A person’s spirit-light naturally depletes the way a lamp burns oil—it’s a very gradual process. It’s absolutely nothing like the way Sister Wu’s spirit-light scattered and flew apart. The spiritual reservoir affects the connection between body and soul; once the spiritual reservoir is exhausted, the hun and po spirits leave the body, and the person dies. So in a sense, the spiritual reservoir is about equivalent to one’s lifespan.
He Yu only wants to be an ordinary person. Ordinary people don’t understand how to resolve these paranormal incidents. Xiang Yang may still be pretty green right now, but he is the male lead, after all, and he has the Paranormal Affairs Bureau backing him—resolving Sister Wu’s problem shouldn’t be an issue.
Xiang Yang had previously wanted to test He Yu, talking to him about paranormal matters every single day, and repeatedly reminding him that if he ever encountered anything abnormal, he must contact him. Giving Xiang Yang’s contact information to Sister Wu was thus perfectly reasonable, and there was no need to worry about exposure.
This way he could resolve Sister Wu’s trouble while also diverting Xiang Yang’s attention—killing several birds with one stone. Perfect!
Over the following days, Xiang Yang indeed didn’t come back to the shop.
He Yu was in good spirits, and bought another batch of tomato seeds, ready to plant them in the ground. He had specially set aside a small plot in the courtyard for growing vegetables.
Chen Shi attentively prepared a hoe, a small shovel, and a little stool for He Yu.
“You’ve been excessively diligent these past two days. Out with it—what’s going on?” He Yu asked.
Chen Shi had always been fairly hardworking, but these past few days he’d been especially attentive, polishing the shop windows until they gleamed, not missing a single nook or cranny inside or out.
Chen Shi smiled ingratiatingly. “Boss, I’d like to ask for an advance on my wages…”
He Yu’s mind turned and he immediately understood. “You want to buy a phone?”
Chen Shi nodded repeatedly. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, mm-hm!”
The shop had been sporadically getting a bit of business these past few days, and every time he caught sight of someone else playing with their phone, he’d get unbearably envious.
“Then go buy one. What model do you like?” He Yu was very easygoing about it.
He wasn’t short on money these days; running the shop was purely for the fun of it. Chen Shi worked hard, so advancing him some wages was nothing.
Once he got his phone, Chen Shi was thrilled, and brought up again to the old-fashioned telephone whether it wanted to join up with the boss. The old telephone declined, and quietly held down the little plush toy, who was itching to give it a try as well.
It wasn’t that the old-fashioned telephone wasn’t interested—it just had reservations. Ever since the commotion upstairs had stopped, Chen Shi and the little plush toy had assumed the boss had personally resolved the predicament of the mother and son upstairs. But the old telephone had remained doubtful all along—just how exactly had he resolved it?
The old telephone was the one most deeply bound to the house; the other ghosts and spirits couldn’t sense it, but he could—ever since that day, not a single sound had come down from upstairs again.
This was an abnormal kind of silence.
As long as people are living there, all sorts of sounds are bound to occur, inevitably—heavy footsteps, furniture being moved, the chopping of vegetables, and so on. His telephone wire ran inside the walls, and he could sense many sounds that ordinary people couldn’t hear.
But after that day, there was no sound at all from upstairs anymore.
It was as if it had become an empty room.
Let’s keep watching a bit longer, he thought.
The boss really didn’t seem like a bad person. But he had to be careful. Chen Shi was already smitten; of the remaining two, one was innocent and naive, and the other carefree and thoughtless—so he had to be all the more cautious on their behalf.
After getting the phone, Chen Shi didn’t let playing with it interfere with his work. He was a ghost anyway, and didn’t need to sleep at night, so he could play as much as he liked. He knew what mattered most: clinging tightly to the boss’s golden thigh was the single most important thing!
When the phone was first in hand, Chen Shi spent all day tapping away at the screen with a stylus. The phone had a capacitive touchscreen, which worked off the human body’s electrical current, and Chen Shi was a ghost, his body currently made from a dinosaur plush toy. A dinosaur plush toy was an insulator, so touching the phone got no response at all.
He Yu found this very interesting, and enthusiastically wanted to help his own employee solve the problem. He wanted to re-examine the plush toy Chen Shi inhabited, to see if he could modify it to respond to a capacitive touchscreen.
After being experimented on a few times, Chen Shi couldn’t help but start begging the boss to let him off the hook.
He Yu agreed with a look of regret on his face. Chen Shi, seeing that expression, spent his days on tenterhooks, terrified that the boss might get interested again someday. Later, Chen Shi solved the problem himself: he sewed the stylus onto the dinosaur plush toy’s paw.
There were no customers in the shop that day, so Chen Shi tidied the whole place up, set the phone on the counter’s phone stand, with the little plush toy on the left and the old-fashioned telephone on the right.
