Ghosts

“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 had a dream while boating on the lake with my friends.

In the dream, a man told me he had taken a liking to me and demanded that I marry him.

I refused.

The next day, a female classmate on the boat vanished without a trace.

When I dreamt again that night, I agreed.

He laughed with joy, but unfortunately for him, he had no idea that I am the sole Earth Master successor.

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.

A friend of mine worked at the Egyptian Mummy Museum.

She said something had happened there and asked me to come take a look.

Out of curiosity, I unwrapped the mummy’s bandages.

Beneath layer after layer of linen was my friend’s face. “Lu Lingzhu-“

While we were out at sea on a cruise ship, a tourist from Sakura Country put on a Night Parade of One Hundred Demons for us.

Everyone praised his superb magic tricks, never realizing that every last one of those “demons” was a real ghost.

He used those ghosts to blackmail the other tourists, so I gave him one hell of a slap.

“Within the borders of Huaxia, foreign entities are forbidden to pass!”

What he didn’t know was that I was the one and only Earth Master successor.

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!”

The parents of a missing boy came to me for help. They wanted me to find their son.

But every sign pointed to the boy already being dead-while his heart was still beating.

My friend was a “bone collector.” After opening a coffin, he actually desecrated a female corpse right in front of her family.

He did it several times in a row, and the local villagers flew into a rage and locked him up.

I rushed over to save him, but the villagers shouted for me to get lost.

What they didn’t know was that I was the sole Earth Master successor.

I am blind, and I make my living reading feng shui.

That day, a seductive woman came to my fortune-telling stall and said she dreamed every night of a man coming to see her.

After I went to her home, the dog she kept caught my attention.

It was clearly a Yin-Yang Dog!