Ji Yi was having a nightmare. First he dreamed that Lin Zhao was forcing him to work overtime until he coughed up blood, and then he dreamed that he was pinned beneath the Five Fingers Mountain [1]the mountain the Monkey King was trapped under jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931964_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931964_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, the weight of the mountain pressing down heavier and heavier until he could barely breathe.
He clawed with both hands and finally struggled free of the dream. The moment he opened his eyes, he saw a big black cat standing on his chest, its eyes glowing faintly like moonlight.
It was the black cat sitting on his chest that had given Ji Yi the sensation of suffocating in his dream. Seeing that Ji Yi was awake, the cat met his gaze without a hint of fear, and then it even lifted its front paws off him and slammed them back down, landing another blow right on his chest.
“The hell,” Ji Yi said, clutching his chest. “You trying to trample me to death?”
The black cat spoke coldly. “Still not up? How long do you plan to sleep? At this rate, when are you ever going to grow your business?”
The cat clearly had Lin Zhao’s voice, a constant reminder that everything from the night before hadn’t been a nightmare at all.
The previous night, after Lin Zhao had finished scorning Ji Yi for having no ambition, he’d announced that, to make it easier to find the person he was looking for, he would be staying at the guesthouse. As soon as he said it, he transformed into a creature resembling a black panther, only far larger than any panther. On all fours, it stood as tall as Ji Yi’s waist.
Ji Yi’s shock could hardly have been greater. “This is your true form?”
Lin Zhao circled halfway around Ji Yi, then let out a soft laugh, as if he found Ji Yi hopelessly ignorant. “My true form is much bigger than this.”
Its fur looked clean and soft, its limbs held immense power that could burst forth at any moment, and its eyes carried all the arrogance and confidence of a predator.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lin Zhao’s voice rang out coldly.
Only then did Ji Yi realize he had already reached out toward Lin Zhao, his hand just a few centimeters from the beast’s head. Ji Yi didn’t understand why he’d suddenly stretched out his hand either. Probably some part of him just felt that Lin Zhao in this form looked incredibly squishable, and he’d acted on it without thinking.
Ji Yi had always had a soft spot for big cats. He’d never expected Lin Zhao’s transformed shape to be one of them too.
He withdrew his hand and, with a perfectly straight face, changed the subject. “Never mind what I’m doing. A body your size showing up in my guesthouse is going to scare off plenty of guests. Can’t you shrink down a bit more?”
Lin Zhao said, “So this isn’t small enough either? No wonder…”
Ji Yi got the feeling there was something loaded in the words he’d left unsaid. No wonder what? Could it be that all those terrifying local legends, the ones that had made people give this place a wide berth for so many years, had something to do with Lin Zhao? Just how big was his true form?
Then, under Ji Yi’s direction, Lin Zhao slowly shrank down to his current shape, the size and appearance of an ordinary black cat.
But although Ji Yi had seemingly accepted all of this the night before, he was now feeling roughly a billion regrets.
Why was it that he’d come here to kick back, relax, and live the life of a lazy fish, only to end up experiencing the grind of a corporate wage slave all over again? Was the soul of a working stiff really a fate carved into his very genes?
Seeing Ji Yi sit up, Lin Zhao turned, hopped off the bed, and got ready to leave.
But Ji Yi called out to stop him. “Hold on a second.”
Lin Zhao turned back to look at him. “What?”
“I’ll do my best to make the guesthouse a success, and you’re welcome to look for the person you’re after here. But I suppose that counts as me helping you, so is there anything you can give me in return?” Ji Yi’s tone sounded steady enough, but in truth it carried a trace of nervousness.
Asking Lin Zhao for a reward might well strike him as bold and rude.
The “Bo Lao” that Lin Zhao had mentioned last night was surely that little chubby bird that loved potato chips. Ji Yi remembered Bo Lao saying that Lin Zhao had already been searching for someone back when it first awakened to consciousness centuries ago. Lin Zhao might well be a thousand-year-old great demon. In that case, snuffing out Ji Yi’s life would be effortless for him.
To his surprise, Lin Zhao merely asked in return, “What do you want? Immortality, or eternal youth?”
Ji Yi didn’t expect Lin Zhao to agree so readily, so he hadn’t given a single thought to what he actually wanted in return. He’d simply approached it from a working man’s angle, seeing whether he could squeeze a little interest out of the mouth of the villainous capitalist.
Lin Zhao, however, seemed thoroughly familiar with this whole procedure. Seeing Ji Yi at a loss, he added, “Immortality, probably. Plenty of people want that one.”
“Hold on, I haven’t decided yet,” Ji Yi said, stopping him. “And besides, how is immortality a reward? That’s terrifying.”
The black cat tilted its head, seemingly baffled by Ji Yi’s words.
Ji Yi said, “If you’re the only one who lives forever, isn’t that just a punishment?” But the moment he finished, he felt he’d misspoken.
Because if Lin Zhao really was a thousand-year-old great demon, powerful enough to even grant others immortality, then wasn’t he himself an immortal being?
Lin Zhao showed no sign of taking offense. He only said mildly, “Then tell me once you’ve made up your mind.”
“Oh, right,” Ji Yi said, suddenly curious. “Have you ever given anyone else immortality before? What happened to them?”
With his back to Ji Yi, Lin Zhao gave a soft laugh, not shying away from the question at all. “Greedy, all of them. They’re all dead now.”
“Dead?”
