Ghosts

Chapter 0

The storm had passed.

Uncle Xiong rolled off me, sated, pillowing his head on my arm as the tip of his nose nuzzled into the hollow of my neck.

“I know every girl at Golden Sand Beach has a story, Shaluo. I want to hear yours.”

“Sure. Do you want the long version or the short one?”

“The long one.”

The long version wasn’t that long, either.

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.

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.

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!

At three in the morning, the funeral home’s Morgue was only supposed to have five registered bodies, yet I found a sixth, unregistered, nameless female corpse in locker number six.

A slip of paper was pressed against her chest with nothing but my name written on it.

Even more terrifying was the moment my hand brushed her wrist; I saw the last seven seconds of her life and heard her raspy, blood-choked voice whisper: “Shen Nian, don’t trust your father.”

That was the night I realized that sometimes, the dead don’t come to say goodbye-they come to reopen a case.

I’m a rookie Ghost Agent for the Netherworld.

To crush my KPIs and earn a promotion, I started staking out my targets three days before their scheduled deaths.

My first subject was an elderly woman.

Out of nowhere, she turned to me and asked, “Am I about to die?”

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.

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.