But people with that mindset were far from rare, otherwise the countless livestreams and videos hawking supernatural gimmicks wouldn’t rack up so many views. Ji Yi had no urge to lecture strangers, and once he’d confirmed the guy was human, he relaxed.
There was still a short stretch of road ahead. Ji Yi waved at the green-haired guy. “I’ll head off now.”
They were just passersby who’d crossed paths by accident, so now was the time to go their separate ways.
But the green-haired guy showed no intention of parting ways with Ji Yi. He kept pace with him, selfie stick held high, and even struck up conversation: “Hey, you don’t believe in this stuff, do you? Let me tell you, some things you’re better off believing in than not.”
Ji Yi neither agreed nor disagreed, and countered: “If you believe in it, why are you still filming?”
The green-haired guy chuckled a couple of times and lifted his head to look ahead. The path in front of them had widened a little now, and he could already clearly make out the corner of a house peeking out from behind the trees.
“So your family’s ancestral house is in Red Leaf Village,” the green-haired guy said.
The question made Ji Yi pause. He looked at the little green-haired guy. “You’re a local?”
Red Leaf Village had been deserted for nearly ten years, and most current electronic maps didn’t even include it. The only people who knew about the place were mostly the villagers living nearby.
The green-haired guy nodded, and, not watching the rocks underfoot, nearly slipped. “Whoa, crap,” he yelped, quickly grabbing Ji Yi’s arm before answering, “Sort of. I live in town.”
Hearing that the green-haired guy lived in town, Ji Yi’s feelings grew even more tangled. He found it genuinely hard to connect this young man, with hair dyed an almost fluorescent green, obviously flighty and reckless in temperament, with those old men in the teahouses who sipped tea at a leisurely pace, as if living in a stretch of time that had stopped twenty years ago.
This time Ji Yi couldn’t help asking: “You live in town, and dyeing your hair like that didn’t get you a beating?”
The green-haired guy grinned. “My mom and dad work away from home. It’s just me and my grandpa, and his eyesight’s bad.”
So indeed there was no one around to beat him.
“Oh,” Ji Yi said, understanding. After walking a couple more steps and seeing the guy still trailing right alongside him, he asked, “You’re going to Red Leaf Village too?”
By rights, this close to the mountains, having a local trail after you when you’re walking alone was a situation that called for caution. But Ji Yi had long since sized up the little green-haired guy’s skinny arms and legs, probably not even worth a single punch of his, so he wasn’t the least bit worried.
The green-haired guy nodded. “I’m going up to have a look, do a little livestream of the deserted village for everyone. Wanna see it, folks?” The second half was obviously directed at the viewers in his stream.
But once he finished, Ji Yi glanced at his phone and saw that the bullet comments comments popping up were pitifully few, one or two of them even asking who Ji Yi was, and whether he was livestreaming alongside the host.
Ji Yi recognized this streaming platform, he watched it occasionally himself. A glance at the top-right corner showed a “popularity” count of under five hundred. Subtract the popularity padded out by gifted presents, and whether the real viewer count even reached a hundred was anyone’s guess.
From that angle, the little green-haired guy’s earnestness was actually kind of inspiring.
A few exchanges later, Red Leaf Village was right in front of them.
Although Red Leaf Village sat very close to the forested mountains, it wasn’t really in the mountains at all.
Their route had seemed to twist and turn every which way, but from the main road it was really only about a five-minute walk. Counting the trip from town, Ji Yi checked his phone, with no delays, on foot it was roughly twenty minutes.
The real mountains lay behind Red Leaf Village. Standing before the first house he saw, Ji Yi recognized this ancestral house at a glance, without needing to look again at the photo his mom had given him.
In more than ten years of wind and sun at the mountain’s foot, the ancestral house, white walls, green moss, dark tiles, looked no different from the old photo. Even the spring-festival couplets pasted on the broad, thick wooden door hadn’t fully faded.
Ji Yi stood before the door, his gaze falling on the big lock hanging from it. He reached out and cradled the lock in one palm to find the keyhole, while with his other hand he took out the keys, matched one to the size of the keyhole, and slid the likely fit in.
