The apron ghost’s name was Liu Dalei. While he was alive he really had spent several decades as a head chef, having taken on a master to learn the craft since he was barely more than a teenager. His master’s family was said to have produced an imperial cook a few generations back, though there was no way left to verify it.
Whatever the case, Liu Dalei’s cooking really was good. Partly it came from his master, and partly from all his own years of knocking about north and south, where he’d seen and tasted plenty. He knew at least a little of every regional cuisine.
Both in life and in death, cooking was his greatest passion and pursuit. As for spirit money and the like, he honestly didn’t care much about it.
His biggest dream while alive had been to travel the whole world, to see and taste every delicacy there was. But he hadn’t been given a long life, so that goal was fated to go unfulfilled.
Ji Yi tucked a piece of braised pork into his bowl, savoring the rich, fragrant taste, and looked at Liu Dalei as he spoke. “So what kind of reward do you want, then? They all like incense and candles, melons and fruit and spirit money, you really don’t want any of that?”
Liu Dalei’s apron was stretched to bursting across his belly. He sat there now with the most aggrieved look on his face. “You won’t let me snatch a substitute, and you’ve got me trapped here, so there’s nothing left for me to want. I’ve still got a good ten years or more before it’s my turn to reincarnate. I’d meant to pour what limited time I have into the boundless cause of cookery, to keep studying and keep getting better. But I can’t leave Beishan, and now I can’t even move around anymore…”
He lifted his eyes and watched Ji Yi eat, oil glistening at the corners of his mouth. He still couldn’t work out how Lin Zhao had come to be here, and looking so easy and familiar with a living person, at that.
Liu Dalei glanced left and right. Not seeing any sign of Lin Zhao, he lowered his voice and asked Ji Yi, “What’s your relationship with Lord Lin Zhao?”
Ji Yi had still been mulling over Liu Dalei’s words a moment ago. Asked about his relationship with Lin Zhao, the way he saw it, it was probably much the same as Liu Dalei’s own.
His notion of running a laid-back, let-it-be little guesthouse had been forced into something serious under Lin Zhao’s coercion, and Liu Dalei too had been kept here by a single word from Lin Zhao.
“What do you think?” Ji Yi countered. He figured Liu Dalei ought to understand his situation well enough.
Liu Dalei stared at Ji Yi and thought it over, reasoning it out bit by bit. “Lord Lin Zhao has never liked living people, and he doesn’t like living people turning up on his turf. Yet you’ve been allowed to stay here, and today Lord Lin Zhao went and detained me too…”
Ji Yi felt Liu Dalei had a certain shrewdness to him. Following the drift of Liu Dalei’s reasoning gaze, he was just about to nod and give a confirming look, when he heard Liu Dalei gasp, “So you’re Lord Lin Zhao’s sweetheart!?”
Disappointment crossed Ji Yi’s face. “Dalei. In the end, I misjudged you.”
“So it’s not that?” Liu Dalei looked rather relieved himself. He knew perfectly well he couldn’t leave, and not knowing what exactly lay between Lin Zhao and Ji Yi, he’d been turning it over and over, worrying whether laying a hand on Ji Yi earlier might see Lin Zhao holding him to account. Now, hearing that there was no such relationship between the two of them, his heart settled.
“I wasn’t trying to think that way on purpose,” Liu Dalei said. “It’s just that Lord Lin Zhao has been alone for so long. I’ve never once seen him especially close with anyone.”
Ji Yi shoveled down his rice, and in the gaps, itching with gossip, quietly fished for more. “Was he alone before, too?”
“Now that I couldn’t tell you. If you go back and count, Lord Lin Zhao was already here several lifetimes before mine.” Every time Liu Dalei spoke of Lin Zhao, a wary look crossed his face. Still, he hadn’t given up on the idea of freedom, and pressed Ji Yi ingratiatingly, “Since that’s how it is, I see Boss Ji seems to carry a bit of weight with Lord Lin Zhao. Might I beg you to put in a few good words for me, so I can win back my freedom sooner?”
