Supernatural

In the unluckiest year of my life, a wandering Daoist priest came to town.

He gave my father an idea: have me worship a Household Guardian Immortal to suppress my bad luck, and maybe I would live past the age of ten.

My father was a rough man who had made his fortune in troubled times by the barrel of a gun.

He called his adjutant over and did the math for him. “One Household Guardian Immortal keeps her alive to ten, two keep her alive to twenty, and twenty keep her alive to two hundred. Right?”

The adjutant counted on his fingers. “Marshal, your math is absolutely correct.”

My father hardened his heart and rounded up all the pigs, cattle, and sheep from miles around as offerings.

“My damn girl is going to live ten thousand years!”

That year, my father rode into the old mountain forest on a pig with me and took eleven Household Guardian Immortal into our household.

He flew into a rage. “Damn it, that’s still one short of the twelve zodiac animals!”

Later, who knew where he bought a Daoist boy from, but that made the twelfth.

On the night before our engagement, my fiancé got a call from his first love.

He left without a word and vanished for the entire night.

Calmly, I packed my things and called him to break up.

But when the call connected, a stranger answered.

“Who are you looking for?”

I contacted my fiancé’s parents, but they told me they were DINKs. They had no children, and they didn’t know me.

Everyone around me had forgotten that my fiancé had ever existed.

I touched my slightly swollen belly, horror crashing over me.

“Then who is the father of this child?”

Do you know about the Uncanny Valley Effect?

This sense of dread originates from ancient times.

Back then, our ancestors had already seen these things! They appear similar to humans, yet are distinctly different.

Today, they hide within modern society.

They might even be our family and friends.

The question is, how do we tell them apart…?

Have you ever heard of Crossing the Yin?

They say that when a woman undergoes Crossing the Yin, half her body has already stepped into the Yin Realm.

She has to stay in the same room as a dozen burly men, all night long, until dawn.

Only then can she snatch her life back from the hands of the Yin beings.

I had always scoffed at rumors like that.

Until one day, my beloved little niece underwent Crossing the Yin too.

But she was only six years old!

While staying at a hotel, I discovered a headless corpse under my bed.

Time of death was less than an hour ago, making me the prime suspect.

The police arrested me, but I told them the corpse would come back to life by nightfall.

Everyone thought I was insane. What they didn’t know was that I am the sole successor of the Earth Master lineage.

And this corpse belonged to a Jiangtou Practitioner who could use the Flying Head Jiangtou.

I was invited to make a cameo appearance as a supporting female character in a horror movie, but my role was snatched away by a Rich Young Actress who bought her way into the production.

What she didn’t know was that the character would summon a real Pen Spirit, and everyone participating in the game was destined to die.

Only I could suppress the evil energy.

Because I am the sole Earth Master successor.

After Huang You wakes in the middle of the night and overhears two ghosts talking about hidden money, greed pulls her into a deadly game of fortune, curses, and borrowed fates.

Her roommate Wanting insists the ghosts are Water Ghosts looking for a Substitute, but each warning only makes the promised wealth harder to resist.

As more secrets surface, Huang You realizes that both the ghosts and Wanting are hiding their true intentions.

To survive, she must decide whom to trust before her Eight Characters, her life, and even her body are stolen by forces that have been circling her from the start.

In our village, there was an abandoned Brick Kiln rumored to be haunted.

During my first year of middle school, a few classmates and I went to the kiln for an adventure. We unexpectedly stumbled upon a swarm of rats worshipping a wall, all of them throwing themselves against it until they died…

In that moment, I realized there was truly something in that kiln that shouldn’t be provoked.

Unfortunately, it was already too late. From then on, my friends began to die one after another.

Until one night, that thing finally stood at the head of my bed…

The night Grandma draped the red cloak over my shoulders, there was still unwashed blood tucked beneath her fingernails.

She told me to take a cake to the Cabin in the Woods to visit “sick Grandma,” yet I had seen her with my own eyes returning from that very cabin only last night.

I am a crow, and I was perched in a tree, speaking with a young man-

“…It found a clay jar, but there was too little water inside. So, it picked up stones in its beak and dropped them into the jar until the water rose, and it finally managed to drink. However, once it returned to Penglai Mountain, the clan leader had it burned to death.”

“Why?”

“It was sick. A ‘Crow Plague’ had grown inside its head. That is a type of pestilence from your mortal realm that only we crows can contract.”

“How could they tell it had the Crow Plague?”

“It started dropping stones into jars. It even claimed that the divine bird atop the Fusang Tree looked like it had three legs and fifteen toes.”

“…That Crow Plague you’re talking about? I think it might go by another name in our world.”

“What?”

“Brains.”