The lock body was rusted, but the keyhole was still clear. Ji Yi pinched the smooth key between his fingertips and gave it a light turn. With a click, the rather hefty lock sprang open.
Ji Yi lifted the lock away and, with a slight press of his palm, pushed the closed wooden door open a crack. The door swung slowly inward, the wood grinding out a creak, as if every inch of force met a response.
When the door panel formed a near right angle with the frame, Ji Yi drew his hand back. Behind him a faint rush suddenly rose, wind sweeping through the leaves like a rolling wave, startling a flock of forest birds into the air.
Ji Yi felt the sudden gust. When he turned to look, the wind’s last traces hadn’t yet dispersed, curling up to stir the loose hair at his temple. Only then did he notice that, from this angle, the ancestral house sat squarely at what was almost the mouth of the great mountain behind it.
The forest was dense, the peaks layered ridge upon ridge, and the thick woods screening one another made it impossible to take in the whole of the mountain.
He was looking at the mountain, and it seemed the mountain was looking back at him.
“What’s this mountain called?” Ji Yi asked the little green-haired guy, who was fiddling with his phone beside him.
At that, the green-haired guy lifted his head and followed Ji Yi’s line of sight, then thought about it and frowned, looking rather not sure. “It should be part of the Beishan range, I think. Doesn’t seem to have its own name.”
He finished and looked up again at the now-open old house, letting out a “wow.” “Your family’s ancestral house is pretty big!” With that, he stepped inside alongside Ji Yi.
The old house really was quite big. Past the entrance you could see the courtyard well and the main hall, with two rooms on each side, and two more rooms flanking either side of the main hall. Although the house was brick-and-timber, it was also two stories, if the upper floor’s layout roughly matched the ground floor’s, then this ancestral house was indeed no small place.
Beyond the structure itself, though, what drew Ji Yi’s eye even more were the exquisite, finely wrought carvings on the wooden windows and doors, on the roof beams, and on the other timber elements, figures, insects, fish, flowers, and birds.
Under the natural light, the carvings showed clear marks of age, yet nothing about them felt decayed. They were steeped in the years without any change to their solid, original form.
The overall state of the house’s upkeep was good enough to surprise Ji Yi. Before coming, his mom had said that after all these years the house might well have partly collapsed.
Ji Yi said nothing, but the green-haired guy beside him let out another sigh of admiration: “These crossbeams of yours, these carvings in the corners, they’re just too gorgeous.”
He shook his head and clicked his tongue in wonder, then patted Ji Yi’s arm. “Good thing your place is tucked away so deep, or it’d have been stolen and sold off long ago. A few years back our village’s ancestral shrine got robbed in the middle of the night, plenty of the nice decorative bits got sawed right off. It’s all those money-grubbing wretches with no shred of decency, the kind fate cuts short.”
Ji Yi tilted his head back, taking in every corner and detail of the old house, and unexpectedly felt very much at peace. He couldn’t say why, only that this peace was quite different from what he usually felt. He wasn’t sure whether it was the house’s aura affecting him.
Hearing the indignation in the little green-haired guy’s tone, Ji Yi said, “They even robbed the shrine? That really is shameless.”
As he spoke, he went on inspecting the various rooms.
A space left empty this long needed a careful look. So close to the forested mountains, snakes, bugs, and vermin were probably unavoidable, though that wasn’t what Ji Yi actually cared about. What he wanted to check was whether anything non-human had taken up residence in the empty house.
When the little green-haired guy saw Ji Yi walk up to one room, seemingly about to push the door and go straight in, he immediately lunged forward in a single bound to block Ji Yi’s hand. Then, under Ji Yi’s puzzled gaze, he explained: “You don’t get it, do you? A house that’s been empty a long time, you can’t just walk right in.” The second half he dropped to a low voice, as if afraid something might overhear. “Because an empty house might have ‘good friends’ living in it.”
He gave Ji Yi a meaningful look, signaling him to step back, then solemnly extended his hand, pushed up his sleeve, and rapped lightly twice on the wooden door, saying as he knocked, “See, best to knock like this first, then wait a bit before going in.”