Very few people used that kind of telephone anymore these days, so to keep it from looking out of place, Chen Shi had carefully arranged a few coordinating stuffed toys around it, making the old telephone look like a decoration.
Chen Shi had a phone of his own now, and he couldn’t just let the other ghosts watch idly—good things ought to be shared. The one out in the courtyard wasn’t interested in phones, so never mind him.
The phone was playing local news.
The police had captured a criminal gang that had been illegally digging up wild orchids, and along with them, a flower shop owner surnamed Hu, who had knowingly purchased and resold the stolen goods. Police seized over a dozen precious wild orchid plants from his shop, among which one slipper orchid was especially valuable, a first-class rare protected plant, said to be the panda of the plant world.
However, before the police arrived to make the arrest, Mr. Hu had already gone into the hospital—he had inexplicably fallen unconscious, and after being revived, he became extremely terrified, shouting all day that there were ghosts about.
He Yu clicked his tongue softly. He’d known that slipper orchid had something wrong with it!
Now that the orchid had been seized by the police, he didn’t know how they would handle it. If they replanted it back into the wild soon, that would be fine—but if it stayed in human hands for too long, someone else was bound to end up unconscious too.
Should he try to find some way to hint at this to Xiang Yang?
With the male lead absent, it was really rather inconvenient to be missing a tool character to pass word along to the Paranormal Affairs Bureau. If nothing else worked… he could always write another anonymous tip-off letter?
Just as he was mulling this over, someone pushed open the door, and the moment he entered, he raised the bag in his hand and flashed eight neat white teeth. “Boss, look what I brought you!”
Xiang Yang walked in looking travel-worn, his face somewhat haggard—it seemed he’d been through quite an ordeal these past few days.
He Yu’s eyes lit up at the sight of him. Speak of the devil and he shall appear—perfect timing to dump the trouble onto the male lead.
Xiang Yang, rarely met with such a welcoming attitude at He Yu’s place, was flattered. “Boss, don’t tell me you’ve been craving the good food I bring you?”
He Yu rolled his eyes at him. Before he could say anything, the news video on the phone had just finished playing and started looping through a second time.
Xiang Yang heard the news report and paused for a moment.
“What’s wrong?” He Yu asked.
“Boss, you haven’t bought any of those wild plants, have you?” Xiang Yang knew He Yu was currently fixing up his backyard and often went out to buy flowers. He’d never seen what the back of the shop looked like, though. Once he’d run into He Yu carrying a bunch of flowers back and wanted to help, but He Yu wouldn’t let him—he was quite unwilling to let him go around back.
“Of course not,” He Yu said. He just wanted to be an ordinary person lying flat in peace—why would he go and knowingly break the law?
Xiang Yang let out a breath of relief, and warned him, “Those plants might be trouble. Be careful when you buy flowers from now on too—whatever you do, don’t buy plants of unclear origin.”
He still couldn’t be sure whether the boss was really more than he seemed. After all this time, he hadn’t noticed a single abnormal thing. If the boss really was an ordinary person, then running into something like this would spell trouble.
“Got it,” He Yu agreed.
From the looks of it, the Paranormal Affairs Bureau had already discovered something was wrong with that orchid, so there was no need for him to think of a way to give them a hint after all.
“How are things going with Sister Wu?” He Yu began to display an ordinary person’s curiosity about paranormal incidents.
Xiang Yang let out a sigh. “More or less resolved, I’d say. Truth be told, this disaster was brought on by Sister Wu’s nephew himself. That kid is just way too much trouble.”
The unruly kid was always running around causing mischief, stealing chickens and such, and one day he ran off to a graveyard with his little friends, and to prove how bold he was, he urinated on a grave—and that was how he got haunted.
His family had found some sort of spirit medium from who-knows-where, and the medium said their child had brought this sin upon himself, and it couldn’t be resolved unless compensation was paid. But what the entity wanted wasn’t burning paper money or incense offerings—it wanted a person’s fortune. Once they paid up, the matter would be settled.
But the child’s own fortune wasn’t enough to cover it, so paying it off would cost him his life.
The family begged further, and the medium gave them a method for borrowing fortune, taking some of someone else’s fortune and lending it to the child, so the child wouldn’t have to pay with his life. But this method had a restriction: it could only borrow the fortune of a blood relative, and the person whose fortune was borrowed had to perform the ritual themselves.
The family couldn’t bear to lend their own fortune, so they set their sights with ill intent on Sister Wu.
Xiang Yang got angry just talking about it. He’d personally witnessed, while he was there, all the outrageous things that family had said. They said Sister Wu was doing well for herself, with strong fortune, so lending a little to save their son wouldn’t hurt her at all. Their son was the only one carrying on the family line for the Wu family, and surely Sister Wu couldn’t just watch the Wu family line die out.
