Mystery

I was trafficked to a mountain village for a ghost marriage.

But they don’t know I’ve lived for three hundred years and am the Dragon King’s Wife.

In the dead of night, I soothe the Black Dragon coiled around my waist.

“Alright, alright. They’re just little kids of sixty or seventy. What are you getting mad at them for?”

My roommate was a professional bride.

She said she’d landed a big job recently, and the client was incredibly generous.

When I saw the fee wrapped in red paper, I tried to talk her out of taking it.

But on the day of the event, my roommate still snuck off.

And she never came back.

What she didn’t know was that every one of the event’s organizers…

wasn’t human.

I’m an influencer who specializes in adventure content.

For the sake of the show, I bought a cabinet that had once been used to hide a corpse.

Supposedly, the cabinet was cursed.

Anyone who owned it would die an unnatural death within ten days.

I’ve always been stubborn, and luck has always been on my side.

I absolutely didn’t believe it.

The night I had the cabinet moved into my home, I had a dream.

A girl covered in blood crawled out of the cabinet.

She beckoned to me, then glanced at the clock on the wall and used her fingernail to carve a “9” into the cabinet. …

A year ago, on a whim, I told my wife a story.

Because the content was bizarre and the details were too realistic, she was scared out of her wits.

Afterwards, I deeply regretted it and emphasized countless times that the story was made up. But her trust in me had already collapsed, and the look in her eyes was filled with fear.

That night, she ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and called the police.

As a result, I ended up in jail.

Now, I am sorting out the whole incident as follows.

A beautiful woman came into my shop one night to have her phone repaired.

With practiced ease, I installed screen-spying software on her phone.

After she left, I opened the monitoring terminal.

Everything happening on the woman’s phone appeared before my eyes in real time.

That thrill of peeping into someone else’s screen had me completely hooked.

Until late that night…

I saw something that made my blood run cold.

I run a science-debunking channel.

I’m also a Taoist priest.

Every day, I livestream ways to expose feudal superstition for what it is.

One day, a young woman asked me to help sever a toxic romantic entanglement.

The next day, her boyfriend was dead.

I followed an underworld Big Brother for six years.

But on my birthday, he brought home a girl.

He was covered in blood, and the pretty, delicate girl was hiding in his arms.

From then on, the man who had indulged my every whim never looked at me again.

Everyone thought I loved Xu Chang but could never have him, and that I was heartbroken beyond words.

I only smiled and toyed with the watch on my wrist.

I was an undercover police officer planted inside Huaxi’s largest criminal gang.

I’d stayed by his side all these years for one reason: to treat him to a taste of prison food. So how could I possibly… fall in love with him?

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…]

Before she died, my closest friend gave me two things.

A piece of skin she had cut from her own body, and her lover.

She asked me to use that skin to make a shadow puppet for the opera…

I think I understood what she meant. She was telling me: Ah Mei, I’m giving you a generous gift. You should return the favor-kill someone for me.

I was beaten and driven out of the Chancellor’s Mansion with clubs.

As I lay dying of illness in the pouring rain, a scholar picked me up and took me home.

He didn’t mind my filth, nor did he mind my stupidity.

He cared for me in silence, acting even more like a mute than I did.

Once my injuries had healed, I prepared to bid the scholar farewell.

He went out to buy supplies for my journey, but he did not return that night. When I finally found him, I discovered that someone had broken both his legs and left him on the street to die.

He saw me and looked dazed for a moment, his face tinged with regret.

“Zhizhi, why haven’t you left? You should have gone.”

I wanted to ask myself that too-why hadn’t I left? Perhaps it was the few scraps of conscience I had left that made me unable to walk away, unable to avoid the trouble.

I dragged him home and nursed him with care. Before long, he recovered.

Neither of us ever mentioned my departure again. Later, his name appeared on the golden roster.

He was named the Top Graduate during the palace examinations, and he was on the verge of achieving fame and fortune.

Yet, he knelt and pleaded with His Majesty to thoroughly reinvestigate the case of the deposed Crown Prince from years ago.

His Majesty was furious. He threw him into the Imperial Prison and ordered his exile to the frontier.

I had no money and couldn’t get into the Imperial Prison.

I could only wait at the city gates, hoping to run into him and ask what on earth had happened.

But I waited through several dawns and dusks, and he never came.

Later still, I entered the palace as a study companion for the Fifth Princess.

Only then did I learn that a scholar in the Imperial Prison that year had died to prove his resolve, smashing his head against the blood-stained walls of the cell. Naturally, there were no guards to escort a prisoner out through the city gates.

But the Song Duhe I knew was never a reckless man, and he certainly wasn’t one to choose death so easily.