But no sooner had the words left his mouth than the unlocked wooden door, from his knocking, swung open with a deep, drawn-out creak.
That stretched-out grinding sound came straight at their faces, carrying the stale, oppressive air of the pitch-black room within, like some strange sort of welcoming ceremony.
Right then it came across as untimely and eerie. For all the little green-haired guy’s smooth patter, at that moment he reflexively scrambled to hide behind Ji Yi, muttering a curse under his breath: “Ugh, holy crap.”
Ji Yi was so amused by the way the guy clearly had no nerve yet insisted on playing brave that he nearly laughed. He patted the little green-haired guy’s hand, which was gripping his arm a touch too tightly. “Scared, huh? Then I’ll go in and look myself.”
The little green-haired guy glanced at his stream and forced a calm front: “I’m not scared. How could I be scared of this? Tonight I’m even going to livestream sleeping out in the mountains. I brought my tent and everything.” He patted the big pack on his back.
Ji Yi didn’t call him out, though he could practically hear the little green-haired guy’s racing heartbeat. He stepped into the room first. Inside there was a certain long-sealed, musty smell. Holding up his phone flashlight, Ji Yi went all the way in and threw open the shut wooden window.
With that, light from outside spilled into the room, driving off the darkness, and taking the eerie feeling with it.
Aside from a few wooden chairs and stools, the room held nothing, taking in everything at a single glance.
Seeing this, the little green-haired guy calmed down a good deal and started bragging to his phone camera: “What’s so scary about this? I wasn’t scared one bit.”
After making a circuit and opening up every room, Ji Yi found there were four bedrooms. He counted them as such because all four had beds, and most of the furniture was there too.
Just then Ji Yi’s mom called on video. Ji Yi carried her along on the video for a look around, then asked why there were so many rooms.
“Back then there were a lot of kids,” his mom explained. “This house was built by your great-grandfather. Don’t go by the fact that we’re all only children now, in the old days people loved having lots of kids for good fortune, so of course the house had plenty of rooms. Who knew that later, what with wars and natural disasters, only your grandfather was left? Otherwise you’d have had a whole bunch of brothers and sisters.”
Ji Yi let his mom reminisce for a while before hanging up. The moment he did, he heard the little green-haired guy ask, “You’re not staying here tonight?”
The question was probably prompted by Ji Yi having told his mom on the call that he’d soon book a hotel over by the Beishan scenic area.
“Right.”
The little green-haired guy fixed him with a look that said Ji Yi didn’t know how things worked around here. “Did you book a hotel in advance? If you’re only booking now, there definitely won’t be anything left for tonight.”
“Really?” Ji Yi honestly hadn’t known hotels around Beishan were in such tight demand.
Sure enough, he opened several booking apps and checked, only to find that every one of them showed no rooms available for today.
Just as Ji Yi was considering whether to call a car back to the city, the little green-haired guy proposed: “Why not just sleep here? Don’t be scared, tonight I’m planning to do an exploration stream in this village, so I can keep you company. I’ll share half my tent with you.”
Who exactly was the scared one here was anyone’s guess.
Ji Yi’s eyes glinted with I see right through you as he shot the little green-haired guy a sidelong glance. The guy immediately turned to his stream camera and gushed theatrically: “Oh, my phone’s about to die, I’ll end the stream for now. Eight o’clock tonight, folks, be there!”
He finished, ended the stream, then let out a long sigh as if a weight had lifted, and turned to Ji Yi with a pleading, hangdog face. “Bro, we may have met by chance, but that’s fate too. You’ve got nowhere to stay anyway, so just let me spend the night here with you! I’m scared on my own!”
Ji Yi neither agreed nor disagreed, only asked, “If you’re scared, why do you livestream this kind of thing?”
The little green-haired guy lowered his head and looked at his own feet. “I don’t really know what else to do, you know? That guy who came to livestream before and had that accident, I heard his video got tons of views and he made a good bit of money off it. I didn’t even finish high school, my grandpa’s health is poor, so I can’t go too far from him. There aren’t many job openings anywhere close to here, and with just a middle-school education, everywhere turns me down for being underqualified…”
He rambled through the whole thing, then pressed his palms together and bowed to Ji Yi again. “I’m begging you, bro. I already promised all eighty of my fans I’d stream tonight.”