“Is that so strange? Aren’t greedy people everywhere you look?” There was loathing in Lin Zhao’s tone. “If not for being human, he wouldn’t have left me either.”
That one short sentence was enough for Ji Yi to imagine an entire drama of tragic, star-crossed love. He couldn’t help asking Lin Zhao, “Is the person you’re looking for a former lover of yours?”
The black cat reacted strongly to this. It jerked its head up and snapped its mouth open to scold him. “Don’t talk nonsense!”
With that, the cat leaped nimbly over the doorframe and vanished from Ji Yi’s sight.
What was that about? If it wasn’t true, then it wasn’t true. No need to get so worked up over it.
Still, Ji Yi found it strange. If not a lover, then what kind of relationship would make Lin Zhao so relentlessly determined to find someone?
Ji Yi felt a little uneasy. He sat there in a daze for a while, and then his phone chimed with a notification.
He picked it up and looked. It was an alert that a new friend request had just gone through. Looking more closely, he recognized it as Jian Yi’s personal WeChat account.
It was six in the morning, not long after daybreak. Jian Yi seemed to have just been released back to his hotel, and he’d immediately accepted Ji Yi’s request. Right after that, he’d even sent Ji Yi a transfer of money.
Ji Yi looked at the four zeros trailing that transfer and felt sorely tempted, but the night before he’d really only lent a casual hand, and he didn’t think such a trivial favor was worth that kind of money.
Jian Yi also sent over a voice message. “Bro, thank you so much. I’ve worked things out with the other side. From now on they’ll respect my work here in the living world and won’t just haul me over whenever they feel like it. Please, you have to accept the red packet we agreed on last night.”
Ji Yi replied politely, “I’ll pass on the red packet. Just focus on doing your work well from now on.”
“Doing your work well” had a double meaning. Both in the netherworld and in the living world, he had to give it his all.
Jian Yi sent back a crying sticker. Maybe because there was nowhere else he could talk about an experience like this, he then fired off several more messages full of grievances, pouring out a bit of his sorrows to Ji Yi. He said he was now hard at work taking acting lessons in the netherworld, hoping to do well in the netherworld’s films and escape the sea of misery as soon as possible.
The ghost director had promised Jian Yi that once the filming wrapped, he’d stop bothering him.
By the end of the messages, Jian Yi had even started to regret ever becoming a celebrity.
“Actually, I did really well in my major back in college,” Jian Yi said.
Ji Yi asked offhandedly, “What was your major?”
“Interior design!”
At that, Jian Yi asked Ji Yi again, “Bro, are you sure you won’t take the red packet? Then I really don’t know how to repay you.”
Ji Yi’s gaze settled on Jian Yi’s previous message, and he slowly typed out a line.
“There might just be a way you can repay me after all…”
When Jian Yi met Ji Yi again in his human body, he was quite excited. He came right up and gave him a hug, then lifted his eyes to size up the whole layout of the old house.
When Ji Yi brought up wanting his help designing the soon-to-open guesthouse, Jian Yi was both surprised and a little thrilled. He hadn’t touched anything in his field since becoming a celebrity, and the truth was he’d studied interior design in the first place because he loved it.
But his delight made Ji Yi a little anxious. Given that Jian Yi seemed to have a habit of talking himself up, Ji Yi couldn’t help confirming with him, “You really can do this, right? Or is it like your acting, where you just feel like you can…?”
It wasn’t that Ji Yi was being blunt for no reason. The cautionary example was right there in front of him.
Jian Yi didn’t get angry. He even blushed a little. “It’s not like the acting. I really wasn’t lying to you.” He even took out some of the design drafts he’d done before to show Ji Yi, and they were indeed quite good.
Feeling a bit more reassured, Ji Yi said, “Take a look around first. I’ll pour you some tea.”
Jian Yi had snuck over during a break in filming to take some on-site measurements, so he could then work on the design and improvements.
Only Ji Yi had been in the old house, but by the time he came back with the tea, he saw a black cat crouched right in front of Jian Yi. Jian Yi looked full of curiosity too, his hand already reaching out to pet the cat’s head. Hearing Ji Yi’s footsteps behind him, he called out across the room, “Brother Ji, is this a cat you keep, or a stray from the mountains?”
“Don’t touch him!” Ji Yi shouted at once.
Jian Yi’s hand froze in midair. He turned back to look at Ji Yi, a little puzzled.
“That, uh, it’s a cat I know from the mountains. It’s pretty fierce, you can’t pet it,” Ji Yi explained.
What if Jian Yi’s hand got bitten off the instant it touched Lin Zhao? Ji Yi figured he couldn’t shoulder that kind of responsibility.
Fortunately, Jian Yi’s urge to pet the cat wasn’t all that strong. He let out an “oh” and drew his hand back, then said to Ji Yi with a smile, “This cat’s been staring at me this whole time, sniffing me too. I’ve always had terrible luck with cats. Finally running into one that likes me, it’s such a rare thing.”
A cat that liked Jian Yi?
Ji Yi looked over at the black cat that was Lin Zhao’s transformed form. He knew full well that Lin Zhao was most likely just confirming whether Jian Yi was the person he was searching for, but he still couldn’t help glancing his way.
The cat’s face wore an expression of having suffered the most outrageous humiliation.
Before Jian Yi’s smile could fully form, the black cat that had been sitting in front of him immediately walked off without a backward glance, its resolute retreating figure practically spelling out the words “how utterly revolting.”
Jian Yi: “…”
Kitty, love me one more time.
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