Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The woman’s name was Liu Hui. She was twenty-eight this year and worked as a product manager at a cosmetics company. From what she told me, her symptoms had been going on for nearly two months. She had tried traditional Chinese medicine, Western medicine, Baidu searches, and had even asked the village shamaness for help, but nothing worked.

Recently, in particular, things had only gotten worse. She had begun losing hair, her periods had become irregular, and she often fainted without warning. It was already seriously affecting her life.

As luck would have it, one of her clients had once come to me for a feng shui reading, and that client had referred her to me.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

I took out the old almanac and began calculating her birth chart as I asked.

“No. But for the past two months, I’ve kept having the same strange dream. In the dream, there’s a man whose face I can’t see, and every night he… um, sleeps with me.”

She seemed a little embarrassed, but there was fear in her eyes too.

“I’ve been wondering if I’ve run into something unclean. When I asked the shamaness before, she said I had. She mixed me a bowl of incense-ash water and made me drink it, but after I drank it, things seemed to get even worse.”

Sleeps with her?

My pen stopped. I looked up at her.

When humans and ghosts engaged in relations between man and woman, it was usually female ghosts or spirits draining a man’s yang energy. You couldn’t exactly call such cases rare.

As far as I knew, there had once been a case in the Northeast. A family had worshipped a Household Guardian Immortal-Master Liu, meaning a snake immortal-and there had been an incident where it drained a woman’s yin energy. The unlucky one was the family’s daughter-in-law. At first, no one took it seriously, and after a year or so, she died violently in bed. Not only that, after her death, she even gave birth to a nest of little snakes.

It was horrifying to the extreme.

Now, Liu Hui’s situation seemed somewhat similar.

“Do you keep or worship anything at home?”

“No.”

The woman shook her head.

Hearing that, I frowned. After getting a general understanding of her situation, I decided to go to her place and take a look.

After we grabbed a quick bite, she brought me back to her home.

She lived in an urban village, where buildings crowded against buildings and sunlight was hard to come by.

Along the way, she kept grumbling to me about the incense-ash water the shamaness had made her drink and the rituals she had performed. She seemed quite dissatisfied, convinced that the shamaness must have done something bad to her.

I didn’t comment much on that. We all made a living in the same line of work. As long as no one crossed the line, there were still rules, big and small, that had to be understood.

You couldn’t just smash someone else’s rice bowl.

But to be honest, when it came to drinking incense-ash water, other than giving you the runs, I really couldn’t think of what use it had.

When we reached the foot of her building, I paused.

It was a six-story building that looked rather old. Many of the exterior tiles had fallen off, and because the surroundings were relatively damp, moss and weeds had grown around the corners of the walls.

The entrance was tucked inside an alley. Looking ahead, the alley seemed to stretch on without end, with only a delivery rider pedaling forward on his bike.

What made me stop was that less than a hundred meters from the southeast corner of the building stood a garbage station and a public restroom.

A Solitary Yin Curse.

I narrowed my eyes and studied the building’s position, silently making the judgment in my heart.

If there had been a wet market here, the human bustle and the butchers’ killing aura might have been enough to suppress it. But unfortunately, the area was packed entirely with buildings, causing yin energy to fill the place.

Even sunlight couldn’t reach it. Rats, cockroaches, and other vermin bred here, and the moment you walked in, you felt uncomfortable.

There were also many stray cats, all of them either black or white. These things weren’t like pet cats. They could connect with the yin realm.

Just on the way in, I had already seen no fewer than five of them.