The story was only getting more pitiful.
Ji Yi couldn’t bear to hear more, and, honestly, he had no real objection to spending a night here anyway. From his walk-through just now, the house really was “clean,” so he simply nodded. “All right.”
The little green-haired guy’s face instantly bloomed into a huge smile. “Bro, you’re like a real brother to me now. Oh right, my name’s Wei Hu. What’s yours?”
Already sworn brothers, and only now thinking to exchange names.
“Ji Yi.” Ji Yi thought the name Wei Hu carried a plain, honest air that really didn’t suit the little green-haired guy at all.
“Oh, Brother Ji.” Wei Hu had a sweet tongue. “It’s Brother, right? You don’t look that old to me. I’m twenty-one, how old are you, Brother? Of course, even if you’re younger than me, I’d still treat you as my big brother.”
“Don’t worry, you didn’t call me Brother for nothing,” Ji Yi said. “I’m twenty-five.”
Since he’d decided to stay here, Ji Yi took another careful tour of the house.
The kitchen here was quite large. Running water had even been plumbed in beside the old-style stove, probably done back when running water was first installed over a decade ago, though no one had used it in all the years since.
Ji Yi turned the tap. First came a couple of sputters, then water gushed out. The first bit was very murky, but after running a while it gradually cleared.
Ji Yi didn’t expect the water here to still be on, and suddenly things felt a lot more convenient. There were mountain springs and such outside, but those were never quite so clean.
The water was on, but the power wasn’t. Ji Yi tested several spots and confirmed that the house had wiring but no electricity running through it. Fortunately, he dug several candles out of the drawer beneath the incense table in the main hall, which could be used for light at night.
In the time it took him to go check on the power, Wei Hu had already come in cradling a big armful of leafy greens. “Brother Ji, these greens are so tender, plenty for the two of us.”
What Wei Hu held was the wild vegetables he’d just picked outside. Ji Yi couldn’t tell what they were, but they did look fresh and tender. Wei Hu also pulled two packs of extra-large instant noodles from his own bag, ready to share with Ji Yi.
“I’ll go find a basin to wash the vegetables,” Ji Yi said.
Earlier he’d seen a few basins in another room piled with odds and ends.
By the time Ji Yi fetched a basin back, Wei Hu had already found a rag and wiped down the whole stove, bustling about with even more brisk efficiency than the fairy in the snail shell [1]the diligent housekeeper of the folk tale jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931952_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931952_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });. This Ji Yi didn’t expect, in his impression, most young people, himself included, hardly went near a kitchen, and any need to eat was mostly settled with takeout.
But watching the way Wei Hu worked, he was clearly used to doing housework.
“Do you cook a lot at home?” Ji Yi asked.
“Yeah. My mom and dad usually only come back for Spring Festival. When I was little, my grandparents still had farm work to do, so after school I had to cook dinner ahead of time and wait for them to come eat. I’ve done all this so many times it’s second nature.”
“Impressive,” Ji Yi said sincerely.
Praised, Wei Hu’s face, lit up in green, broke into that honest smile again.
Wei Hu also asked Ji Yi about the old house. Learning that Ji Yi hadn’t been back in years and that the house normally just sat empty and unused, he found it a real shame.
“I went over to Beishan before and saw a few guesthouses they’d set up, supposedly done in a retro style, but you could tell at a glance the carvings and decorations were all modern imitations, and not even good ones. The gimmick’s loud enough, though. The rooms aren’t even big, and it’s over four hundred a night,” Wei Hu said, rinsing the vegetables under the tap. “If you ask me, Brother, this house of yours is what real retro looks like.”
Ji Yi said, “Of course they wouldn’t use finely made things for a guesthouse. The cost is too high and it takes too long to recoup.”
A lot of intricate carving carried no small price at today’s rates, either.
