Ji Yi opened the notes app on his phone, where he’d jotted down the groceries Liu Dalei had asked him to buy that day.
The morning market in Qingxi Town was mostly local farmers who’d hauled in their own produce to sell, taking up the space on both sides of the already narrow road. The town’s one and only little fruit shop had also just opened for the day.
“Hey, sir, how much per catty for these lotus roots?”
Ji Yi crouched down, and the way he picked through them marked him instantly as a kitchen novice.
The vendor glanced at him and quoted a price. “Seven a catty. All freshly dug up today.” As he spoke, he picked up a broken segment with mud still in the holes and held it out to Ji Yi. “This piece is nice and tender.”
Slow as he was, even Ji Yi could tell that piece was no good. He picked out two other segments himself. “Trim the ends for me, would you?”
The vendor pursed his lips, but he still deftly picked up a knife and shaved off a bit of the inedible top and bottom of the segments, then weighed them. “A catty and a half. Call it ten.”
Ji Yi took the lotus root and gave it a casual heft. Figuring the weight was about right, he paid up without fuss.
The fruit shop owner next door had just set out some of his wares. Out of the corner of his eye Ji Yi spotted a box of honey peaches inside, which reminded him of the one he’d eaten the day before. On a whim, he carried his freshly bought lotus root over.
When he asked, they were over ten a catty. But his craving had been stirred up the day before, so he still couldn’t resist picking out three of them, a catty’s worth.
Carrying the groceries and peaches, Ji Yi had barely gotten home before he eagerly washed one to try.
But for all that the peach looked strikingly red on the outside, the taste in his mouth didn’t live up to his expectations. It wasn’t that the peach was bad, exactly, at most, Ji Yi had just built his expectations up too high and now felt a bit let down.
Ji Yi stared off in the direction of Daishan, his mind ticking away.
The pork Bolao had given him had been quite delicious. At first Ji Yi had assumed it was Liu Dalei’s skill. But with the peach as a point of comparison, it occurred to him that maybe the pork itself was simply top quality. After all, Liu Dalei the ghost was picky about ingredients, yet he’d never once found fault with the pork Bolao brought.
A mountain this huge, how many delicious things must there be inside it?
Ji Yi sat there dazed with craving until he’d finished off the peach, too bland to enjoy, too wasteful to throw away. Then he got up, walked to the front door, looked into Daishan, and casually tossed the peach pit under the old tree beside the house.
From out of nowhere came an “Ow!”
Ji Yi didn’t even look at the old tree. “Don’t try to shake me down. [1]don’t fake an injury to guilt-trip me jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2932313_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2932313_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); A peach pit’s the kind of garbage that rots away in no time. It’s about the same as your own fallen leaves, just treat it as fertilizer.”
Ever since the last time the old tree had manifested itself on Wei Hu and traded blows with Ji Yi, it had gone quiet, maybe wary of Lin Zhao, or maybe afraid of Ji Yi, who’d threatened to set the mountain on fire. It had been living in peace with Ji Yi, with barely any presence at all.
Sure enough, once Ji Yi said his piece, the old tree only grumbled a couple of times and didn’t argue back.
Ji Yi gazed out at Daishan. He could faintly make out a few birds hopping and playing on a distant tree, quiet and idle, like a whole separate little world carved out of its own.
“What’s with that look?” A sudden, cold voice rang out, giving Ji Yi a start.
He turned toward it and found a black cat perched on a treetop not far off, staring straight at him. When had it gotten there?
What look?
Ji Yi thought about it. “Just a normal look…?” What kind of look could he possibly have.
The black cat said, displeased, “It was clearly a look of greed and desire. I’ve seen plenty of those.”
Lin Zhao’s tone said “don’t even try to deny it,” and the gaze that immediately followed as he sized Ji Yi up was full of the stare of death.
Ji Yi remembered Lin Zhao saying he’d killed no small number of humans who’d let greed go to their heads, and for a moment he felt a little uneasy.
He hurriedly waved his hands to clear his name. “What? No, no, I’m just a glutton!”
“A glutton?”
“That’s right,” Ji Yi said. “I was just wondering whether there might be a lot of tasty things hidden in this mountain.”
Lin Zhao looked half-convinced and didn’t answer Ji Yi’s curiosity. He’d taken the form of a cat, but his true form was no cat. So his gaze carried the cold severity and killing intent of a big cat, and being sized up by that kind of stare, it was hard not to feel a chill run down one’s spine.
