“Yeah,” Wei Hu said, scratching his hair a little sheepishly. “When the stylist recommended it I thought it looked pretty cool, so I went with the fluorescent color. Supposedly it stays glowing for a good ten, twenty days.”
Ji Yi had very nearly landed a punch on Wei Hu’s face a moment ago. Now he was both relieved and feeling like the speechlessness in his chest was about to take physical form. He shook out his hand, forced the urge to hit someone back down, and still couldn’t quite manage it. He reached up and yanked the hood of Wei Hu’s hoodie down over his forehead, then turned and walked off.
Seeing Ji Yi about to leave, Wei Hu hurried after him. “Hey, Brother Ji, wait for me! Did you hear those birds calling up in the mountains just now? Really gave me the creeps.”
It was precisely because he’d heard those bird cries all alone that he hadn’t dared linger outside by himself, and he’d run right into Ji Yi, who had come looking for him.
Before he’d come out to livestream, Wei Hu had always thought of himself as pretty gutsy, otherwise he wouldn’t have shown up to try his luck after hearing something bad had happened around here. But next to Ji Yi, Wei Hu figured his own nerve wasn’t worth mentioning.
On the surface Ji Yi looked like a clean-cut kid who’d grown up in the city, yet the steadiness about him, the way nothing seemed to rattle him, made Wei Hu feel safe.
Especially now, at the foot of the mountain at night, with the mountain wind carrying the cries of unnamed birds and the darkness closing in.
Wei Hu couldn’t help reaching out and grabbing a corner of Ji Yi’s clothes.
Ji Yi felt the tug at his shirt, turned, and saw Wei Hu’s hand. “And you still want to go out and livestream later?”
Wei Hu thought of his eighty-odd followers and his lukewarm, empty stream, then glanced back at the road they’d just walked, already swallowed back into the darkness.
He was in agonies of indecision and about to speak when that long, cold bird cry drifted toward the two of them again, from far to near.
Wei Hu’s spine went stiff, and he shook his head at once. “Forget it. I’ll just skip it.”
Ji Yi didn’t bother about whether or not the man was clinging to his shirt, he just kept walking forward.
The night wind slid through the strands of his hair, like a cold hand brushing lightly across his scalp.
The strange bird cries seemed to speed up their rhythm, and before long another set joined in, weaving together as if trailing the two of them on their way back.
At the front of the old house, Wei Hu was first to hop inside, while Ji Yi, holding the candlestick, couldn’t help glancing back toward where the bird cries were coming from.
At that one glance, the bird cries cut off abruptly, and Ji Yi’s gaze seemed to meet something. There was clearly nothing before him but a mass of darkness beyond the flickering candlelight, yet the sense of a stare landing on him was too plain, something sizing him up from within the dark.
Eyes hidden in the darkness, watching. Ji Yi had seen them more than once. He was used to facing such things calmly, because to let fear show was to let a weakness show.
Ji Yi withdrew his gaze evenly, stepped through the doorway as if nothing were the matter, and then barred the front door from the inside with the crossbar.
The crossbar was a thick, heavy length of wood. Set against the solid door panel, it was as if it barred all the unknown terrors outside.
By the time Ji Yi carried the candlestick back to the pitched tent, Wei Hu had already posted a “taking a break” notice to his livestream channel and was on his phone editing the footage he’d shot outside.
Seeing Ji Yi come over, Wei Hu snickered. “Just now when I said I was taking a break, somebody actually asked if I’d run into a ‘friend’ too. I didn’t answer straight. If I edit this video tomorrow and post it, maybe I can pull in a wave of traffic.”
Ji Yi didn’t understand these content-creator tricks. He sat down beside Wei Hu, took his laptop out of his bag, connected to the phone’s hotspot, and went through his email. It had been almost forty-eight hours since he’d last logged in, and there wasn’t a single message inside.
He hadn’t even gotten one phone call.
Now that’s what I call eerie, Ji Yi thought to himself.
A wave of genuine weariness settled over him. He closed the laptop, lay back, and covered his eyes with one hand. Then he thought of the pair of fretful, nagging parents he’d have to face once he got home, and found himself outright not wanting to go back at all.
Ji Yi thought of what Wei Hu had said earlier about opening a guesthouse. On impulse he pulled out his phone and searched for a while, reading for a good half hour and clicking through quite a few pages, getting a rough sense of how feasible running a guesthouse might be.
The conclusion he reached was that opening a guesthouse here actually might not be out of the question.
The most important thing for a guesthouse is location, and location-wise, this place wasn’t far from Beishan. As Wei Hu had mentioned, even villages farther out than Red Leaf Village were running guesthouses off the tourist traffic from the Beishan scenic area. Ji Yi searched online for guesthouses in the area too, and sure enough, there really were places considerably farther in than Red Leaf Village operating guesthouses tagged with Beishan keywords.
Red Leaf Village’s location was no problem at all.
Next, and just as important, were the property and the startup costs, and for Ji Yi those were even less of a problem. The old house was already registered under his mother’s name, so there was no rent to worry about. On top of that, from what he’d seen of the house during his daytime inspection, the old house didn’t need much renovation, a few small decorative pieces of furniture at most.
As for the guesthouse’s style, plenty of villagers ran their own guesthouses that were really more like farm-stays. From the photos, the houses could at best be called tidy and clean, and whatever “style” they had was just a crude pile of trendy Instagram-bait elements. Ji Yi felt they couldn’t compare to the natural, old-world charm of the old house.
