Ji Yi rarely used Weibo. Now and then he’d repost a giveaway, but he’d never once won anything.
That morning, after yawning his way through washing up, he happened to log in and saw that the number-one trending topic was “#JianYiCallsHimselfAWoodenActor#”.
Ever since browsing the Ghost Web and learning that Jian Yi, currently shooting a film over at Beishan, seemed to be haunted, Ji Yi had grown a little sensitive to the name. So he tapped in for a look. Faced with the post Jian Yi had put up an hour earlier, already nearing a hundred thousand comments, a post in which he was basically insulting himself—Ji Yi mulled it over for a few seconds, silently calculating the odds that Jian Yi had been driven mad by a ghost.
After all, wrapping a shoot in the living world only to head to the netherworld and shoot some more did sound pretty stressful.
Suddenly finding yourself surrounded by ghosts—Ji Yi knew exactly what that felt like.
His sympathy had barely surfaced when a flick of his fingertip scrolled down to the next post, from a marketing account, which laid out in detail the estimated earnings from every film Jian Yi had made over the past two years. Ji Yi looked at the figure, denominated in hundreds of millions, and his sympathy vanished in a puff of smoke. He felt himself turning into one of those people who resented the rich.
The renovation hadn’t officially begun, and Ji Yi already felt his own poverty keenly. Chen Weiguo’s wages could be settled in spirit money, but the various material costs had to be paid in cold, hard living-world currency.
What’s more, Ji Yi had only wanted a simple renovation, mostly repairs, keeping the original look intact. But once Chen Weiguo heard that, he earnestly advised him otherwise: “You’ve got to design it properly, or the guests won’t be comfortable staying here. Back when I did a job for a hotel over Beishan way, now that place had real style to its design.”
Ji Yi wanted to point out that a Beishan hotel and he himself were on rather different budgets. Still, thinking it over, Chen Weiguo’s words weren’t without merit. A guesthouse did need a certain distinctive character. Ji Yi’s attitude toward running the place was pretty zen, but he still hoped people would actually want to stay.
So Ji Yi searched online for interior design. The results were either the obviously shady kind or the kind that started in the five figures.
Ji Yi decided he wasn’t worthy.
Chen Weiguo had only offered a suggestion anyway, besides, what he was earning was spirit money. But apart from the design style, Chen Weiguo had another request for Ji Yi: find him a few laborers, or one ghost alone would be working on this until the year of the monkey and the month of the horse [1]for ages and ages jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931961_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931961_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Since he’d already hired Chen Weiguo to do his renovation, Ji Yi certainly couldn’t bear to hire living-world laborers for the grunt work either. These days a renovation laborer’s daily wage started in the hundreds, and any amount at all was a fortune to Ji Yi.
Naturally, if you’re hiring ghosts, experienced ones are best. But according to Chen Weiguo, he was just about the only ghost in the area with this trade. He’d seen a few old ghosts earlier who seemed to have carpentry skills, and if worst came to worst they could be brought in to learn on the job, they’d just work a bit slower. But since Ji Yi was the one trying to save money, that couldn’t be helped.
There happened to be a few local ghosts he already knew, though. Ji Yi thought of Old Li and the others. Strangely, though, Old Li, who usually came around this way, hadn’t shown up last night.
That evening, as soon as darkness fell, Old Li did come, but looking even more crestfallen than before. The moment he saw Ji Yi he said, “Boss Ji, I’ve come to say goodbye.”
Ji Yi was baffled. “What do you mean? Have some filial son or grandson come to relocate your grave?”
Old Li heaved a sigh and told Ji Yi the reason for the misery written all over his face. It turned out that the other night, when Ji Yi had witnessed that pack of local ghosts tussling with Ying Xiaotao’s crew, one of the ghosts whose camera had been smashed had gone down below to file a complaint. A ruling had already come down: the local ghosts involved had to compensate the out-of-town ghost for his camera, or else they’d be locked up for a year or so.