Ji Yi just came right out with it. “Here’s what I was thinking, if there’s melons, fruit, vegetables, pork, beef, or mutton up in the mountain, it’d save me some money on groceries. I’ll find someone to help you, so surely you wouldn’t begrudge me even this much.”
Only then did Lin Zhao leap down from the treetop. “Whatever you want to trade with them is your business.”
“So that’s a yes?” Ji Yi pressed.
Lin Zhao neither confirmed nor denied it, but Ji Yi was getting familiar with his temperament by now, in a case like this, it meant tacit approval.
It was exactly this prickly manner of Lin Zhao’s that made Ji Yi curse him under his breath: stinky cat.
Ji Yi went to pick up Shuai Zhiming at the time they’d agreed on, and before long he saw Shuai Zhiming coming down the mountain.
Only, compared to how spirited he’d looked heading out that morning, he now cut a rather crestfallen, messy figure.
The moment he saw Ji Yi, he said, “Boss, the monkeys on Beishan aren’t the same as the ones I met yesterday.”
So he’d run into the Beishan monkeys after all. Looking at Shuai Zhiming’s obviously ravaged state, Ji Yi felt both a little guilty and a little sorry for him. “Probably a different troop.”
Shuai Zhiming followed Ji Yi back to the guesthouse, mainly he was after the guesthouse’s lunch, otherwise he could just as easily have skipped coming down and eaten a bit at one of the restaurants up on Beishan.
Fortunately the guesthouse food was as good as ever, and it went a long way toward soothing Shuai Zhiming’s mood.
This time, too, he didn’t forget to take photos, planning to post them together with the dinner shots.
In the afternoon Ji Yi went to tidy up the second floor.
The renovations on the second floor had been finished up the night before, now, given another couple of weeks, it would be ready to open for business. Ji Yi just figured the guesthouse’s likely foot traffic wasn’t enough to make him need the second floor anyway.
When he came down from upstairs, Liu Dalei was in the kitchen peeling potatoes, muttering as he peeled.
Ji Yi walked over and asked, “What are you going on about?”
Holding up a potato, Liu Dalei said with great disdain, “Back when I was still alive, all this kitchen grunt work was done by apprentices. Since when did I ever have to do it myself?”
“This is all the setup we’ve got here, and besides, I’ve got nowhere to dig up an apprentice for you,” Ji Yi consoled him, not very sincerely. “Just put up with it a little.”
Liu Dalei was only saying it to say it, he knew things weren’t as grand as they’d been in his living days. He only made one request of Ji Yi: “Then let me finish watching yesterday’s video today before you take the phone away.”
Ji Yi limited Liu Dalei to just one hour of phone time a day. Sometimes a documentary or video would happen to be almost over when the time ran out, and it drove Liu Dalei crazy.
Ji Yi reluctantly said, “Fine. I’ll go check whether the phone’s fully charged.”
He’d left the phone charging in his room earlier. Now, remembering to go get it, he discovered a whole batch of message notifications on it. When he tapped in to look, they turned out to be booking requests and inquiries from various platforms.
Ji Yi was both startled and delighted. He opened them up, the guesthouse currently had three empty rooms, and there were already reservations for them over the next few days.
This sudden surge of traffic left Ji Yi baffled, but he couldn’t help being pleased.
Only after he tapped open one of the online inquiries did he find himself sprouting a few more question marks.
“Boss, have the monkeys at your guesthouse been to school?”
“Boss, if I book a room, can you guarantee I’ll get to see the monkeys when I come?”
“Boss, is the guesthouse that Weibo blogger who got scratched by a monkey mentioned yours?”
Ji Yi read a few of the messages, then followed the keywords they’d dropped and searched around on Weibo, and only then did he understand what had happened. Although most people were just piling on for the fun of it, Shuai Zhiming’s earlier Weibo post had been reshared by several marketing accounts and had indeed gotten no small amount of buzz. That had drawn the attention of some people who’d seen the post and were already planning to travel to Beishan soon, steering them toward the Daishan guesthouse.
Even though most people still preferred to stay closer to Beishan, and weren’t all that reassured by a newly opened guesthouse, Ji Yi had genuinely siphoned off a bit of Beishan’s traffic.
Perfectly content, he cradled his phone and, not forgetting to ride the wave, added a line to the guesthouse’s listing description: “We cannot guarantee guests will get to interact with the polite monkeys after checking in.”
The Beishan monkeys were all a pack of bandits. The monkeys over at Daishan, judging by the politeness Shuai Zhiming had described the day before, must have cultivated into spirits. How could the contrast not be striking?
