“There’s something filthy clinging to these words.”
Jiang Yu looked up at him. “How do you know?”
“I can smell it… malice.”
Cang Ming’s gaze held pure disgust. “The kind I’m familiar with.”
Familiar?
Jiang Yu tightened her grip on her phone. That so-called uncle—she’d barely met him more than a few times in her life.
Where was that malice coming from?
She didn’t ask further. She turned the phone screen-down, placing it face-first on the table, as if sealing away something inauspicious. Whatever. Even if the sky fell, it could wait until after she’d slept.
…
The next morning, when Jiang Yu woke up, she found Cang Ming sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at her phone with the intense focus of someone deciphering ancient runes.
On the screen, a weather forecast host was smiling as she delivered the report.
“Within this tiny box,”
Cang Ming noticed she was awake and looked up, asking with utter seriousness, “why is a person’s soul imprisoned? Does he know tomorrow’s wind and rain?”
Jiang Yu rubbed her temples and took a deep breath.
“That’s called software, not a soul.”
“Software.”
Cang Ming repeated the word, then casually picked up a charred stick left over from last night’s fire and began scratching on the cement floor.
The strokes were archaic, the brushwork as sharp as if carved—the characters for “software” exactly.
Looking at the ground covered in his doodles-turned-memorandum, Jiang Yu sighed. “…I’ll buy you a notebook. You’re wasting the floor.”
After breakfast, Zhou Dafu was pressing for his goods, so Jiang Yu prepared to head out.
She’d barely walked a dozen meters out of the stone house, intending to leave Cang Ming with Aunt Lin, when a muffled grunt came from inside.
Jiang Yu immediately turned back and saw Cang Ming frowning, one hand pressed to his chest, where faint dark-red patterns flickered in and out of visibility.
The ten-meter restriction zone was real.
In the end, Jiang Yu had no choice but to compromise.
She went to the reef area herself, leaving the restless A-Wang to take Cang Ming around within sight.
So A-Wang, escorting a silver-haired handsome man capable of crippling the island’s signal, began a day tour of Deer Antler Island.
And then, A-Wang’s worldview shattered into pieces.
“Inside that iron house, why is an ice beast that breathes frost sealed away?”
Cang Ming pointed at the buzzing window-mounted air conditioner at the general store.
A-Wang’s mouth twitched. “Bro, that’s called an air conditioner.”
“The iron shell running on the road requires no spiritual power to drive—what principle is that?”
Cang Ming watched a motorcycle speed past.
A-Wang was already sweating. “Bro, it burns fuel. Science!”
“Do you people normally worship this figure in the painting?”
Cang Ming stood before a shelf in the supermarket, pointing at a brightly colored package of instant noodles, which featured a smiling celebrity spokesperson.
A-Wang nearly dropped to his knees on the spot. He felt like he wasn’t giving someone a tour—
He was giving a man who’d walked straight out of the Classic of Mountains and Seas a crash course in civilization.
Meanwhile, Aunt Lin felt an inexplicable closeness to Cang Ming and went so far as to drag out her family’s treasured photo albums.
“Come, A-Ming, look—this is A-Wang as a kid, running naked on the beach.”
Cang Ming flipped through expressionlessly. When he reached a yellowed old photograph, his fingers stopped. In the photo, Aunt Lin’s husband stood at the bow of a boat in his youth, a vast sea stretching behind him.
Cang Ming pointed at the distant water in the photo and spoke in a very soft tone: “This sea… wasn’t like this before.”
Aunt Lin thought he was just reminiscing and laughed. “Yeah, the water used to be so clear, and full of fish.”
She didn’t catch that when Cang Ming said “before,” he meant across a thousand years.
That afternoon, Jiang Yu finally couldn’t stand the old T-shirt Cang Ming was wearing, so she dragged him to the island’s only clothing store.
The owner was a woman in her forties. When she saw Cang Ming walk in, her eyes went wide, staring at him for a full half-minute without remembering to greet them.
In the end, Jiang Yu just grabbed a few of the most basic pure-white T-shirts and black trousers.
Cang Ming took the clothes into the cramped fitting room. When he came out, the whole little shop seemed to brighten a few shades.
A white T-shirt that cost a few dozen yuan—on him, it somehow carried an air of cool, refined elegance.
The owner lowered her voice and whispered to Jiang Yu, “Girl, is your boyfriend some celebrity here to experience real life?”
Jiang Yu’s hand paused mid-payment.
“…No.”
Back at the stone house, Jiang Yu tossed him the new notebook and pen.
This time, Cang Ming didn’t use a tree branch. He sat at the small table, recording the rules of this new world in immaculate handwriting.
“Electricity—similar to heavenly thunder, but controllable.”
“Currency—a physical manifestation of providential luck?”
Jiang Yu walked past behind him and accidentally caught a glimpse of a line. Her footsteps stopped abruptly.
“Jiang Yu. Enjoys crab. Despises pity. Sleeps curled into a ball with the blanket. Hides her pain. Smiles first at the left corner of her lips.”
She walked away as if nothing had happened, but her heart skipped a beat.
Yet after a few steps, she couldn’t help but look back. That figure was bent over, writing stroke by stroke, with the utmost seriousness.
That focused silhouette lingered in her sight, refusing to fade.
In the days that followed, Jiang Yu kept up a livestreaming schedule of once every two days, with much more casual content—sometimes just digging for clams, or simply sitting by the sea chatting with the comments.
Cang Ming appeared in every stream. Though he spoke little, fans had already created a super topic for the Cang Yu CP.
One afternoon, Old Chen, who had been beachcombing for thirty years, wandered over again. After a sip of Aunt Lin’s tea, he brought up stories from his youth.
“Back in my grandfather’s day, everyone believed there were gods in the sea. There used to be a Sea God temple on this island, but it collapsed later…”
Old Chen glanced at Cang Ming, who sat quietly nearby, and continued, “I’ve always felt that the good things in the sea aren’t gone—they’re just hiding.”
The moment he finished speaking, Cang Ming, who had remained silent the whole time, suddenly looked up at him.
Just that one look made Old Chen shiver inexplicably, the hairs on his back standing on end. The rest of his words got stuck in his throat.
Two days later, early morning.
Jiang Yu opened her streaming dashboard as usual. When she saw the follower count, her breath hitched.
10,003.
Three weeks ago, she had been abandoned at this dock, penniless and utterly alone.
Now, ten thousand people were waiting for her to go live, calling her Sister Koi.
She turned off her phone, a calm smile curving at the corners of her lips.
Just then, her phone rang at an inopportune moment—the same uncle’s number.
Jiang Yu hesitated for a moment, then answered.
On the other end, her uncle Jiang Wenshan’s voice carried an urgency he couldn’t suppress.
“Jiang Yu, the family’s Fortune Plate divination this year has shown a severe deviation. The feng shui master in charge of maintaining the formation eye says… it’s caused by a shift in the position of the luck-snatcher. We need you to come back and cooperate with a divination.”
Jiang Yu’s hand holding the phone tightened bit by bit.
“Luck-snatcher.”
She repeated the word, her voice as soft as a breath, yet as cold as ice.
Jiang Wenshan paused on the other end, seemingly caught off guard by her reaction.
Jiang Yu suddenly laughed, the sound devoid of any warmth.
“So this ‘jinx’ of yours actually has such a pretty name.”