“There’s something off about the potatoes you bought.” Liu Dalei was frowning at the small sack of potatoes piled in the corner of the kitchen.
Ji Yi heard him from outside the door and assumed the potatoes he’d bought had gone bad.
“No way. I just bought them yesterday. Are they sprouting?” Ji Yi asked. “I picked them out one by one. It can’t be that bad.”
He walked into the kitchen and saw the grave look all over Liu Dalei’s greenish face, and figured the problem must be even worse than sprouting.
Liu Dalei turned around and scolded him. “You bought the starchy kind. To make shredded potato you need the crisp kind.”
“Potatoes come in starchy and crisp kinds?” Ji Yi didn’t know that, and privately thought it didn’t matter in the slightest. He couldn’t be bothered to argue with Liu Dalei and all his strange little obsessions, so he headed out, only to see, in the main hall, the unopened bag of snacks he’d left on the table. It was now hovering in midair, looking very much like it was about to make a break for the door.
“What the, what is going on?”
The snacks had lifted off on their own. That was more ghostly than seeing a ghost in broad daylight. Ji Yi instinctively grabbed for it and caught the bag, and only then did he see, peeking out from behind it, a round, fluffy little bird’s head, straining to drag the corner of the snack bag away in its beak.
It was the same bird that had come by to eat potato chips before. Ji Yi remembered Lin Zhao saying it was called Bolao.
“Let go, let go. What are you doing? You know what it’s called to take something without asking?” Ji Yi put in more effort, and after a brief tug-of-war between man and bird, it was still Bolao who let go first.
“I did ask. You just didn’t hear me from inside the house.” Bolao said stubbornly. It didn’t fly off right away, but followed Ji Yi’s movements as he set the snacks back on the eight-immortals table, coming to a stop right beside them.
Its little bird feet paced a few steps across the table, and it demanded of Ji Yi, “Give me some to eat.”
Ji Yi didn’t want to bicker with a little sparrow, so he casually tore open the bag of puffed snacks, then asked, “You… came to deliver a message?”
It wasn’t really that Ji Yi wanted to ask that, but ever since the day he’d hugged the black cat, Lin Zhao hadn’t shown up for several days. There was still a scab on the back of Ji Yi’s hand from that black cat, one touch of those sharp claws had been enough to leave a scratch.
Although Ji Yi did feel a little guilty himself. The black cat had looked all soft and fluffy and eminently pettable, but it was, after all, Lin Zhao’s transformed shape. Even if Ji Yi had only grabbed it at the time because he was afraid the cat would beat Wei Hu to death, that sudden lunge to hug it had probably been extremely rude to Lin Zhao, who didn’t like humans.
“Deliver whose message?” Bolao looked utterly clueless, as if it had no idea there was any awkwardness between Ji Yi and Lin Zhao. It just kept its head down and ate, and after finishing half the bag, it even offered a critique. “Still not as good as the cucumber flavor. Remember to buy the cucumber kind next time.”
Listen to that ungrateful tone.
Ji Yi hadn’t gotten a single useful piece of information out of Bolao, and had wasted half a bag of snacks plus earned one bossy lecture for it. He snatched up the remaining half. “Buy what? I haven’t made any money yet. I can barely afford groceries. Do you know how much pork costs a pound these days?”
The guesthouse was up and running, and Ji Yi had checked the local hotels and guesthouses and tentatively set a perfectly reasonable price of one hundred fifty a night, but it had been three days, and so far not a single room had been booked.
Ji Yi was somewhat mentally prepared for this. It would actually be weird to blow up and hit the peak of your career right out of the gate. Especially with how fierce the competition was in this industry now. To do it big and strong the way Lin Zhao demanded, ideally reaching the whole world, well, that was something Ji Yi couldn’t manage even if he worked himself to death.
So in this situation, Ji Yi felt a little guilty about hugging the black cat on the one hand, and on the other was relieved that, because of it, Lin Zhao seemed to have stopped coming by to keep tabs on him for the time being. At least it took some of the pressure off.
With no income coming in, every expense had to be trimmed. His lament about the price of pork wasn’t Ji Yi talking nonsense, he felt it deeply.
Buying groceries these days was really damn expensive.
By rights, Qingxi Town was already a fairly remote place. A lot of the fresh vegetables were hauled in and sold by local old-timers on little three-wheelers, so the prices were somewhat cheaper than in the city. But things like meat and seafood were priced pretty much the same as in the city, and for Ji Yi, who currently had only expenses and no income, meat was delicious, sure, but buying it felt like cutting flesh off his own body.
“I don’t know.” Bolao shook its little head and lifted off into the air. “You want to eat pork?”
“I do.” Ji Yi thought of the braised pork Liu Dalei had made a couple of days ago, and his mouth was still watering over it. It was just that these past couple of days he’d bought some appliances, a washing machine, an air conditioner and so on, and really hadn’t had the heart to treat himself to an extra dish.
Bolao said nothing, turned, and flew away.
“Hey,” Ji Yi said, watching it leave without so much as a backward glance. “Damn, is it an ingrate bird or what? The second I mention pork costing money, it takes off. Scared I’d hit it up for cash.”
Ji Yi dragged over a chair and sat in the blazing sun folding paper ingots. In a couple of days he’d have to settle wages with Old Man Li and Chen Weiguo and the others, so he had to prepare in advance.
He didn’t expect that, after he’d folded most of a small basket of joss paper, Bolao would come flying back.
Ji Yi, head bowed, saw a small shadow above his head. This time when he looked up, what he saw was once again a piece of food hovering in the air. But it wasn’t a bag of puffed potato chips, it was a big, thick, top-grade slab of pork belly.