“A year or so” was just a figure of speech. If they had money to grease the palms of the netherworld officers, the sentence would be slashed dramatically, maybe from a year down to ten days or half a month.
But local ghosts were mostly a shabby, penniless lot. Old Li, whose offerings had been cut off, couldn’t scrape together a single coin. Sun Changxing, who ran a pastry shop in town, still received offerings, but even he couldn’t pull together that much money. So they were all worrying themselves sick.
The other night Ji Yi had thought it odd that a ghost was hauling around a camera. He’d never imagined it was someone from that ghost film crew over at Beishan, the very one that had latched onto Jian Yi. What a coincidence, he couldn’t help thinking.
“So that’s how it is. For a while now, I’m afraid I won’t be able to come around,” Old Li said.
“That’s not necessarily so,” Ji Yi said.
Old Li looked at him in confusion. Seeing Ji Yi’s expression turn relaxed, he went on: “Master Chen says he’s short on hands over on his end, er, short on ghost-hands, and I was just thinking of finding a few people to help out. If you all come to help, I’ll definitely pay you. And if you’re willing, let me see whether I can get this camera business sorted out, we’ll count it as part of your wages. How about that?”
Ji Yi’s proposal turned a hopeless dead end right around. Old Li was first stunned, then, as it sank in, overcome with emotion, seized by the urge to drop to his knees and kowtow on the spot. Old Li felt Ji Yi was offering coal in the dead of winter [2]a lifeline in his hour of need jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931961_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931961_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });. After all, wouldn’t a few young, strong ghosts serve better than a bunch of old codgers like them?
For a moment Old Li admired Ji Yi from the bottom of his heart. What virtue, what nobility of character was this?
Ji Yi wasn’t as high-minded as all that. He simply figured Old Li and his little band of ghosts weren’t bad sorts, and he was fairly familiar with them. Sure, sometimes their age made their manner and ways feel like a real generation gap from his own, but on the whole they meant no harm. Old ghosts were, after all, a simpler breed, having seen little of today’s dazzling world. If he really did bring in a few young ghosts, they might just team up with Chen Weiguo and get a gambling table going on the spot.
Having settled on the idea, Ji Yi had Old Li go call over the other ghosts involved in the matter.
Old Li also gave Ji Yi the more detailed terms of the compensation: “Their side says either replace his camera with the exact same model, or hand over a thousand silver ingots.”
Ji Yi had just finished folding the silver paper he’d bought earlier over the past couple of days, and that came to only a bit more than two hundred. Hearing “a thousand” now, he instantly felt an ache spread across his palms.
Ji Yi had seen cameras at the funeral-goods shop too. These days there were all kinds of paper-crafted electronic products, but the ones sold at the town’s funeral shop were obviously very old-fashioned versions, made without any real care, and who knew how many years they’d been piling up. Even a layman like Ji Yi, who didn’t dabble in photography, could tell.
Ji Yi ran a search on Taobao, and sure enough plenty of paper-craft products popped up, a rich, varied selection, some even accepting custom orders, where you could message the shopkeeper. But the custom jobs offered here were living-world versions of famous-brand cameras, there was nothing of the “Heaven-and-Earth brand” that the out-of-town ghost had named.
“I’d think the latest living-world camera would be better than his, right? Let’s ask him whether he wants a living-world camera,” Ji Yi reasoned.
Old Li said, “Then we’ll have to tell him tonight, or the netherworld officers will come to make the arrests around this time tomorrow.”
The other ghosts also looked at Ji Yi with lingering dread. “Then we’ll be off.”
Ji Yi called them back. “Hold on, I’ll go with you.”
For one thing, he wanted to speak to their side about the camera himself, for another, thinking of the Weibo post Jian Yi had put up during the day, he strongly suspected the man was on the verge of being driven mad. So, out of simple humanitarian concern, he figured he’d go take a look and see whether anyone needed saving.
