Fu Sang threw back the covers he had barely warmed and got up to head outside.
The place they were in was an abandoned, long-empty small courtyard at the entrance of Heishan Village. Huo Wei had rented it for a large amount, after all, it was inconvenient to go anywhere in the middle of night, and Fu Sang’s fate was still unknown…she had come rushing over to find him and needed someplace to stay.
But the villagers in this remote place were all gloomy and sinister, extremely xenophobic, and only cared about money. Just renting this filthy, broken-down house with its flickering lightbulb had cost Huo Wei ten thousand yuan.
The crooked, haphazardly pieced-together wooden gate in the courtyard couldn’t even be properly closed, and could only be left ajar. Fu Sang pulled it open now, only to find that the village dirt road outside, which should have been empty and dark, was actually quite lively. The villagers, all with grim faces, hurried past, their flashlights in hand like swords and spears piercing through the night.
Fu Sang glanced at the pitch-black sky and belatedly fished his phone out of his pocket.
3:48 AM
“The village is this lively in the middle of the night?” Huo Wei crept up beside Fu Sang and asked in a low voice.
Then she remembered: “Oh, right, that village chief did say something happened in the village earlier…”
Fu Sang raised an eyebrow slightly and tilted his head toward her: “Curious?”
Huo Wei nodded vigorously.
So Fu Sang gestured his chin toward the noisy crowd hurrying past on the path: “Then go ask.”
“Huh?” Huo Wei’s eyes widened: “Why me?”
Fu Sang remained expressionless and perfectly at ease: “Because you’re curious.”
‘As if you’re not the least bit stirred yourself.’
Huo Wei rolled her eyes but still stepped down the crooked dirt-and-stone steps.
Fu Sang walked beside her with his hands in his pockets. As they approached the solemn-faced villagers passing by, before they could even ask, they overheard the villagers’ conversations:
“Hey, how could a perfectly fine person just suddenly be gone like that?”
“Who knows. What the elders passed down still makes sense; don’t come back after dark, nothing good ever comes of it!”
“What a shame, Aunt Li was such a good person.”
Huo Wei blinked, looking at Fu Sang in surprise, her eyes spelling out two big words. ‘Someone died?’
Fu Sang gave her no emotional feedback, only signaling with his eyes to follow the original plan.
So Huo Wei rolled her eyes at him, then plastered a smile on her face, walked over, and picked an older man who looked kind to ask:
“Uncle, what happened in the middle of the night?”
The old man was wrapped in a thin padded jacket with a leather hat on his head. He had been walking with his head down, but when Huo Wei called out to him, he looked up at the two of them and was startled by their strange appearances.
One had hair so long it nearly covered his eyes, pupils of different colors, skin as white as a ghost, dark circles, and a lip ring. The other was even more striking; black eyelids, black lips, and illuminated by the cold white beam of the flashlight, anyone who didn’t know better would think she was some kind of underworld deity coming to snatch souls away.
“Oh my…”
The old man stepped back dramatically. Once he realized they were just living people dressed a bit oddly, he patted his chest and let out a long sigh, muttering “dressed like ghosts in the middle of the night” as he looked the two youngsters up and down:
“You’re from out of town, right? This is Heishan Village! How did you get in?”
“That… it’s a long story, but we definitely didn’t sneak in over any walls, we came in the proper way!”
Huo Wei glossed over that topic and got to the point: “So what exactly happened in the village in the middle of the night?”
It was the middle of night, and the old man didn’t want to bother arguing with them. He waved his hand: “Ah, someone died!”
“Someone died?!” Huo Wei pretended to know nothing, gasping dramatically while secretly pulling Fu Sang along to keep pace with the old man: “What happened?”
“I haven’t seen it myself either. I heard it was a widow in the village. She went into the mountains to gather herbs around noon and never came back. Later in the evening, her big yellow dog started barking frantically, so someone went to check, and guess what? She’d fallen and rolled down a slope! She was really unlucky, when she fell, a wooden spike pierced straight through her and she died on the spot! I tell you, this Black Mountain entrance is truly cursed. Anyway, I’m not staying anymore. I’m going to the city next month to stay with my son…”
The old man seemed like he hadn’t fully woken up, letting everything spill out in a daze, bursting with a desire to share. Huo Wei seized the moment and gave him a lot of emotional feedback:
“Oh my god, that… is there some kind of legend about these mountains?”