He knew that online buzz, if you didn’t deliberately market to keep it going, usually came and went fast, and Shuai Zhiming’s post had gone viral by accident, so the heat would probably die down soon.
But at least this traffic had converted into real, honest-to-goodness guests. Ji Yi was already quite satisfied, treating it all as an unexpected windfall.
He confirmed the reservations lined up for the empty rooms and started looking forward to the guests arriving.
At nine that night, Ji Yi lit a coil of mosquito incense and sat in the main hall reading.
Old Li and Old Sun drifted in through the front door. “Boss Ji.”
Ji Yi had set their work hours, nine at night to five in the morning, and now they’d shown up right on time.
Ji Yi looked up. “You’re here.”
Since they’d arrived, Ji Yi went and shut the front door, planning to wash up and go to bed himself.
Liu Dalei was off to the side, absorbed in the phone. Ji Yi glanced over out of the corner of his eye and saw that the show had already started rolling its closing credits, so he took the phone back. “Time’s up.”
Although Liu Dalei hadn’t watched his fill, it really was the agreed hour, so he didn’t say anything and got up to head to the kitchen himself.
Ji Yi took the phone back to his room and replied to a few netizens who’d come asking after seeing Weibo. Those booking a room directly were, in the end, a minority, most had just come to join in the fun.
Ji Yi scrolled his phone a while longer, then remembered to tap into the local famous handsome guy’s Weibo, and found that Shuai Zhiming had posted again, a photo collection of the day’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This time he specifically praised the Daishan guesthouse’s food by name.
This post’s traffic, though, had returned to normal, just a few dozen reshares and a hundred-odd comments. After all, posts that got heavily reshared by netizens like the previous two were the rare exception. But some people did say it made them hungry and they wanted to come try it out.
Ji Yi checked his phone once more and saw it was already ten, so he turned off the light and went to sleep.
If you asked what the single biggest improvement was since he’d stopped being a corporate drone, it was that Ji Yi had kicked his bad habit of staying up late. Now he basically slept at ten and woke around seven, getting plenty of rest, and barring anything unusual at night, he’d sleep straight through till dawn.
Only, that night, it felt like Ji Yi had been asleep barely any time at all before he was woken by a commotion outside.
Groggy, Ji Yi pricked up his ears to listen. All he could hear was Liu Dalei cursing and shouting, things like “you little brats,” “you little bastards.” Mixed in were the voices of Old Li and Old Sun, they were trying to calm things down, though there was some scolding too. Putting it together, it seemed they were trying to talk Liu Dalei down, but who exactly he was cursing at, there was no telling.
Could it be the ghosts had gotten bored at night, started a card game, and gotten into a fight?
He knew that before, when Chen Weiguo used to come do his night shifts, he’d organize card games during the break time, and had even tried to play for money, which Ji Yi had put a stop to, forbidding gambling from being organized on the premises. Every so often they’d play a few rounds without any money on the line.
Hearing how fierce the racket outside really was, Ji Yi couldn’t stay asleep. He had no choice but to sit up, put on his slippers, and head out.
The reason the noise outside was keeping Ji Yi awake was that Ji Yi could hear these ghosts’ voices. When Ji Yi opened his door and saw not a stir from Shuai Zhiming’s room, he knew it hadn’t disturbed him at all. So Ji Yi didn’t speak loudly either, to avoid his own voice startling the guest awake.
Ji Yi saw several ghosts by the front door. The big, burly ghost Liu Dalei was pinning down two scrawny ghosts, while Old Li and Old Sun were also grabbing at the two of them, stopping their attempts to bolt.
Ji Yi walked over and asked in a low voice, “What’s going on? Who are these two?”
Liu Dalei said indignantly, “These two little ghosts stole from the head chef himself. You tell me, are they asking to die or what?”
“Thieves?” Ji Yi was a bit puzzled. He looked down at the two scrawny ghosts. Through their ashen-gray faces he could just make out that both had been fairly young when they died, and there was something sleazy about their air.
Old Sun said, “I know these two ghosts. They’ve always liked doing shady, disreputable things, sneaking around, not to mention they’re a pair of gamblers. And now they’ve actually got the nerve to come steal here. If Old Li and I hadn’t been around, they’d probably have pulled it off and run by now.”
The two little ghosts begged for mercy. “Boss Ji, Boss Ji, we let greed get the better of us. We’ll never dare again, please let us go.”
