Spirits

In the unluckiest year of my life, a wandering Daoist priest came to town.

He gave my father an idea: have me worship a Household Guardian Immortal to suppress my bad luck, and maybe I would live past the age of ten.

My father was a rough man who had made his fortune in troubled times by the barrel of a gun.

He called his adjutant over and did the math for him. “One Household Guardian Immortal keeps her alive to ten, two keep her alive to twenty, and twenty keep her alive to two hundred. Right?”

The adjutant counted on his fingers. “Marshal, your math is absolutely correct.”

My father hardened his heart and rounded up all the pigs, cattle, and sheep from miles around as offerings.

“My damn girl is going to live ten thousand years!”

That year, my father rode into the old mountain forest on a pig with me and took eleven Household Guardian Immortal into our household.

He flew into a rage. “Damn it, that’s still one short of the twelve zodiac animals!”

Later, who knew where he bought a Daoist boy from, but that made the twelfth.

“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.

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.

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.”