The trouble was, at this hour the Beishan scenic area had already closed, and had long stopped letting anyone up the mountain. Ghosts could come and go as they pleased, but a living, breathing Ji Yi couldn’t.
So the ghosts led him along a shortcut over the mountain behind the old house, heading straight there. The ghost film crew was also near where the two mountains met, not very far, about a dozen minutes on foot.
Ji Yi stepped into the darkness one pace at a time, flashlight in hand, the pack of ghosts following behind as they made their way along the mountain path beneath the night sky.
In the past, Ji Yi had either pretended not to see ghosts or thrown down and fought them. Being on such harmonious terms now gave even him a strange, uncanny sort of feeling.
Entering the range of the back mountain, Ji Yi’s feet trod on the soft fallen leaves, and once again that odd cry of some unidentified bird reached his ears.
Ji Yi heard several of them and couldn’t help glancing back. In the darkness he thought he faintly made out a few round, fluffy bird shapes, like the little sparrow that had spoken human words to him the other day and had a fondness for cucumber-flavored potato chips.
After about ten minutes of walking, they crossed into another hilltop. A little while later, distinct sounds of conversation reached Ji Yi’s ears.
When Ji Yi walked into a more open area, he could see a film crew that looked remarkably legitimate, with plenty of ghosts bustling back and forth inside.
Jian Yi had been summoned over again today, and he was thoroughly fed up.
The Weibo post he’d made that morning had already been deleted at his manager’s insistence, but since it had stayed up for over an hour before coming down, a whole crowd had long since picked it apart. The comment section was nothing but war between his fans and haters. The haters even claimed he was manufacturing hype on purpose, asking how many trending spots he’d bought with his annual package, and so on. His company was furious over his sudden Weibo outburst of insulting himself, too.
Jian Yi felt he was even angrier. Set against Huang Yuemei, he couldn’t help wondering just what caliber of coaches his company had hired for him before. Of course, here Jian Yi was the one being muddled, the coaches his company hired weren’t necessarily without real ability, it was just hard to stay calm and explain things simply when faced with raw material like Jian Yi.
He’d practiced his lines with Huang Yuemei for a while when the ghost director called him over and had him deliver a passage of his character’s dialogue.
The ghost director was holding a stick in his hand today. Earlier Jian Yi had heard him point at a cameraman and curse him out, cursing him for having nothing better to do than go stick his nose into the action, dragging down the shooting schedule, and then getting himself beaten up by local ghosts, how utterly useless, and so on.
That cameraman ghost didn’t dare make a peep under the director’s tirade, and the other ghosts did their best to shrink their presence at a moment like this. And of course this was exactly when the ghost director called Jian Yi over. Jian Yi was practically trembling, terrified the ghost director would fly into a rage and give him a whack with that stick, and then would he actually end up dying right here?
During the day, when he’d hinted at all this to his manager, not only had the manager not believed him, but he’d shot Jian Yi a suspicious look that said, “Have you been secretly popping pills? How else would you be this haggard and be hallucinating like this?”
Jian Yi trudged toward the ghost director with heavy steps, praying to God, the Buddha, and Lord Lao all in one go. If someone would come save him at a time like this, he thought, he’d gladly be that person’s beast of burden.
Whether or not Heaven really heard Jian Yi’s plea, just as he was about to reach the ghost director, watching the director’s expression grow uglier and uglier, hunching his head in fear of being hit, a ghost beside them suddenly tugged at the ghost director’s sleeve and cried out in alarm: “Director, look, those local ghosts have brought a living person with them.”
A living person?!
Jian Yi and the ghost director turned their heads toward the back in unison, and sure enough they saw a rather handsome young man coming their way alongside a group of old codger ghosts. Although the living person was walking with ghosts, he showed no fear, he looked utterly unfathomable, Jian Yi’s imagination running away with him.
The ghost whose camera had been smashed came over nervously and said to the director, “Director, they’re not here to trash the place, are they?”
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