Ji Yi set down his chopsticks. “You said just now that you want your freedom so you can go around learning about cooking and keeping up with the times, right?”
Liu Dalei nodded.
Ji Yi pulled out his phone. “Well, you might just be able to improve your cooking right here. Do you have any idea how rich the online world is these days?”
He casually opened a channel and let Liu Dalei skim through it. As he scrolled down, there were dishes of every cuisine, pictures and videos of all kinds.
“Do you really need to go out for this? Besides, even if you left you couldn’t get past Beishan, and wandering around aimlessly every night, what is there to see?”
Liu Dalei’s gaze was completely captured by Ji Yi’s phone. The dazzling, colorful world before his eyes had him spellbound. His offerings hadn’t been cut off, but in all these years no one had ever burned him a phone or a computer.
Of course, even if someone had burned him one, Beishan had only gotten hooked up to the netherworld network in the last couple of years. And the crucial thing was, the network down below was only partly like the one up top, the content was rather different. The old traditional stuff down below was solid, plenty of it truly impressive, but when it came to innovation it fell short.
On top of that, the network up in the living world had given lots of folk masters a stage to show off. Plenty of the videos were no worse than what a trained professional could make.
Liu Dalei watched a full twenty-minute video through on Ji Yi’s phone, a foreign cooking-competition show. He didn’t understand Western cuisine, but anything to do with the kitchen fascinated him.
Ji Yi had more or less finished eating, and seeing that the show had already rolled into its next-episode preview, he put the phone away. He’d been watching Liu Dalei’s rapt gaze earlier, and now he had a plan in mind.
Liu Dalei’s eyes stuck fast to the phone. “Let me watch a little longer,” he cried. “There was a dish just now they hadn’t finished yet, oh, and an oven. You don’t seem to have an oven here.”
“Even if I had an oven, there’d be no one to use it,” Ji Yi said. “I can’t cook a thing.”
Liu Dalei wasn’t much good with one either, but he’d already been hooked by the huge thrill of exploring new territory. “I can! I’ll do it. Just let me watch these things every day, and I’ll make you delicious food every single day.”
“So you won’t leave, then?” Ji Yi asked.
“If you let me watch these videos, give me plenty of chances to study, then I won’t leave,” Liu Dalei said earnestly. “I don’t want incense, I don’t want spirit money, I just want this.”
Truly a ghost lost in his obsession.
Ji Yi said, “This I can let you watch. And I’ll give you spirit money and incense on a regular schedule too, it wouldn’t be right to have you working here for nothing. Besides, if you’re not well fed and watered, where would you get the strength to toss a wok?”
His wish granted, Liu Dalei was all smiles. Then he asked Ji Yi again, “So, are you going to buy an oven? The kind in the video would do, it looked pretty handy to me.”
“We’ll see,” Ji Yi said. “I’m not much for Western food.” He was talking nonsense, the real reason was that, in his current budget, he couldn’t bear to carve out a slice for an oven. A decent oven wasn’t cheap, and the kind Liu Dalei had just seen in the video was pricier still.
His principle these days was to save wherever he could.
The guesthouse’s sign was already up. The second floor was still under renovation, but the first floor was basically finished and ready to open for business.
Before opening, the next step was getting listed on all the platforms.
“This angle’s okay, right?” Ji Yi held up his phone, framing the shot, and snapped a picture. He thought it wasn’t bad, and leaned over to show it to Wei Hu.
Wei Hu was taking photos with his phone too, and had just finished one himself. When they set their two screens side by side to compare, Ji Yi quietly put his own phone away, then sincerely gestured for Wei Hu to go ahead. “After you, please.”
There was no denying it, Wei Hu, who had the heart of a video creator dying to go viral, was a far better photographer than he was.