This was why Fu Sang liked to assign tasks like gathering information to Huo Wei.
She was naturally outgoing, talked a lot, and was truly gifted at this sort of thing.
Fu Sang only needed to be a shadow, staying by her side, quietly listening to what she unearthed.
“What? You youngsters dare to run into this Black Mountain entrance without knowing anything?”
The old man gaped, looked around, and lowered his voice: “This Black Mountain entrance… is really cursed! People die here all the time! Especially outsiders…basically ten come in standing and nine go out lying down. Otherwise, look at how nice the scenery is around here, this place would’ve become one of those… internet famous check-in spots long ago. Not to mention other cases, just two years ago, seven city folks came in a group to Black Mountain entrance, and all of them died! The police sealed off the mountain and searched for seven days and seven nights! They couldn’t even find all seven bodies’ bones, just pieces here, and chunks there, it was terrifying!”
“Really?” Huo Wei cooperatively took another deep breath: “Then how come our fellow villagers dare to still live in the mountains?”
“Ah, our families have been here at Black Mountain entrance for generations, and we’ve managed to live all these years too. Besides, our village is on the edge of Black Mountain entrance; if we don’t go deeper in, we usually don’t attract anything… though that’s not guaranteed either. Take that widow who died today, her family was really strange!”
The old man’s voice dropped even lower, so low that Fu Sang could barely hear him, so he subtly moved two steps closer.
“Do you know why she’s a widow? She used to have a child, a boy. When the boy was five, he went out to play and didn’t come back all night. By the time they found him, he was just a corpse. People said a wolf killed him, but how could that be? If it were really a wolf, would it have left a body behind?
“Then a month later, her husband fell off a cliff and died too. All these years she’d been surviving by going up the mountain to gather herbs, and now she’s… ah, what a tragedy!”
The old man shook his head and sighed.
The village wasn’t big. In the time they’d had this conversation, they’d already arrived at the widow’s doorstep.
The widow’s body lay in the yard, covered with a white cloth. Under the big shed in the yard hung a dim yellow lightbulb, with mosquitoes and moths circling conspicuously beneath it.
The village chief who had bargained with Huo Wei earlier stood with his hands behind his back, surrounded by the crowd, his face contorted in a frown: “Just look at this mess! What a nuisance!”
With that, he pulled a wallet from his bosom, took out a few crumpled bills, none of large denominations, and without even counting them, stuffed them into the hands of someone nearby: “Tomorrow, go to town and find a feng shui master to come pick a spot and bury her. Aunt Li was a pitiful soul. Let each family contribute a little something so she can go with dignity…it’ll be everyone’s way of showing some care.”
The crowd murmured sparse agreement.
Unlike in the city, in remote mountain villages like this, once someone died, you’d find someone to pick a spot and bury them, and that was that. The deceased had no family left, so there weren’t many formalities.
Fu Sang stood at the periphery. After hearing the village chief’s words, he thought for a moment and silently raised his hand.
He was tall and his outfit was conspicuous, so the village chief spotted him immediately: “Hey, that young man? You’re not from our village…why are you raising your hand? What’s the matter?”
At that, everyone turned to look at Fu Sang.
Fu Sang didn’t even lift his eyes, looking like he hadn’t woken up. He just rubbed the tip of his nose with his hand and said in a neither-loud-nor-soft voice: “I know feng shui. No charge.”
“Oh, right, right, exactly!” Huo Wei quickly chimed in to support him: “My friend here runs a funeral shop in the city…he’s a funeral director! He’s also quite good at feng shui, face reading, and fortune-telling. He’s very professional in this area! Leaving it to him is definitely the right decision, and the two of us don’t want any money!”
The village chief recognized them, it was the girl who’d been throwing money around like water earlier that night, and her friend who’d walked out of the mountains in one piece in the middle of the night.
Why not take such a free offer? The village chief snatched the cash back from the person beside him and shoved it into his pocket, then asked suspiciously: “You two young folks, dressed like that, you really know how to do this?”
Fu Sang didn’t explain. He just silently pulled something from the inner pocket of his jacket, walked over, and handed it to the village chief: “Why would I lie to you? This is my Senior Feng Shui Practitioner Certificate, with a copy of my shop’s business license inside. Take a look.”
