Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The voice on the other end of the line was furious.

“I make forty or fifty thousand every time I collect bones. Why would I need to borrow money from you? Qiao Moyu, can you stop being such a cheapskate? All I did was steal the snacks under your bed when we were kids, and you-”

I quickly held the phone away from my ear.

“Huh? Hello? The signal’s bad over here-I’m about to lose you!”

“Wait, wait! Big Sis, don’t leave me to die. I really need your help.”

Chen Junzhao’s tone changed in an instant. He started putting on a pitiful, cutesy voice, even with a hint of a sob.

“Boohoo, I’m going to die. The last few times I went to collect bones, something went wrong. Sect Master, you’re the only one who can save me.”

So he wasn’t asking to borrow money. He just wanted me to save his life.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“What happened? What’s going on?”

I pricked up my ears and listened intently, but Chen Junzhao suddenly started hemming and hawing.

“Well, I- The villagers locked me up. There’s something wrong with all the corpses in this area. I think something really bad is going to happen!”

Chen Junzhao didn’t give me the details. He only said that several corpses he’d worked on in a row hadn’t decayed, which was a huge problem, and told me to hurry to Taihe County and save him.

A bone collector’s job wasn’t limited to gathering remains. They also had to find new auspicious burial sites and oversee every step of the funeral and burial process. Strictly speaking, they were part of our Feng Sect lineage too.

If a disciple of the sect got into trouble, then according to the rules, I couldn’t just ignore it.

“Fine. I’ll buy a plane ticket right now. I’ll be there tonight.”

I sent Jiang Haoyan a text and asked him to book two tickets on the next available flight. Then I tossed the book into my bag and prepared to leave the library.

I had only taken one step when I bumped into a boy in front of me.

He seemed to have been heading to the vending machine in the corner to buy a drink. He was holding a handful of coins, and when I crashed into him, they rolled across the floor with a clatter.

“Sorry-”

I crouched down to pick up the coins. There were exactly six of them: two heads up, four tails up.

My heart gave a heavy thump.

Yang trapped within yin, Gen below and Kan above-the hexagram was Water over Mountain Jian. Great misfortune.

Kan represented water, and Gen represented mountain. High mountains and deep waters. This trip was bound to be extremely dangerous and riddled with obstacles. Surely I wasn’t going to run into Tong Fusheng and his group again, was I?

A sudden, large-scale corpse transformation like this really could be the work of an evil cultivator. I couldn’t afford to be careless again.

With that thought, I made a snap decision and took out my phone to call Lu Lingzhu.

“Let’s go. I’m taking you into the mountains to pick mushrooms.”

Lu Lingzhu was overjoyed.

“Really? Where?”

“Taihe County, Jiangxi. Oh man, the porcini there are supposed to be- I heard there are huge patches of jianshouqing too.”

“Stop, stop, my mouth is practically watering. Feifei, Feifei-book plane tickets-”

“Don’t rush. Bring more gear, just in case. Think about it. Last time you got lost, you even ran into a coffin house. This year, you’ve got Tai Sui clashing with Grand Luck. You’re going to run into a lot of bad luck.”

Lu Lingzhu nodded hard.

“Right, right, that makes sense. Ugh, I really have been pretty unlucky lately. Feifei, make a trip to the storeroom and grab more talisman paper.”

What? She had an entire storeroom just for talisman paper?

That damn filthy-rich tycoon!

I went back to my dorm room, pulled a Crown Cookie tin out from under my bed, and took five talismans from inside. After counting them twice, I put three back.

With Lu Lingzhu around, two would be plenty.