Modern Day

I run a science-debunking channel.

I’m also a Taoist priest.

Every day, I livestream ways to expose feudal superstition for what it is.

One day, a young woman asked me to help sever a toxic romantic entanglement.

The next day, her boyfriend was dead.

Chapter 0

After my father beat me to death in a drunken rage, I was reborn as my grandmother’s best friend-an obstetrician-gynecologist.

Grandma asked anxiously, “Xiao Fang, is the baby healthy?”

I said, “It’s brain-damaged. I recommend aborting it.”

Chapter 0

The year I turned thirty-two, I kept a poor college boy.

One day, passing by the university, I saw Shi Jin with a girl caged in his arms.

His eyes were red, wronged yet restrained. “Please don’t think I’m dirty…”

It was a perfectly straightforward sugar arrangement.

So why did he make it sound as if I had defiled him?

If he thought it was dirty, plenty of people wouldn’t.

I exhaled a stream of smoke, turned to the blond college boy passing by in head-to-toe fakes, and said,

“Ask him whether he’s willing to call someone mommy.”

Six years ago, forced to choose between Huo Yanxu and my future, I chose my future and went abroad to study.

Six years later, I returned after completing my studies, and Huo Yanxu confessed to me with six years of devoted waiting behind him.

I helped him secure his position as heir to the Huo Family, only to hear him tell his friends, “Pretending to be a lovesick lapdog has been exhausting. Once I marry her, she’ll make money for both of us, and I’ll take Yinyin traveling around the world.”

The young woman in his arms was smiling brightly.

Someone warned him, “Aren’t you afraid she’ll turn on you?”

“We’re getting married tomorrow. Her family cares so much about reputation. You think she’d let herself become damaged goods?”

I laughed coldly. Six years ago, I could give you up for my career. Nothing has changed.

I had been kidnapped. Me-a burly man nearly two meters tall, with a face that made me look like Zhang Fei-had somehow been abducted and dragged deep into the mountains! I woke up briefly during transport. My hands and feet were bound in iron chains as thick as a forearm, and the slightest movement made a tremendous racket. I didn’t stay conscious for long. Soon, I passed out again. When I woke up the next time, I was lying inside a dilapidated wooden hut. The moment my senses began to return, I caught a thick, overwhelming stench.

On the day the Ghost Gate Opens, those of us who drove long-haul trucks knew better than to travel at night.

But that night, I was driving alone down the road to an old public cemetery.

Halfway there, I pulled into a gas station.

After the attendant finished filling my tank, he seemed to work up every ounce of courage he had before asking in a trembling voice, “Sir… why is your windshield covered in little kids’ handprints?”

I shook my head at him.

I knew it wasn’t just the windshield.

By then, my entire truck was already crawling with them.

That year, I was hauling freight through the Northeast when a snowstorm trapped us on the road. In the blinding snow, I heard someone knock on my truck door.

I opened it, and the snow outside seemed to have stopped.

The brothers traveling with me all seemed to have gotten out of their trucks long ago.

They were standing in the wilderness beyond the highway, waving at me.

I was just about to climb down when a burst of static crackled from the radio inside the cab.

Captain Xu Song’s voice came through in broken fragments.

“…Whatever you do, don’t get out.”

Young Master Li loved eating fish.

Every month, he went through more than a dozen enormous fish, each longer than a grown man was tall.

Delivering fish for the Li Family should have been an easy, well-paying job, but in just three short months, seven or eight drivers had collapsed one after another.

When Peng You, the owner of the logistics company, came to me, his face looked downright sickly.

“Brother Long, this whole thing is just too damn strange. What we loaded onto the truck was definitely fish.”

A buddy of mine who drove a big rig had been tricked onto the dead-end road at the foot of Huai Mountain.

By the time I got the news, he had already gone missing.

His relatives were crying so hard they were on the verge of fainting.

I tried to comfort them. “That road had a Mount Tai Stone placed there to suppress it. Nothing too serious should happen.”

But one of the family members handed me a phone. On the screen was a photo of the Mount Tai Stone, split clean in two.

“Wang Cheng sent this back before he disappeared.”

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.