Supernatural

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…]

At the Dong Manor’s night banquet, the beautiful Singing Girl transformed into a Pink Skeleton.

The next day, I entered the manor to interrogate, but everyone gave the same answer: they saw nothing.

What was even more outrageous-

The coroner’s examination revealed that the skeleton was a man!

The first time I went out on a long-haul run with my Master, I suddenly heard someone calling my name in the middle of the night.

The voice made my heart race.

I leaned against the window to look out, but my Master suddenly yanked me back!

He rolled down the window with lightning speed and spat his cigarette butt out with a fierce flick.

Then, pointing at the pitch-black road outside, he let out a torrent of creative curses!

I was young back then and had no idea who he was yelling at.

I could only curl up in the passenger seat like a shrimp, not daring to make a sound.

Later, I spent over ten years driving long-haul trucks on my own.

I never again encountered a situation where someone called my name in the dead of night.

Until three days ago, when I suddenly received word that my Master had passed away.

A buddy of mine who drove long-haul trucks took a job delivering a Buddha Head.

The Buddha Head had clearly arrived safely, yet he came down with a fever that wouldn’t break and was plagued by nightmares.

By the time I heard the news and rushed to the hospital, he was already delirious from the fever.

His scalding-hot hand clamped tightly around mine.

“Brother Long, I… my Buddha Head was stolen. The Buddha Head is gone!”

“Dashun, the Buddha Head was delivered. It wasn’t lost.”

His wife and mother stood around him crying, but no matter what anyone said, he insisted that his Buddha Head had been lost.

A perfectly healthy man was down to his last breath.

I turned to Dashun’s boss and said, “Where is the Buddha Body? I’ll deliver it.”

When I first started driving freight trucks, I once asked Master out of curiosity: Why did truckers need to perform Chongsha, while bus drivers didn’t?

Master said it was because trucks carried cargo, not people, so what they feared most was running into trouble on the road.

Buses, on the other hand, were always picking people up and dropping them off, so their greatest taboo was disaster striking onboard.

That was why buses didn’t pay much attention to warding off the road itself.

What they cared about was ballasting the vehicle.

Most bus drivers I’d met used stones for it.

Some used stone statues.

Whenever the passenger count hit four or seven, the driver would bring out the Vehicle-Ballasting Stone, treating it as one extra passenger onboard to keep misfortune away.

But recently, I took on a strange job.

A bus driver came to me and asked me to ballast his bus as a living person.

He said that before me, three Vehicle-Ballasting Stones had already shattered on his bus.

At midnight, I woke up in a strange place.

Someone knocked on my truck window and said they were holding a celebration tonight, and asked me to join them.

Still groggy, I got out of the truck.

The village before me was decked out in lanterns and colored streamers.

“Is it a wedding?” I asked the villager. The villager didn’t answer.

Instead, a hazy thought came to me: I seemed to have come here to escort the bride.

I turned back to look at the heavy truck I’d driven here.

It was empty. But why did I remember it being packed full of things when I arrived?

What had I been carrying? For a moment, I couldn’t recall.

When I turned back again, the villager who had come to call me was gone.

I went out northwest to haul coal in a big rig.

That morning, we were lined up waiting to load our trucks.

All of a sudden, we heard someone shouting.

“Oh no! There’s someone buried under the coal pile!”

A bunch of us ran over to help.

But even after we dug all the way to the bottom of that mountain of coal, we didn’t find so much as a shadow of a person.

The worker who had shouted was starting to panic.

Stammering, he tried to explain, “That’s not right. I saw it clear as day.

There was a pair of wrinkled human hands sticking out from under the coal pile!”

“If you pass the scene of a car accident, don’t stare.”

“If someone tries to hitch a ride at midnight, don’t stop unless you have to.”

“And don’t think driving a big rig makes you so intimidating that trouble won’t come looking for you.”

Those were the warnings my Master gave me.

For more than ten years, I kept them close to heart.

But tonight, I made an exception.

At midnight, I came across a family of four trying to flag me down.

The moment the husband saw my headlights, he dropped to his knees at the roadside and kept kowtowing.

Their black sedan was sitting crookedly off to the side, as if it had broken down.

All four of them looked badly shaken. I let them climb into my truck.

Pale with fear, the husband told me that a strange red sports car had been chasing them along the mountain road just moments ago.

I told him not to worry. I was driving a heavy truck; no car would dare mess with me.

Just then, the radio began reporting a traffic accident. On the very stretch of mountain road we were driving along, a red sports car and a black sedan had been involved in a serious crash.

The driver of the red sports car had died at the scene.

I was scammed by a real estate agent into moving into a Columbarium. To my surprise, the place was already occupied by a handsome, young, and tsundere ghost. When I took a closer look, I was even more shocked-it turned out we were old acquaintances.

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.