‘… Really?’
The village chief’s heart was full of doubt, but he didn’t actually recognize many characters anyway. He flipped through it quickly, handed it back to Fu Sang, and gave him a set of keys, effectively entrusting Aunt Li’s affairs to him.
After that, the crowd felt they’d done their part, they’d finished their work and watched the show. Since it was almost dawn, they dispersed and went home.
The small, rundown yard was suddenly empty, with only Fu Sang and Huo Wei. Huo Wei walked over, took his shabby certificate from his hand, and casually flipped through it: “How do you even have this thing? Other professionals would laugh themselves to death if they saw it.”
“Having more certificates never hurts.”
The certificate sounded flashy, but it had no real substance and was completely unrelated to being a true spirit master. Still, when you were out and about trying to make a living, carrying such a qualification could fool both superstitious people and rational ones, so he’d gone ahead and taken the exam, it wasn’t much trouble.
He took the certificate back, put it in his pocket, walked over to the body lying in the middle of the yard, and without any hesitation, lifted the white cloth covering the face.
The woman beneath had her eyes half-open, a deathly pale face, and blood at her mouth and nose. Compared to other corpses, she was not particularly horrifying.
But Fu Sang froze.
“What’s wrong?” Huo Wei had never seen this usually expressionless guy look so stunned, so she came over for a look and asked.
“I’ve seen her before,” Fu Sang replied, snapping out of his daze.
“Huh?” Huo Wei was surprised: “Where?”
“Yesterday, when I was going into the mountains, I asked her for directions.”
Fu Sang pulled the white cloth all the way off and tossed it aside.
As the villagers had said, the woman died from a penetrating wound. There was a large gash in her abdomen, staining the area red.
But for a spirit master, most “accidents” weren’t really accidents. To know the specifics, they’d have to investigate further.
He reached out and closed the woman’s eyes, then took out his Ghost Blood Whip and wrapped it around his hand. Raising his hand close to the woman’s wound, he gently shook it, and the five strings of copper coins beneath the Ghost Blood Whip chimed like wind chimes.
Then, wisps of blood-colored mist began to seep from the wound, which were quickly absorbed by the Ghost Blood Whip.
“Tsk, just as I thought.” Huo Wei watched from the side, sighed, and shook her head: “The energy here is too poor. The mountain’s yin energy is heavy, if you stray even a little off the path, the miasma of resentment will drain your yang energy and luck, causing an ‘accidental’ death. So many people have died here over the years, it’s a vicious cycle with no good outcome… This is beyond us, we have to report it to the family.”
“No.”
Fu Sang cut her off coldly.
“Why?” Huo Wei was taken aback: “The resentful spirits here are piled up…if we don’t deal with it, more people will die!”
“I know. But what’s harming people at Black Mountain entrance isn’t the miasma of resentment.”
Fu Sang slowly raised his hand, his heterochromatic eyes fixed on the copper coins under the Ghost Blood Whip that had absorbed the blood energy: “…Or rather, not entirely.”
“What do you mean?” Huo Wei crouched down and tilted her head to look with him: “You mean the one doing the harming is Qi Changying…that Crimson Evil?”
Fu Sang opened his mouth to answer her, but before he could speak, another voice sounded from behind him:
“It’s not me.”
The Weeping Soul Coins at their waists suddenly began to tremble wildly as if possessed, sounding the alarm.
At the same time, a cool breath flowed past Fu Sang’s ear, brushing against his ear and neck with a chill that made him instinctively feel danger.
But by the time he realized it, he had already turned his face.
The eyes he had once silently praised were now mere inches away.
Qi Changying had appeared behind him at some unknown moment, kneeling on one knee and slightly leaning in to sniff at his neck, his flowing hair brushing across Fu Sang’s cheek.
Fu Sang saw Qi Changying’s slightly lowered brows and eyes, and then the Crimson Evil seemed to pause briefly. When he raised his eyes again, Fu Sang was staring directly into those blood-red pupils, which shrank slightly at the sight of him.
Man and ghost gazed at each other from such close range for a moment. Perhaps thinking Fu Sang didn’t believe him, Qi Changying held his gaze steadily and slowly added:
“Fu Sang, I do not lie.”