“True. But that reminds me, Brother, this house of yours would be perfect for a guesthouse.” The more Wei Hu thought about it, the more he liked his own idea. “The guesthouses and hotels over by Beishan are all booked solid. Actually, heading inland from our town, in villages even deeper than Red Leaf Village, some places have started running guesthouses. You fix up your own house a bit like that, keep the price low, one or two hundred a night, and you’ll still get some guests on ordinary days. They say it brings in two or three thousand a month, and Red Leaf Village is even closer to Beishan.”
Ji Yi had never once thought about opening a guesthouse, but with Wei Hu putting it that way, he couldn’t help mulling it over.
Wei Hu washed the pot and two sets of bowls and chopsticks, then set the instant noodles going with great efficiency.
The noodles were pretty ordinary in flavor, but paired with the fresh wild vegetables Wei Hu tossed in at the end, the taste took on a crisp, tender freshness. Ji Yi and Wei Hu drank down every last bit of the broth.
Their simple meal done, Wei Hu shouldered his selfie stick and headed out again, saying he wanted to scout angles and spots for the night’s stream, to check the route before dark.
His figure soon vanished among the low old houses all around.
Ji Yi walked to the front door and faced the mountain road not far off.
The sky was still dim and gray, but this kind of gray wasn’t dark clouds bearing down, it was simply that the hour was growing late. As far as the eye could see, the trees were lush green, the flowers a vivid red, the woodland streams and the gentle mountain breeze, and that earlier feeling of peace soon returned to Ji Yi’s heart.
Was this the tranquility of the pastoral life so many people talked about? Thinking back on this stretch of hitting one wall after another in his job search, Ji Yi actually felt the old house held a genuine pull, an impulse to make him want to stay.
He’d been working for almost three years now, maybe there’d be no harm in really resting for a while. Even the idea Wei Hu had just mentioned, opening a guesthouse, began circling in Ji Yi’s mind.
Lost in thought, he didn’t notice the sky darkening until, before long, he could no longer make out the mountain road. The mountain itself sank entirely into the dark, as if it had vanished from Ji Yi’s sight.
Ji Yi walked back inside, and with nothing else to do, simply took out Wei Hu’s tent and pitched it beside the courtyard well.
He spent about half an hour getting it all arranged. By then the surroundings had sunk completely into night, and cocking an ear, he could easily catch the steady, rhythmic chirping of insects, as if right beside his ear.
Ji Yi checked the time, already seven o’clock. Wei Hu, who’d said he was only going out to take a quick look around, still hadn’t come back, and Ji Yi began to worry a little.
Remembering the old ghost’s talk of the mountains being thick with sprites and demons, Ji Yi picked up the candlestick and headed out to check on Wei Hu.
The mountains got a bit chilly at night. Even though it was already June, the mountain wind raised goosebumps all over Ji Yi.
The moment he stepped out the door, an unfamiliar bird cry happened to sound from the mountains not far off, strange and drawn out, echoing on and on through the mountain’s body. Ji Yi looked toward the sound. The darkness seemed to conceal countless possibilities, surging in from all directions to lunge at him and the small candle flame in his hand.
Gripping the candlestick, Ji Yi kept walking with steady steps, he wanted to make sure Wei Hu was safe.
He moved forward along the narrow path between the houses for about a dozen steps when he suddenly saw, hovering in mid-air ahead, a mass of glow faintly tinged with green. That floating light seemed to give a sudden shudder, then instantly locked onto him and came charging straight at Ji Yi in a heartbeat.
At the same time there came the regular slap of something heavy hitting the ground, closer and closer.
Even with a measure of mental preparation, Ji Yi hadn’t anticipated something charging straight at him like this.
His eyes went wide, and before he could even judge whether it was ghost-fire or a demon, his fist had already instinctively started to swing.
Just as the fist was about to meet flesh, Wei Hu’s voice rang out: “Brother Ji! Don’t hit me!”
Ji Yi’s fist jerked to a stop, and at last the candle flame in his hand lit up Wei Hu, just over a meter away.
…So the glowing thing had been Wei Hu’s green hair.
Even Ji Yi couldn’t help swearing at that moment: “Damn, your hair’s fluorescent too??”
References[+]