Chapter 80

Chapter 80

“Coming, coming. Hold your horses.”

Grinning, I walked over, raised a hand, and jabbed Old Cao twice in the back.

He immediately returned to normal and could move freely again.

At once, he began making a fuss.

“Oh, my poor, frail old bones! Xiao Wu, you made me stand with my arm twisted behind my back for so long that I ache all over.”

Speechless, I reached out and squeezed his bulging biceps.

“Old Cao, your muscles are almost as hard as rocks. And you call those frail old bones? I think you could kill me with one punch.”

Carrying coffins was hard physical labor. Anyone in poor health simply could not make a living as a coffin bearer.

So although Old Cao was nearly sixty, he was in better shape than many men in their forties. Of course, he still could not compare to Big Bull and the other coffin bearers in their prime.

Seeing that his pitiful act did not work on me, Old Cao laughed a couple of times and let the matter slide.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Whatever else may be said, Xiao Wu, you really have improved at an astonishing pace. The Immortal Lady’s eye is extraordinary indeed. She knew you had superb aptitude and exceptional talent, which is why she was willing to take you as her disciple.”

Good grief!

He had even found a way to praise my master along with me.

What an incurable fanboy.

We walked from the courtyard back into the shop as we talked.

“All right, Old Cao, take your time with that rosewood coffin. I need to go to the credit union, withdraw the woman’s money, and deliver it to her parents.”

“Fine, but move quickly. The credit union is about to close. The moment quitting time comes, those clerks run as though their shoes have been greased. I doubt even a corpse fiend chasing them could catch up.”

The bizarre comparison made me snort with laughter.

Apparently, Old Cao held a grudge against the credit union staff for closing too early. Perhaps he had once needed money urgently and failed to withdraw it in time.

I left the coffin shop and ran toward the western end of town.

The credit union stood beside Lianghe Bridge, quite a distance away. After running there and withdrawing the money, I still had to deliver it to the bungalow by the river on the northern outskirts.

In the past, I never would have made it in time. My bazi weighed only two liang and one qian, and the resulting Featherborn fate had left me with very little stamina.

But since taking Master and becoming a practitioner of the esoteric arts, my physical condition had improved by leaps and bounds. I was now much stronger than other boys my age.

About forty minutes later, I stood before the rundown bungalow from my dream.

The feeling was difficult to describe. It was uncanny.

The old house before me, the little concrete yard beside it, and the vegetable plots all around were exactly as they had appeared in the dream.

Only now, no spreading fog obscured the threshold, and I could see the wooden door standing half open.

People were more trusting in those days. In a town like this especially, doors were seldom shut during the day, whether anyone was home or not.

That was nothing like city life in later years, when heavy security doors stayed locked at all hours and neighbors could live beside one another for three or four years without knowing each other’s names or even faces.

I stepped forward and knocked gently.

“Hello? Is anyone home?”

I called twice. No one answered, but I heard footsteps from inside.

Someone was home after all.

Creak.

The half-open wooden door swung wider, revealing a haggard face.

It belonged to a woman in her sixties. She was thin and sallow, her expression listless, her eyes cloudy and dull. Her entire being seemed steeped in grief.
There was no need to ask. This had to be the dead woman’s mother.

She stared at me for a moment, then looked puzzled.

“Who are you…?”

I hurried to introduce myself. “Hello, ma’am. My name is Wu Zhong. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but something very strange happened last night.”

Perhaps she thought I was talking in circles, because wariness crept into her gaze.

I quickly launched into the story I had invented on the way over.

“Last night, I dreamed I went down to the river. All of a sudden, a young woman walked out of the water. She had long hair, was about average height, and had two tiny moles on the left side of her chin.”

At that, the old woman’s expression changed sharply. She stared fixedly at me, tears already welling in her eyes.

I continued.

“I was terrified. I thought a drowned ghost had come ashore. Fortunately, the woman was very kind and gentle. She said she came from the northern outskirts of town. Her parents were still alive, but she had died unexpectedly, and she felt she had failed them.”

“She was worried that her parents would be left alone with no one to care for them. She gave me her savings account number and password and asked me to withdraw the eight thousand or so yuan she had saved while working in the city and give it all to the two of you.”

“When I woke up, your address, the account number, and the password were still perfectly clear in my mind. So I thought perhaps your daughter had visited me in a dream.”

As I spoke, I pulled stacks of hundred-yuan notes from the pockets of my shirt and pants.

More than eight thousand yuan made a substantial stack, especially since the bills were not particularly new and therefore bulkier.

The old woman cradled the money in her hands, trembling all over as tears streamed down her face.

Apparently wondering why his wife had not returned after answering the door, the old man inside came out as well and regarded me suspiciously.

I had no choice but to repeat the story. Only then did the elderly couple believe me.

How could they not?

A boy they had never met had found their home, described their daughter’s appearance precisely, and arrived carrying more than eight thousand yuan for them.

If their dead daughter had not sent me the dream, that would have been the truly supernatural explanation.

In 1999, more than eight thousand yuan could genuinely be called a fortune.

If I were trying to swindle them, what could I possibly hope to gain? They were farmers with neither money nor influence.

“My poor daughter! Since you died, your father and I have thought of you day and night, yet you never once came to us in a dream. Why did you visit this young man instead?”

The old woman wiped away her tears. The sight made my heart ache.

The old man probably felt it was improper to leave me standing in the doorway and invited me inside. Naturally, I accepted.

After all, I still had to uncover the real cause of the woman’s death. That was part of the nether covenant.

Sis, I certainly made you sound better than you were, I complained silently. You were neither kind nor gentle. You scared me half to death.

I followed the elderly couple inside. At that moment, I suddenly felt as though some invisible burden on my heart had eased.

I suspected I had fulfilled the first part of the nether covenant between the dead woman and me.

Once inside, I studied the main room I had visited in my dream two nights ago.

Sure enough, the black-and-white memorial portrait still hung at the front of the room.

Unlike in my dream, however, a line of small characters beneath the portrait revealed the dead woman’s name.