“You know who I am?” Ji Yi was puzzled at first, then, recalling that Old Sun had said the two were gamblers, a thought turned over in his mind. “You wouldn’t happen to know Chen Weiguo, would you?”
They all loved to gamble, it was hard not to connect the dots.
The two little ghosts didn’t hide it, and admitted frankly, “Yes, yes, we know him. A few days ago while we were playing cards together, we heard Master Chen mention that things seemed pretty flush over here, so we thought we’d come borrow a bit to spend…”
Just as he’d thought.
Ji Yi was so exasperated he had to laugh. He gave each ghost a flick on the forehead. “Is this what you call borrowing?”
Liu Dalei tried to scare the two ghosts. “Of all the people to steal from, you had to steal here. Don’t you know Lord Lin Zhao watches over this place? Once Lord Lin Zhao finds out tomorrow what you’ve been up to, let’s see how you’ll die.”
Sure enough, the two little ghosts were scared into trembling all over, begging for mercy over and over.
They looked pitiful, but Ji Yi hadn’t the slightest intention of softening. Gambling ghosts in the world of the living and gambling ghosts in the netherworld were probably cut from the same cloth: once the gambling itch took hold, there was nothing they wouldn’t do. Otherwise they wouldn’t have had the gall to sneak over and steal even after learning the general lay of the land here.
Liu Dalei said to Ji Yi, “This isn’t their first time coming. A couple of days ago I felt like some of the ingots I’d set aside had gone missing, but I just chalked it up to misremembering. Today I caught them red-handed, so they can’t weasel out of it.”
Liu Dalei was so absorbed in the kitchen that he didn’t care about ingots one way or another, but that didn’t mean he’d stay calm about being robbed. It was just that he too was living under Ji Yi’s roof now, so it wouldn’t do for him to go over Ji Yi’s head in deciding how to deal with the two little ghosts.
Ji Yi yawned, still pretty sleepy. Hearing further that the two little ghosts weren’t first-time offenders but had come back to steal again after getting a taste of the sweetness, he figured gambling ghosts probably had no bottom line to speak of. If he let them go easily now, well, it’s not the thief you fear, but the thief who keeps you in mind. [2]once they’ve marked you as a target, they’ll keep coming back jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2932313_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2932313_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });
Looking at the two cowering ghosts, Ji Yi said to Liu Dalei, “Didn’t you say the kitchen was short-handed? I see they can’t cough up any ingots to pay you back either, so how about you put them to work as your kitchen helpers? Whenever you feel they’ve worked off the debt, then let them go.”
Liu Dalei had meant to give them a good beating to vent his anger, but hearing Ji Yi’s suggestion, he found it even better. So he hoisted the two little ghosts up all at once. “From now on, then, you’ll work under me. Hmph, you’re getting off easy, actually. You’ve no idea what standards I used to have for taking on an apprentice.”
The two little ghosts didn’t dare make a peep. Whether they were willing or not, for now they had to knuckle under first.
Seeing Shuai Zhiming off, Ji Yi felt rather reluctant to part with him.
Not to mention that he and Shuai Zhiming had gotten along well these past couple of days, just the fact that Shuai Zhiming had genuinely brought him a stretch of foot traffic in the days to come was enough to make Ji Yi grateful.
Before leaving, Shuai Zhiming even sincerely offered Ji Yi a suggestion: he could charge separately for the food, just like the model some of the old farm-stay resorts with lodging used to run. Although Shuai Zhiming hadn’t laid eyes on what the head chef here looked like these past two days, he was already absolutely certain of the man’s culinary skill.
It wasn’t that Ji Yi hadn’t thought of what Shuai Zhiming was describing. It was just that when he’d weighed it before, he’d felt that with no steady foot traffic at the start, the guesthouse might not be able to draw customers who came specifically to eat.
After all, restaurants with tasty food were not exactly numerous, but hardly rare either, and not many customers would make a special trip just for a single meal. Even if there were such cases, it would surely be on the premise that the guesthouse had already built up a certain reputation.
And the key thing was, if he wanted to offer an à la carte service, there’d be a fair amount of ingredients to prep in advance each day. When there were plenty of customers and it could all be sold, that was fine, but if the foot traffic fell short, it would still be quite a burden.
If he could solve the cost burden on that front, Ji Yi would be quite willing to do it. Liu Dalei over there was forever going on about being wasted on trivial work these days, and how could Ji Yi not want to give him a chance to fully show what he could do?
Turning it over in his mind, Ji Yi drove back to Hongye Village. He’d barely stopped the car when he heard a rustling from the bushes over there.