Ji Yi nearly thought his greedy mouth had conjured up a hallucination. Then he watched the big slab of pork slowly and steadily descend until it was level with his eyes, revealing Bolao behind it, flapping its wings with effortless ease.
Ji Yi’s eyes went wide beyond his control. He let go of the tinfoil paper and reached out on reflex to catch that slab of pork, which looked heavy and was in an entirely different weight class from Bolao’s body.
Bolao let go, and the pork dropped into Ji Yi’s hands, genuinely hefty, a good five pounds or so.
“That’s enough for you to eat for two days, right?” Bolao perched on Ji Yi’s knee and made its demand with total confidence. “I want cucumber-flavored chips.”
“Where did this come from?” Ji Yi asked once the shock wore off. “You didn’t go take it from somebody’s house, did you?”
After all, Bolao had wanted to steal chips without asking just a moment ago.
There were a few villages around here, with plenty of villagers. If Bolao had gone out for that brief a time and brought back this big a slab of top-grade pork, figuring by current market prices, rounding off, that was nearly two hundred yuan, enough to make an ordinary family ache over it for two days.
More to the point, how many people had seen the sight of a slab of pork flying through the air?
Bolao said, displeased, “You think I’d need to go take a little something like this from someone’s house?”
“What do you mean?” That rich-kid tone of its made Ji Yi straighten up.
Then he thought of something he’d overlooked. Bolao was a bird that had become a spirit, and it had been one for several hundred years, so it wouldn’t be strange for it to have some family assets. Besides, a demon’s view of wealth was probably rather different from a human’s. Take this big slab of pork: in Bolao’s eyes it was a worthwhile trade for potato chips. So maybe he could use all kinds of snacks to make some more trades with Bolao?
Ji Yi’s eyes lit up. “Actually, chips don’t just come in cucumber flavor. There’s lime, tomato, and so on. Do you want to try them all?”
Bolao said with reserve, “It wouldn’t hurt to try.”
Ji Yi fetched all sorts of chips and opened the bags for it to taste. In the end Bolao decided lime was passable, cucumber was still the best, and the rest were take-it-or-leave-it and not worth troubling its beak over.
“The pork’s great too, but if you’ve got other stuff, ahem, like, say, gold and silver treasures, I wouldn’t mind trading with you for those either.”
Bolao flapped its wings. “But I don’t enter the human world, so I don’t have those things. The spirits in these mountains are all restricted and can’t leave easily. I’m afraid only Lord Lin Zhao has such things.”
“I see.” Hearing how guileless Bolao sounded, not the least bit put off by his mercenary love of money, but rather making him feel embarrassed, Ji Yi said, “Never mind, then. Pork’s plenty good.”
Bolao flew off with two opened bags of chips in its beak.
Ji Yi cradled the pork into the kitchen and put it away, washed his hands, and kept mulling over how Bolao could have gotten pork like that. He also felt the name Bolao sounded familiar, as though he’d heard it in some animal documentary.
He pulled out his phone and tried searching for it, and sure enough turned up a bird called the “shrike”, bolao in Chinese.
The shrike is dubbed the “butcher bird,” and its style is seriously hardcore. Its body is sparrow-sized, but it behaves like a bird of prey, it snatches up lizards and mice without fail, and likes to impale its prey on tree branches to dismember it. Some poisonous prey it even dries into jerky in the sun, waiting for the toxins to evaporate before eating.
Before the search, Ji Yi had thought the sight of a little sparrow carrying a huge slab of pork was completely absurd. After the search, Ji Yi could already vividly picture a spirit-form Bolao kicking the brains out of a wild boar with one strike of its foot.
Either way, braised pork really did smell amazing.
Ji Yi called toward the kitchen, “Dalei, make braised pork tonight.” After a pause he added, “Just one bowl is fine. We’ll make the rest last.”
There was no telling when business would ever come, so he had to be sparing.
His phone dinged with a message alert. The unfamiliar notification sound didn’t catch Ji Yi’s attention at first, but a moment later he checked his phone and realized that a guest was inquiring, live, about the guesthouse he’d listed on a certain platform.
Local Famous Hottie: Boss, isn’t it kind of inconvenient to get to and from your place? Is there a bus or something to Beishan? I looked, and it seems like the straight-line distance is about two kilometers?
Ji Yi immediately gripped his phone and hurried to reply.
Mountainside Guesthouse: Yes, yes, that’s right. How many are in your party? We can provide pickup and drop-off service. It’s about fifteen minutes from the guesthouse to Beishan, very close.
The other side went quiet for about two minutes.
Ji Yi’s mood was anxious and tense, he was terrified the guest on the other end would leave.
Fortunately, the guest reappeared.
Local Famous Hottie: That works. Also, boss, can I pet the cat at your place?
The cat at my place?
Ji Yi was stunned, then remembered that Wei Hu had earlier taken a photo of him holding Lin Zhao in cat form, and it seemed to have been uploaded to the platform along with everything else.
Although a customer’s wishes were higher than the heavens, and Ji Yi desperately wanted to keep this guest, in order to avoid a fatality, Ji Yi still gritted his teeth and turned down the customer’s request.
Mountainside Guesthouse: That one’s a no, sorry. There’s a risk of getting scratched.
He loved petting cats too. But the scab on his hand hadn’t even faded yet. It had been too traumatic.
The other side went silent again.
Ji Yi figured this deal had most likely fallen through. Just as he was sighing, an order notification popped up on the platform with a plop.
Local Famous Hottie had booked two nights of lodging.
An enormous sense of happiness came surging in from all sides. Ji Yi slapped the table and shouted grandly, “Dalei, remember to put potatoes in the braised pork!”