harder when he had the chance, knitting his brows and muttering to himself, What did Master say before… Everything in existence can be traced.
If a person died with an unfulfilled wish and conveyed it in a dream to a relative, what the relative dreamed of was the shadow of that ghost. Or, if it possessed a living person, the actions performed by the possessed person were the ghost borrowing their body.
Neither involved using one’s own physical body to participate in the ghost’s life story.
Ghost Trace was different.
Only ghosts whose lingering resentment remained unextinguished, who lingered in the mortal world for a long time refusing to enter reincarnation, and who were on the verge of fading from heaven and earth, could condense a Domain of Ghost Trace.
The ghost master of a Ghost Trace domain would snatch an unlucky soul and drag them in, forcing them to personally act out all the events of its past life, and then complete the unfulfilled wish it had before dying.
And right now, Gu Daosheng was that extraordinarily unlucky soul.
In plain English: Gu Daosheng had to use his own name and his own body to live out a dead person’s life.
The reason he was dragged into this was likely because he had accidentally stepped into the boundary of this Ghost Trace domain, the entire Lou family estate.
The master of the Ghost Trace used its final remnant spirit to force Gu Daosheng to experience the scenario firsthand, reliving its life and completing its dying wish.
Otherwise, Gu Daosheng would have to live out his entire life here in the role of a male wife.
It was a total dead end.
Gu Daosheng: …
I am a Taoist master! I have divine bones protecting my body! Even if your concentrated resentment is packed into this final remnant spirit, you still can’t control me, Gu Daosheng said speechlessly, clutching his knees as he squatted in front of the stone formation, addressing the yellow talisman ashes as if they were the ghost master who had been dead for years.
I have my own thoughts, my own soul, and my soul is very firm. I won’t act like a marionette being possessed, recreating your every move from when you were alive.
I don’t know your memories, so how am I supposed to know what your wish is?
If I don’t know your wish, I can’t help you fulfill it.
And since you’ve been dead for so many years, my only eventual outcome is to follow in your footsteps and die! Are you a fierce ghost? Specializing in harming people.
Harming a Taoist master is a double crime, and harming a young Taoist master is a million times worse!
After rambling on for a while, no ghost paid any attention to him.
With life and death on the line, Gu Daosheng let down his hair, shook the gold cord, and flipped through every single magic tool inside.
He threw them all over the ground.
After bustling around for half a day, he gained nothing; there was no tool capable of breaking a Ghost Trace.
He rested his chin on his hands and looked up at the bright moon.
Then he remembered that before he left the mountain, his master had drawn three Distress Talismans for him.
In times of necessity, they could summon a mythical beast, Master, save me!
Gu Daosheng hadn’t wanted them, brazenly claiming that out in the world one must rely on oneself, and had burned the talismans quite casually.
Meanwhile, after practicing magic for eighteen years, he had only learned how to draw offensive talismans, because using them looked cool, regardless of whether he could win the fight or not.
He also learned how to draw talismans like Turning Stone into Gold, Dust Avoidance, Help-Me-Study Sea of Knowledge, Make Master Shut Up for Half an Hour Because I Don’t Want to Hear Him Lecture, and Make Things Return to Their Places Because the Room is Too Messy to Clean… along with other fun but completely useless talismans.
The more he learned those, the harder his master beat him.
Defensive talismans like Shield, Escape, and Healing were things he considered only cowards would learn. Being naturally bold, Gu Daosheng had studied them very poorly.
Not to mention Distress Call.
Master, save me, Gu Daosheng slapped his hands together, his face scrunched up like a bitter melon. He clasped his hands towards the bright moon and prayed fervently, bowing completely to the ground with total flexibility: Save me, save me, save me, good Master. I promise I won’t make you angry ever again. I won’t climb trees or rip tiles off the roof anymore. Save me! Waaah…
The surroundings remained dead quiet. His master was probably meditating on the mountain peak, unable to send care from thousands of miles away; not even a trace of a breeze passed by.
The moon’s radiance grew even dimmer, curving into a thin line. Judging by its position, it was the moon of the third or fourth day of the lunar month, obscured behind a thin layer of cloud.
Until it completely disappeared and hid away, a speck of hazy white lit up in the eastern sky.
Dawn was breaking.
Since things had come to this, he might as well sleep first.
With a wave of his hand, Gu Daosheng collected his magic tools, bound his long hair, and let out a heavy sigh, acting far beyond his years. He then strolled back into the room to sleep.
He didn’t glance at the mess on the floor at all. It wasn’t caused by him anyway; whoever smashed it should clean it up. Gu Daosheng certainly wouldn’t lift a finger. He walked over to a soft bed with a backrest and lay down.
Just as the east was breaking dawn, Gu Daosheng felt as if he had barely closed his eyes when someone knocked on the half-fallen door, walking in over the shattered mirror fragments with a crunching sound.
Twelfth Young Master, Mr. Lou is asking you to get up and freshen up so you can go together to meet the First Wife. After meeting her, you will have breakfast.
Fine then.
Gu Daosheng let out a yawn, pretending to be bleary-eyed. In front of him stood a male servant he didn’t recognize, not the idiot from last night. Perhaps he could strike up a conversation: Why do you call me Twelfth Young Master?
The news of the bride battling Mr. Lou last night had already spread like wildfire, though no one dared to discuss it. Hearing him ask this, the servant thought Gu Daosheng hadn’t had enough of fighting and wanted to battle him too. He immediately bent his waist, lowering his gaze respectfully without daring to be perfunctory: You are Mr. Lou’s twelfth spouse.
…Fine then.
Confirming there was no immediate danger, he took the new clothes prepared by the servant and smoothly accepted his new identity. Unexpectedly, the moment he walked out the door, he saw an unexpected person from a distance.
The handsome man he had almost kicked was actually here!
He wore a low-profile black suit, looking almost identical to when Gu Daosheng first saw him last night. Except now he stood with his eyes cast down, not looking over. His slightly pale profile was sharp and chiseled like a blade, forming a stark contrast with the black suit. His brow bone rose like a mountain peak, and his eyebrows were as dark as ink strokes.
His high-bridged nose was without glasses; with that change, the gentlemanly aura he carried had almost completely vanished, replaced by a student-like air of preferring solitude.
He seemed a few years younger, perhaps only seventeen or eighteen.
The unique, cold, and aloof aura surrounding him made the blue sky behind him look like a roughly drawn black-and-white painting.
Seeing him for the second time, Gu Daosheng didn’t actually know the man. He ought to maintain the demeanor of a gentleman, observing from a distance without crossing any boundaries. Yet, the heart in his chest was throwing a fit and demanding to split apart, pounding wildly without restraint regardless of how calm his body tried to remain.
Daosheng, come here. Seeing Gu Daosheng, Lou Guangrui showed a kindly smile on his face. At the same time, he waved at the quiet boy standing beside him and said, Hongchen, we are a family now. Introduce yourselves.
Call him Little Stepmom.