And with a small self-run guesthouse like this, Ji Yi had no ambition to build it into something big and mighty. Using the monthly bookings of the nearby villagers’ homegrown guesthouses as a reference, Ji Yi did a rough calculation: two or three thousand a month on the low end, over ten thousand on the high end. It was actually pretty livable.
Ji Yi also looked up the relevant policies here in Nanling. Opening a guesthouse meant getting a lot of permits, the usual routine for any business premises. In some places it was a hassle, but here around Beishan, since the higher-ups were encouraging tourism, running around a bit to get the whole set done wasn’t difficult.
In the two months Ji Yi had been idle, even as he anxiously hunted for a job, he’d been of two minds about it. What corporate wage-slave hasn’t dreamed of stopping to slowly savor the ease of life?
Why else would so many people dream of going down south to open a little inn, being their own boss, living out their days relaxed and untroubled by the world?
Ji Yi had never pictured himself heading down this road, but imagining it wasn’t half bad.
He turned it over and over in his mind, and his mood actually lightened considerably, so much so that for a while he didn’t notice how much time had passed. When he glanced at the clock again, he realized it was already nearly ten.
Still, whether or not to actually try the guesthouse route, Ji Yi hadn’t quite worked that out. It was, after all, an important decision, not one you could settle by mulling it over for a few hours.
The bird cries in the mountains rose again, coo-coo and then a wailing moan, the notes drawn out long, like sobbing.
Ji Yi pillowed his hands behind his head, paying the bird cries no mind, and even started to feel drowsy.
Just as he was about to fall asleep, Wei Hu, beside him, nudged over toward him and asked in a small voice, “Brother Ji, are you asleep?”
Ji Yi was sparing with his words. “Fast asleep.”
Wei Hu stopped nudging. Now he regretted having dragged Ji Yi into sleeping out here in these mountains. Deep at night the mountains really were full of odd cries, and every one of them set off no shortage of horrifying images in Wei Hu’s mind.
Still, hearing that Ji Yi was awake made Wei Hu feel a little better. He tugged at Ji Yi’s arm again. “Brother Ji, I need to pee.”
Ji Yi got the feeling he was running a daycare for big kids.
“So go pee,” Ji Yi said.
“Brother Ji, can you come with me? I’m scared.” Wei Hu had thrown his dignity out the window and clung to Ji Yi for dear life.
As Wei Hu got up, Ji Yi gave his backside a kick from behind, not too light and not too hard. Wei Hu stumbled a bit but didn’t get angry, he just gave Ji Yi an ingratiating smile.
Wei Hu had meant to just go in the rain-drainage gutter of the courtyard, but Ji Yi found the smell distasteful, so he hauled Wei Hu over to the front gate to pee out into the grass.
The splashing sound went on for a while. Inside the gate, Ji Yi waited with his arms crossed, thoroughly bored.
In a moment the sound stopped. Ji Yi’s toes twitched, ready to head back inside at any second. But he waited a while and still didn’t hear Wei Hu’s footsteps returning, which struck him as odd.
He poked his head out to look. Wei Hu’s fluorescent hair was still plenty visible in the night, but his head was hanging low, as if he were pondering something.
“Little Hu,” Ji Yi called softly. Wei Hu’s drooping head suddenly snapped up to look at Ji Yi, an odd expression on his face. His fly wasn’t even zipped up, yet at the moment he seemed unbothered about being on display. He abruptly turned and started walking toward Ji Yi.
“Zip up your fly,” Ji Yi instructed.
Only then did Wei Hu glance down at himself, and then, not much caring, he crammed the thing back into his pants with a rough motion. That made Ji Yi frown.
Damn. That jeans zipper, it made him wince just watching.
Wei Hu spoke, his voice a bit stiff. “Done.”
As he spoke he’d already walked right up in front of Ji Yi, looking every bit like he meant to head straight inside.
Ji Yi stood inside the doorframe, but suddenly lifted a foot to block Wei Hu. “I called for Little Hu, not for you. The road is wide enough for everyone to keep to their own half [1]so go your own way jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931953_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931953_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, kindly stop right there.” His movement was domineering, but his tone was still polite.
The stiffness and strangeness in Wei Hu’s movements, along with his blank, dazed reaction just now, made it obvious he’d been possessed by something. As for what exactly had taken hold of him, Ji Yi couldn’t tell right away.
After all, besides ghosts, these mountains held plenty of goblins and spirits. Just as some trees, given enough time, are said to take on a spirit of their own, and things with spirits have all kinds of strange temperaments, good and bad hard to tell apart.
Wei Hu’s voice shifted along with Ji Yi’s words that had seen through the matter, coming out muffled and thick. “He pissed on me once already in broad daylight, and now he comes back at night. I am bound to teach him a lesson.”
There’d been a big tree where Wei Hu had just relieved himself. Recalling the stiff way Wei Hu had been walking, Ji Yi got a rough idea of the situation. It seemed Wei Hu had angered an old tree that had become a spirit.
He spoke up to plead Wei Hu’s case. “So that’s what happened. But he’s still young and doesn’t know any better, do you think you could let him off just this once?”
This old tree turned spirit, however, was a stickler for principle. He gave a snort. “That time in the daytime was already giving him a chance. He’s done it again, how can I let him off lightly?”
References[+]