He turned to look and found several monkey heads poking out of the undergrowth.
The monkeys watched Ji Yi warily, looking very cautious.
“Hey,” Ji Yi caught on the moment he saw them. “Were you the ones who took the peaches?”
The few monkeys had been observing Ji Yi, but hearing his question, they nodded in a very human way. One of them turned and vanished into the bushes, and before long came back holding up a peach, making as if to hand it to Ji Yi.
These monkeys were clearly different from the deadbeats on Beishan. Their builds were the picture of good health, their eyes clear and bright. And from the way they’d nodded on hearing Ji Yi speak, he could tell these monkeys had awakened their spiritual awareness like Bolao, and could communicate with him.
It was just that after Ji Yi said a couple of things and none of them spoke up, he guessed their cultivation still wasn’t quite enough, and they probably couldn’t yet speak human words.
“You can’t talk?” Ji Yi crouched down in front of them, even lowering his head to keep his eyeline as level with the monkeys as he could.
Only after asking did he feel the words came out a bit ambiguously, but the little monkeys didn’t mind.
The monkeys nodded, and the lead one even pressed the peach into Ji Yi’s hand.
The monkeys seemed to have a desire to communicate with Ji Yi too. They looked around, and their gazes settled on the old tree spirit beside the old house. One of the monkeys, with a tuft of unruly fur on its head, walked over, patted the trunk, then let out a couple of “ook-ook” cries.
The old tree spirit spoke up, somewhat unwillingly. “It says they can’t speak human words yet. They’re learning.”
The monkey squeaked a couple more times, and the old tree spirit went on translating. “Because they’ve always stayed in the mountain and haven’t seen many people, they’ve had few chances to practice. Now that Lord Lin Zhao has eased up, they’ve been wanting to seek out some opportunities to interact with people.”
So that was it, Ji Yi realized.
He knew that one major criterion for judging a demon’s success in cultivation was whether it could take human form and speak human words, he just hadn’t imagined this required practicing by interacting with people. Then again, it made sense: without something to model yourself on, how could you possibly get good out of thin air?
Ji Yi looked at the peach in his hand and asked, “So you want to interact with me more, is that it?”
The old tree spirit spoke again. “Not just interacting with you more, really, the more people the better. To learn all the ways of humankind. If they want to reach a higher level, they’ll even have to learn human writing, so they can blend into human society without barriers. Blending in isn’t necessarily the goal, but it’s a necessary ability.”
That whole latter half was the old tree spirit speaking for itself, said both for Ji Yi to hear and for the several little monkey spirits.
Hearing this, the little monkey spirits only nodded along.
The old tree spirit was, after all, a tree in the village, over all these years it had witnessed many of Hongye Village’s people go from childhood to adulthood and on to old age and death. Its understanding of many things was far better than the little monkey spirits’.
The little monkey spirits squeaked, and looked hopefully toward Ji Yi.
Ji Yi didn’t understand, and waited for the old tree spirit to translate.
“What they mean is, they hope they can come by often from now on to observe humans, so they can study and improve. They don’t know whether you’ll allow it.”
There was nothing wrong with monkeys showing up here, even if tourists saw them, they’d most likely just think them cute. Ji Yi found these little monkeys quite endearing too. He said, “Of course it’s fine. But I’ve got something I’d like to ask you all as well.”
The little monkeys looked at Ji Yi with round, limpid eyes, seeming to ask with their gaze what it was he wanted to know.
Ji Yi held up the peach in his hand and asked the little monkeys, “This kind of peach, are there a lot of them in your mountain?”
The little monkeys nodded without hesitation, and even drew a big circle with both hands in front of their chests. The old tree spirit added from the side, “Loads. More than you could ever eat.”
Ji Yi’s mouth practically watered at that, but he didn’t forget to pull out his phone and open an app with a grocery-shopping function. He scrolled to the fruit-and-vegetable page and pointed for the little monkeys. “How about this one, this, and this?”
The little monkeys nodded all at once, their meaning couldn’t be clearer: “Yes, we’ve got them all!”
After the little monkeys obligingly went through the entire fruit-and-vegetable list with Ji Yi, they also indicated that not only did the mountain have everything Ji Yi had shown them, but even the things not on the list, the mountain had those too.
Ji Yi’s gaze turned once more toward the boundless expanse of Daishan. Was this a mountain? Was this not, in fact, a treasure trove of resources, fresh twenty-four hours a day and absolutely superb in flavor?
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