The two of them went around together taking shots outside the old house, then headed in and took a whole batch from every angle.
Snapping away, Wei Hu said, “The most important thing in photography is light and angle. Ji-ge, what’s the special feature you want to play up for our guesthouse?”
“Special feature, huh.” Ji Yi looked at the bricks, looked at the tiles, looked at the mountains in the distance. “Rustic, down-to-earth, one with nature and all that?”
“Personally I think this place of yours has a rather transcendent, otherworldly feel to it. Oh, right, where’d you find the people who did your renovation? Nice work. A simple job, and yet it’s got a real fresh-start, brand-new look to it.”
Originally Wei Hu had offered to find Ji Yi a few local workers, he could haggle the price down to something fair, and if any problems cropped up later it’d be easy to get someone to deal with them.
But then Ji Yi had found Chen Weiguo, so of course Wei Hu’s crew never got used. Now that Wei Hu was asking, Ji Yi hedged. “Not bad, right? Just found them down below somewhere.”
People in Qingxi Town often said “the folks down below,” and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the netherworld. Past Hongye Village and further in, in the locals’ way of speaking, was “down below,” where there were several more villages.
Wei Hu scratched his head at that. “There are renovation craftsmen like that down below, huh.” Of course, he didn’t dig any deeper into it, maybe the guy was just new to the trade.
Having finished his round of photos, Wei Hu set down his phone and looked around. Then he dug into his own pocket, and out of the bulging pocket he pulled a little can.
Ji Yi asked, “What’s that?”
Wei Hu gave a sly little laugh. “Cat food. Bought it specially.”
The moment Ji Yi heard “cat food,” he got a bad feeling. Sure enough, Wei Hu’s next words were, “I want to feed it to that black cat. Shame he’s not around right now.”
Ji Yi thought to himself, Good thing he isn’t around. If he knew you’d prepared cat food for him, he’d claw your face off.
Wei Hu hunted around and came up empty, and had no choice but to give up.
Ji Yi remembered there was still plenty of the braised pork Liu Dalei had made earlier, and turned to go to the kitchen to fetch some for Wei Hu to take home. He’d eaten a fair bit at Wei Hu’s expense over time, so naturally he couldn’t forget him now.
Ji Yi filled a big bowl straight to the brim, wrapped it around the outside with a food-storage bag, and carried it out, only to find Wei Hu gone. He could just hear Wei Hu’s coaxing voice out at the front door: “Tsk tsk tsk, here, kitty, come here, cat food for you.”
The braised pork in Ji Yi’s hands nearly flew out of them. He bolted out the door, three steps taken as two, and there was Lin Zhao, arrived at some unknown point, standing on the stone steps at the door, looking down his nose at Wei Hu.
Wei Hu was cluelessly holding up an opened can of cat food, waving it back and forth in front of the black cat’s face.
In the sunlight the black cat’s pupils had narrowed to slits, making him look especially cold and ill-disposed.
Lin Zhao’s tolerance for humans was limited to begin with, and here was Wei Hu, blind to the danger, shaking an iron can around in front of his face. The black cat’s paw bared a hint of sharp claw, both shoulders coiling with force as he sprang, as if to swat Wei Hu’s head clean off.
But his motion was intercepted midair.
The black cat’s soft body, before it could react, was scooped up and gathered into someone’s arms. His head landed against the man’s chest. He should have raked a claw across on sheer instinct, but, feeling a warmth and closeness he hadn’t known in a very, very long stretch of years, he froze where he was, claws not even drawn back into their pads in time.
There was no way Wei Hu had missed that the black cat had just meant to attack him. He simply hadn’t had time to so much as flinch before the cat was already gathered up in Ji Yi’s arms.
In the sunlight, outside the old house, the young man holding a black cat, and the black cat frozen, gazing up at him. The scene came crashing into Wei Hu’s eyes.
Something stirred in his heart. He pulled out his phone and let the camera freeze this very moment.