Spirits

Luxury cars picking me up at the school gate was a common sight. My roommate started a rumor that I had a sugar daddy, and even secretly took tons of pictures of me with middle-aged men. But not long after, her father was on his knees in front of me:

“Master Qiao, I beg you-please save my whole family.”

What she didn’t know was that I am currently the only Earth Master successor.

In ancient, remote places, many eerie and terrifying things are bound to happen.

And these things happen right around Hua Jiunan.

In fact, Hua Jiunan is a part of these events himself.

For instance, he is a Corpse-Born Child!

The first time I went out on a long-haul run with my Master, I suddenly heard someone calling my name in the middle of the night.

The voice made my heart race.

I leaned against the window to look out, but my Master suddenly yanked me back!

He rolled down the window with lightning speed and spat his cigarette butt out with a fierce flick.

Then, pointing at the pitch-black road outside, he let out a torrent of creative curses!

I was young back then and had no idea who he was yelling at.

I could only curl up in the passenger seat like a shrimp, not daring to make a sound.

Later, I spent over ten years driving long-haul trucks on my own.

I never again encountered a situation where someone called my name in the dead of night.

Until three days ago, when I suddenly received word that my Master had passed away.

I paint faces for the dead and open The Door for the living.

After the Prime Minister’s Daughter met a sudden, violent end, I painted the last thing she ever saw.

Three months later, that very face smiled at me from a crowded street.

Later, when the Grand Princess lay within her coffin, she reached out and gripped my brush. “Don’t paint me,” she whispered. “Paint yourself.”

The Battle for First Seat.

Just as the match between my junior sister and me was about to be decided, my life-bound sword suddenly turned its edge on me and gravely wounded me.

The sword spirit said, “Your swordplay is too fierce. You would have hurt her. I didn’t want you to bear the infamy of injuring a fellow disciple, so I had to act as the situation demanded. I’m sorry.”

They all say swords have souls, and that they are loyal to the masters they acknowledge.

But I had rescued the Muyuan Sword from the abyss, then carried it to fame throughout the world. For decades, we were inseparable.

Even so, he remained proud and untamed. Everyone advised me.

A bond with a divine sword could not be forced. What was not mine would never belong to me, no matter how tightly I held on.

In that case, I might as well give the Muyuan Sword to my junior sister.

I thought they were right. After all, in all these years of using the Muyuan Sword, I had never been able to draw out even seventy percent of my strength.

It was time to choose a new sword.

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.”

In the ancient villages at the foot of the Shennongjia mountains, there is a secret ritual: using grown women as bait to lure a Wild Man.

This time, the village chose me.

If luck is on my side, I will become pregnant and give birth to the hope of the entire village.

But this time, luck is not on their side.

Because they have no idea that I am the sole Earth Master successor.

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.

At a construction site, five coffins were dug up-four with something inside, one empty. Strange things kept happening at the site.

In less than three days, two workers had already been sent to the hospital.

Someone had asked me to go there and haul the coffins away.

But the expert the site had hired kept blocking me at every turn, refusing to let me move them.

With a dark, sinister look, he told me: “These five coffins can’t be moved by anyone within seven days. Whoever moves them will be the one buried inside.”

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.”