Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My name is Chen Xingzhi. I’m a feng shui practitioner with no sect, no school, and no backing.

Answering people’s questions, reading their fortunes, checking feng shui, and casting divinations-that was how I made a living. My health had been poor since I was young, so even if I wanted to do anything else, my body wouldn’t allow it.

Blind Master passed away ten years ago. Before he left, he gave me a fortune-telling stall and a small wooden box. I had no parents, no siblings, and no relatives, so those became all the assets I owned.

This line of work isn’t nearly as glamorous as people imagine. Those who can enter it either suffer from the Three Deficiencies and Five Drawbacks, or are born owing a debt to fate. And whatever fortune we’re allotted in life is fixed. We can only scrape by-we can’t use this craft to get rich. It’s a miserable fate. Take my master, for example. Even after he died, he couldn’t have a grave marker carved or be buried in a proper tomb. He could only be wrapped in a straw mat and laid to rest.

He wasn’t even allowed to lie in a coffin.

People like us exist in this world with only one thing we can do: accumulate a little more hidden merit, and pray that in the next life, we’ll be born into a better fate.

That day, a woman came to my stall.

To be precise, she was a very beautiful woman. Tall and slender, with fox-like eyes and a swanlike neck. She wasn’t even thirty, yet there was already a sultry charm about her.

Most people who came to have their fortunes told or ask about problems were older folks-uncles, aunties, grandpas, and grandmas. These days, very few young people believed in this stuff, especially when it came to people like us with no ancestral master or sect behind us. Most of the time, we were treated like scammers.

So when such a beautiful woman walked over, she naturally drew attention.

“Sir, I’d like to have my fortune told.”

After the woman sat down, her voice carried a trace of delicate softness that gave me goosebumps.

Sir?

That form of address made my heart give a small leap of joy.

Because I was born blind in one eye, and my master had also been blind, everyone in town called me Half-Blind. This was the first time in my life anyone had called me “sir,” and for a moment, I felt almost overwhelmed by the honor.

I nodded and asked her to take off her mask and brush up her bangs.

There was a dark aura over this woman’s Heavenly Gate and Fortune Court. Her eye sockets were sunken, her cheeks gaunt, and her spirit withered. The bags under her eyes were as dark as a panda’s. I didn’t know if it was from staying up late, but at her age, she already had crow’s feet even when she wasn’t smiling.

And those crow’s feet were precisely the problem-they were messy.

In physiognomy, crow’s feet can reveal a person’s romantic fortune. With hers so loose and chaotic, there was a high chance she had encountered rotten romance.

If it was serious, then it would be a romantic calamity.

“What happened?”

“Lately, my mental state has been awful. No matter what I do, I can’t focus. When I sleep at night, it feels like I’ve slept, but also like I haven’t slept at all. Even sleeping pills don’t work. My hair’s falling out by the handful too. I’m almost at my breaking point.”

She had barely spoken three sentences after sitting down before her voice took on a sobbing tone.