Curses

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.”

In the wake of a violent storm, a beautiful woman suddenly appeared out of thin air on the Deck of a deep-sea fishing vessel manned entirely by men. When the ship finally returned to shore, only a single madman remained on board.

My sister went to Yunnan to teach as a volunteer, but shortly after, she vanished.

All she left behind was a bizarre post on her social media feed:

“Black dogs grow white scales, the Flesh Well blinks with a thousand eyes, and humanity cannot escape Ailao Mountain!”

After failing to reach her privately, I turned to the police for help, but they refused to open a case.

Left with no other choice, I had to travel to Yunnan alone.

At that time, I had no idea that the terrifying truth buried deep beneath the surface had already begun to emerge…

Spending the night in an abandoned temple, I found a thin gauze handkerchief wreathed in fragrance. After nightfall, someone murmured beneath the window:

“My lady, have you perchance seen the handkerchief this humble scholar left behind?”

Through the crack in the door, the figure outside looked so ethereal that it seemed he might drift away on the wind at any moment.

At his words, I couldn’t help recalling the rumors about this place.

They said this temple had been abandoned for ages, and that seductive ghosts haunted the area. Any traveler who got entangled with them would either have their essence sucked dry or be dragged into another world, vanishing without a trace.

With that in mind, I hurriedly cracked open the window and tossed out the piece of cloth I had used to wipe the floor, the windowsill, and my stinky feet.

The other party caught it with lightning-fast reflexes.

Then he stared down at the gauze scarf in his hand, now crumpled and ruined like dried pickled greens, and fell into deep contemplation.

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?”

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.

In the dead of night, I received a phone call. The caller ID showed it was my husband. With a voice of utmost gravity, he told me that I would die at two o’clock in the morning.

But right now, he was clearly lying right beside me, fast asleep.

The owner of an antique shop came to me with a job: help him transport a batch of aged wine.

The wine had been hidden away in a deserted village for sixty years, sealed in massive jars, each one half as tall as a man.

On the day the cellar was opened, the fragrance carried for miles. Even the workers moving the jars felt light-headed from it.

But the young man selling the wine looked deathly pale. The moment he took the owner’s money, he refused to stay even one minute longer and hurried off.

That night, one of the workers secretly opened a jar.

When he was found the next day, his head was stuffed inside the wine jar. By the time they dragged him out, he was already dead.

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.