Ghosts

I have a temple in the human world.

Hardly anyone visits, but one girl came to pray three times.

The first time, she offered ten years of her life in exchange for her grandmother’s recovery.

The second time, she raised the offer to twenty.

The third time, she muttered, “Why won’t it work?”

“Because you’ve come to the wrong temple,” I said.

“I bury people.

I don’t save them.”

Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear me.

She still knelt and bowed, three times to her knees and nine times to the ground, then took five yuan from her pocket and put it in the offering box.

Who had lied to her?

I followed her out, back to a cramped, dilapidated alley.

A group of children crowded around her, laughing.

“The idiot’s here!

Come look at the idiot!”

She clutched her sleeves and said quietly, “I’m not an idiot.

“I’m just a little slow to react.”

My husband was a notorious invalid.

We had been married for three years, and he had never once touched me intimately.

Gentle and gracious, he would often drag his frail body to the couch to read and compose poetry.

Watching him look so fragile that he might die at any moment left me utterly exasperated.

I couldn’t help demanding of the system, “Seriously?

Look at him.

He’s practically at death’s door.

“And you’re telling me he’ll become a monster everyone wants dead?”

[Tales of mountain spirits and sea monsters no longer circulate in the mortal realm. As the gods who protect humanity begin to awaken, they seek offerings of incense.]

[Do not underestimate this fair night. Many pairs of eyes lurk in the darkness, watching.]

[Wake up, humans! A terrible, all-destroying day of doom draws near!]

…

One day, Xie Qingling wakes to a murmuring whisper in her ear.

Amid one mortifyingly theatrical proclamation after another, the revival of the ancient gods begins to unfold before her.

…

The Special Incident Response Department in Future City has a new member: Xie Qingling.

At first, Xie Qingling thinks she is just an utterly ordinary rookie in the Special Incident Response Department.

Her senior colleagues think so too.

To whip the newcomer into shape as quickly as possible, they decide to spar with her and put her in her place. Time to teach her a little about the real world.

Then they see her out on a mission, taking on a vicious ghost alone and furiously wrenching its head off. A Four-Way Crossroads Ghost is forced into child labor, a Rakshasa has its blade stolen, and a Painted-Skin Ghost has its skin torn off…

Her seniors: “…” Their confidence is in pieces!

Afterward, Xie Qingling still thinks she is just an utterly ordinary rookie in the department.

As a newcomer fresh out of school, she decides to take the initiative and ask her seniors for guidance. A little sparring should help her improve and learn what the real world is like.

Her seniors recoil, terror on their faces:

“She can twist a vicious ghost’s head off, and you call that a rookie?”

“She can stop ghost children crying, and you call that a rookie?”

“Please spare us, rookie!!!”

Xie Qingling’s work diary: A person mustn’t get too arrogant. Especially a rookie as young as me.

Her seniors and the ghosts: She seems to have no idea how terrifyingly powerful she is. Does she even know what arrogance means?

What she’s doing is called being humble. 🙂

Are all the rookies this terrifying now?

She starts by ripping vicious ghosts apart, and you’re telling me this is a fucking rookie?

What’s the real world like? The rookie IS the real world.

Hey, rookie! Veteran here. Carry me, please!

Within Huaxia, no god gets to sit idle. The righteous gods return to their places; demons and monsters are put to the sword.

Gu Lin is a notoriously timid player who survives the Infinite Horror Game only by hiding behind her powerful boyfriend, Li Jingchi.

When a harmless slogan mutates into a world rule and hurls her into an SSS-rank wedding instance, she wakes beside a charred, many-armed entity that insists she is its wife.

To escape, Gu Lin must decode the rules, confront the man who sacrificed her, and decide whether the monster she fears is truly more dangerous than the humans she once trusted.

Every night, Chen Youlan’s grandmother kowtows backward before a red-draped Buddha, cursing the family whose prosperity was bought with her blood.

When Grandma dies smiling and Youlan is chosen to inherit the ritual, the old house begins exposing every bargain, every stolen life, and the true firstborn hidden behind the family’s lies.

To survive until dawn, Youlan must decide whether the weeping statue is a god, a demon, or merely the patient judge of a debt generations in the making.

In our village, a child who dies before his parents cannot be given a funeral—unless he dies in an unclean place.

When my drowned best friend is laid in the mourning hall, a seven-day vigil turns my guilt into terror, and the truth behind the hauntings proves more horrifying than any ghost.

After Jiang Can dies in a plane crash, her grandmother, He Xiuhua, refuses to let hope die with her. Unseen by the living, Jiang Can’s spirit watches as Grandma searches, grieves, and waits through years of scams, protests, and an ocean-spanning hunt—until enduring love finally brings a family home.

After dying under mysterious circumstances, fearless general Shi Songyue awakens as a ghost bound to Jiang Yinxue, the sharp-tongued imperial censor who was once her sworn enemy.

She assumes she can drain his yang essence and torment him at will, until she discovers he stole her body, traded away his lifespan to summon her soul, and spent years hiding a love neither of them dared confess.

As fragments of memory expose her former fiancé Shen Feng as her murderer, Songyue must choose between clinging to Jiang Yinxue at the cost of his life and leaving him behind forever.

Yet fate offers the quarrelsome lovers one more chance—if they can stop wounding each other long enough to seize it.

In remote mountain villages, strange things happen and stranger tales are told.

Corpse retrieval, spirit possession, talisman water, the paper-effigy craft, the Temple of the Five Immortals, rice divination and crossing into the underworld, the flood dragon’s run from Yin Mountain…

I walk beyond the crowds and the mundane world, living through one hidden, uncanny event after another–things ordinary people could never glimpse.

Now, I will tell them to you.

“The Ghost King? I’d say we’re about evenly matched. I solo-kill it all the time, too.”

So said Qin Lan, fresh out of a max-star horror instance.

Anomalies have descended across the globe, and all of humanity is now at risk of being dragged at random into horror instances, where evil spirits hunt them down.

Qin Lan, however, has awakened a bugged Talent that lets him reload without limit and stack his attributes with every death.