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Luxury cars picking me up at the school gate was a common sight. My roommate started a rumor that I had a sugar daddy, and even secretly took tons of pictures of me with middle-aged men. But not long after, her father was on his knees in front of me:

“Master Qiao, I beg you-please save my whole family.”

What she didn’t know was that I am currently the only Earth Master successor.

After my ex-boyfriend, Gu Yanzhou, died, his will specifically named me as the one who had to read it aloud. He left me one billion in equity, three video recordings, and a final message: “Don’t be so quick to hate me. Among the people sitting across from you tonight, there is one who killed me-and your brother.”

In my first few years driving rigs, my master used to tell me that the main road could hold back evil.

So unless you absolutely had to, you should never leave the proper road, and you should never pay any attention to the “things” that stood outside the guardrails.

Lately, though, whenever I’m out on the road, I keep seeing my childhood friend-the one who’s already dead.

At first, he only stood beyond the guardrail, one leg raised stiffly.

But little by little, he managed to get that leg up onto the rail. Now half his body is leaning out over the highway.

That year, I was hauling freight through the Northeast when a snowstorm trapped us on the road. In the blinding snow, I heard someone knock on my truck door.

I opened it, and the snow outside seemed to have stopped.

The brothers traveling with me all seemed to have gotten out of their trucks long ago.

They were standing in the wilderness beyond the highway, waving at me.

I was just about to climb down when a burst of static crackled from the radio inside the cab.

Captain Xu Song’s voice came through in broken fragments.

“…Whatever you do, don’t get out.”

The System orders her to win over the male lead, but there is one tiny problem: she is a lesbian.

When the mission finally changes to the aloof, brilliant second female lead, she throws herself into courtship with all the subtlety of a guided missile—and gets kicked into a bush for her trouble.

Between library dates, disastrous gorilla costumes, a hopelessly idiotic male lead, and an armed kidnapping, her target remains convinced that every romantic gesture is part of a scheme to pursue the wrong person.

She may not realize when she has succeeded, but across worlds, explosions, doctoral degrees, and one scandalous graduation photo, her wifey keeps choosing her anyway.

A friend of mine was developing a residential complex for a real estate company in Xi’an when they discovered an ancient tomb. To avoid delaying construction, they chose to cover it up and report nothing. But none of them expected that someone would write a line on the wall of the work shed in red pen. Rules of the corpse-nurturing ground: 1. Do not feed the corpses raw meat. 2. If you see a child under the age of ten, close your eyes immediately. 3. Eat the rats.

Young Master Li loved eating fish.

Every month, he went through more than a dozen enormous fish, each longer than a grown man was tall.

Delivering fish for the Li Family should have been an easy, well-paying job, but in just three short months, seven or eight drivers had collapsed one after another.

When Peng You, the owner of the logistics company, came to me, his face looked downright sickly.

“Brother Long, this whole thing is just too damn strange. What we loaded onto the truck was definitely fish.”

When I was a child, my father once gave me a ten-yuan bill as pocket money.

He said he had picked it up on the road.

I remember very clearly that on the back of that bill, written in black ink, was a line:

“There is a pyramid scheme on the fifth floor. Help.”

I took the money to show my father, and he smiled and told me,

“Who knows how many people have used this bill? Who knows when those words were written? Maybe the person who wrote them has already been rescued.”

I was in a hurry to buy chocolate, so I didn’t think much about it.

Because chocolate is sweet, after all.

Not long after, there was a piece of news on TV.

“A man mistakenly entered a pyramid scheme den, was beaten to death, and then dismembered.”

As a child, I stared blankly at the television.

My father also stared blankly at the television.

I asked him what was wrong.

He shouted at me angrily, telling me not to meddle in his business, and then left the house.

At the time, I didn’t know what was going on; I just felt confused.

It wasn’t until the New Year, at the family dinner, that my father got drunk and cried uncontrollably. In front of all the relatives, he confessed to picking up that bill.

The place where he found the money was directly below the den mentioned in the news.

In other words, the words on that ten-yuan bill were very likely written by someone who had fallen into that pyramid scheme, possibly even the person who was dismembered.

He sobbed, clutching a bottle of liquor, saying that it was his fault that the man died. The whole family comforted him, but I just stood aside, dumbfounded and at a loss.

So… I used that money to buy chocolate…

Something indescribable seemed to awaken within me.

Throughout my later life, I would often think of that ten-yuan bill.

I wondered, was the original owner of that money alright? Was he really rescued? Or… did that money really come from the man who was dismembered?

If it really came from him, he must have endured painful beatings and inhuman torture before finally seizing a chance one day to write those words for help on the bill and toss it out the window.

He must have clung to hope for rescue until the very moment he died.

Yet my father ignored that hope.

I always ask myself, if I had been the first to find that bill, could I have saved him? Or would I have overlooked the writing, just like my father?

This thought haunts me like a ghost, tormenting my mind more and more as I grow older.

Until that day.

A new “bill” appeared before me.

…

The school was locked down for seven days. Every one of us received a text message:

[Please follow these 25 rules. You may only leave once the school lockdown is lifted in seven days. As for those students who leave early…]

My name is Zhou Jiu, and I’m a professional haunted-house test sleeper.

Tonight, the company assigned me a new job: the old house where my entire family burned to death fifteen years ago.

But that house had long since been reduced to a barren wasteland.

I returned with a black-and-white photograph of the fire scene.

In the shadows of that photo, a person who looked exactly like me was already waiting at the door.