Short Story

He Died Before Spring When Lu Chen died before my eyes for the sixth time, I finally stopped trying to block that car, that river, and that fire.

I no longer clung to a medical report, fruitlessly arguing with fate.

Over the past three years, I had dragged him back from the brink of spring time and time again, only to finally realize that someone eventually has to walk that path to the end.

But I still couldn’t let go. At the very least, this time, I wanted to tell him I loved him to his face before he closed his eyes for good.

The celebrity Zhu Yuan is dead. I still hate her. She always made me feel as wretched and hidden as a rat scurrying across the street.

And yet, I found her third gift. It was a plain music box sitting in the hospital corridor.

I casually handed it to the child in the neighboring bed.

She was dying, too.

A girl came to Drunken Fragrance Pavilion and insisted on becoming a prostitute.

She went on about the romance and glamour of Shanghai’s ten-mile foreign concession, saying this was such a romantic era.

Then let her have a good look at what romance meant in this man-eating age.

I can see the final moments of the deceased through their eyes, a gift that has helped the government solve countless cases.

Everything changed when the body of a drowned man was brought in.

Looking into his eyes, I saw him strangling me just before he died.

And on those hands, he was wearing the Jade Bracelet that had been buried with me.

On the night of my wedding, the Queen ordered her guards to pin me down and force those Glass Slippers back onto my bleeding feet. She said that if the shoes were not sated by my blood before the thirteenth bell toll of midnight, she would carve out my heart to feed the mirror. The entire hall waited for me to become a Princess Consort, but only the groom, Su Zhichuan, leaned in and whispered into my ear, his voice trembling and hoarse. He said, “Don’t believe in fairy tales. Kill me before dawn, or you’ll be the one who dies.”

Yuan Lina was the kind of teenage delinquent who wore bizarre outfits, dyed her hair strange colors, and caked on dramatic makeup.

Yuan Lina smoked, drank-she did it all. She had once poured Erguotou into a mineral water bottle and brought it to school to drink openly.

Yuan Lina liked forming little gangs and bullying people.

Plenty of people had been beaten up by her.

I transmigrated into a world of horror, and by accident, I stole and ate the Bodhisattva’s offerings.

But the Bodhisattva did not blame me. Instead, They told me to leave that place and never come back.

After I became an adult, a huge sum of money inexplicably appeared in my account.

Someone told me I must not accept it.

Because in another world, someone was making offerings to the dead-me.

Half skeptical and half convinced, I took the money.

But that night, I heard the Bodhisattva’s whisper again.

“Run…”

“The thing from that world…”

“It has found you.”

At three in the morning, the funeral home’s Morgue was only supposed to have five registered bodies, yet I found a sixth, unregistered, nameless female corpse in locker number six.

A slip of paper was pressed against her chest with nothing but my name written on it.

Even more terrifying was the moment my hand brushed her wrist; I saw the last seven seconds of her life and heard her raspy, blood-choked voice whisper: “Shen Nian, don’t trust your father.”

That was the night I realized that sometimes, the dead don’t come to say goodbye-they come to reopen a case.

Five hundred years after my death.

The people who had once benefited from my kindness had long since forgotten me.

Only my sworn enemy crouched at my grave, huffing and puffing as he dug for three whole days.

And dug me out.

As twelve bolts of tribulation lightning crashed down,

I saw Ye Yu’s face-unchanged from five hundred years ago.

The moment he saw me, his face lit up with excitement. “Shen Xi, come fight me!”

My gaze drifted past his shoulder

to the nervous members of the Righteous Path hurrying over behind him.

Those people had once been my master and fellow disciples.

They were also the ones who had killed me back then.

At the sight of them, I suddenly clutched my chest and collapsed into Ye Yu’s arms while he was watching the show.

In a soft, delicate voice, I said, “Big brother, this freshly reconstructed body is still so weak. Be a dear and take care of those small fry for me, will you?”

In an instant, I felt the body I was leaning against go completely rigid.

When I lifted my head again, the arrogant, untouchable Demon Lord was blushing so hard he looked ready to burst into flames.

The System told me to teach Pei Yu, the disabled campus heartthrob, how to go bad. I agreed.

At the internet café, I snatched his Five-Year Gaokao, Three-Year Simulation out of his hands.

“Teach me how to play Minesweeper.”

Pei Yu gave a soft scoff. “What a joke.”

During a fight, I grabbed his prosthetic limb and used it as a weapon, swinging it in a full arc to smack Yellow Hair.

“Not gonna lie, this thing’s pretty handy.”

Pei Yu: “Heh.”

On a rainy, overcast day, Pei Yu’s stump started spasming. I ignored it and treated it like a massage gun, using it to help me snag concert tickets.

After I got them, I rewarded him by kissing his stump.

“A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”

Later, Pei Yu pinned me against the headboard.

And coaxed me too. “Baby, hold on a little longer. A kiss, and it won’t hurt anymore.”