By the time Xiang Yang got there, the medium had already fled. What he’d given them wasn’t some fortune-borrowing witchcraft at all—it was something far more terrifying: the forbidden technique of lifespan theft.
The victim of lifespan theft would offer incense for seven consecutive days; over the first several days, it would loosen the spiritual reservoir, and on the seventh day, it would steal away the entire spiritual reservoir all at once, and the victim would either die in an accident or suddenly drop dead.
If He Yu hadn’t pulled Sister Wu back that day, interrupting the progress of the ritual and forcing it to restart the seven days of offerings from scratch, Sister Wu would truly be gone by now.
Because he’d had to travel out of town, this matter was handled together with another senior from the Paranormal Affairs Bureau and Xiang Yang; they eliminated the wild ghost in the grave. Normally, once the ghost was eliminated, that self-destructive troublesome kid would have been fine. But because his family had performed that whole forbidden ritual earlier, now that the ghost was dead and the technique was broken, it was backfiring on them, and the kid didn’t have many days left either.
“Heaven watches everything a person does. Sooner or later, this was bound to happen.” Xiang Yang said.
“How is Sister Wu doing now?”
“She’s fine now. But she can’t come back for the time being.” As he spoke, Xiang Yang looked like he wanted to laugh. “That pack of shameless relatives of hers still wanted to blame Sister Wu for causing the child’s death, trying to bully her with sheer numbers. But Sister Wu had paid to hire several bodyguards before she even went—every single one of them over six-foot-one, rock-hard muscles, and the moment they planted themselves there, it was absolutely brilliant!”
At first he’d even told Sister Wu that hiring ordinary people wouldn’t do any good against a paranormal incident—who would have thought that was exactly what they’d be used for.
Xiang Yang gave a thumbs up. “Sister Wu—a heroine among women!”
That pack of shameless relatives had wilted for now, but Sister Wu still had plenty to settle regarding the shameless things they’d done, so she was staying on there for the time being.
Xiang Yang didn’t chat for long before his phone got a message, and he hurried off again.
After he’d gotten back, he’d first gone to report the lifespan-theft matter to the Paranormal Affairs Bureau, and only afterward come to the plush toy shop, which was also how he’d come to know about the orchid incident. But the Bureau had only just released him and had already called him back, clearly meaning something had changed with the case.
This time when Xiang Yang went back, two seniors were waiting for him at the front gate, and the moment they spotted him from a distance, they immediately walked over and, one on each side, escorted him into the Bureau.
Xiang Yang was somewhat dazed.
Three hours earlier, when he’d first gotten back to the Bureau, he’d walked in on his own, picked up the report form, written up a case summary and submitted it, filed into the records. The team leader had asked him a few questions related to the case, then approved his leave and told him to go rest.
The Paranormal Affairs Bureau had recently been run ragged over the disturbances at Wang Mountain and the sudden activity of organizations like the Seven Parts Association and the Descent Cult, and still had no energy to spare for mentoring rookies—unless a rookie stumbled onto a case themselves, they were left to their own devices.
If this case hadn’t involved the forbidden lifespan-theft technique, he probably wouldn’t even have gotten to see the team leader’s face.
Coming back this time, why was it being treated so seriously?
Xiang Yang was flanked and brought into a room by the two seniors, and checked over and over, more times than he could count, front and back, using both spiritual techniques and high technology, before everyone else’s expressions finally relaxed. Next he was taken to an interrogation room, where every single detail of this trip outside was asked through in careful detail.
By the time it was all over, the sky had already darkened. Xiang Yang found the senior in charge of escorting him and asked, “Sister Lei, what’s going on here?”
Lei Da—that really was her actual name—kept short hair that stopped at her ears, no longer than four finger-widths, with a lychee-sized round earring fastened to her left ear, said to be a ritual implement. Her look was crisp and clean, and her personality equally efficient.
She looked at Xiang Yang, considering that this kid was fairly obedient, all things considered. Although what he was asking about wasn’t information he was supposed to know at this point, this kid had already been unwittingly dragged into it, so there wasn’t much point in hiding it from him too heavily anymore.
Lei Da took him somewhere with no one around. “That spirit medium who knew the lifespan-theft technique might be connected to the Descent Cult.”
“The Descent Cult? What are they scheming now?” Xiang Yang asked.
He deeply despised that organization. There was no shortage of unofficial paranormal organizations, each with their own differing beliefs—some upright, some extreme—and the Descent Cult wasn’t the most powerful among them, but it was the most vicious and cruel.
They believed the world was filled with sin, and that sooner or later it would be cleansed thoroughly by the Lord of Wang Mountain. What did “cleansed thoroughly” mean? Once every living thing capable of producing sin was dead, that was called being cleansed thoroughly.
Because of this, they had never once treated human life as something that mattered, and the blood debts they carried were enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end.
Lei Da took a deep breath. “They’re searching for the Lord of Wang Mountain.”