NR | Chapter 9

We didn’t have a family genealogy. As for the origin of the craft on my grandfather’s side of the family, all I knew came from oral tradition passed down from my grandfather and his ancestors. My grandfather’s forebears had once been an incomparably huge clan. From the way he described it, at its most prosperous, the family even rivaled the Ningguo Mansion in *Dream of the Red Chamber*.

The years of those old events can no longer be verified now. Besides, what they were doing back then seemed to be connected to imperial tombs and burials. Not only did they need to be proficient in the *Yijing*[[1]], they also had to possess the ability to solve problems for emperors, so a lot of things were not allowed to be recorded by the official historians.

According to my grandfather, the Gan family’s founding ancestor was once a famous fengshui master in the capital, and there were four other fengshui masters on par with him. Each of them had their own specialty. They knew each other well and respected one another.

But later, no one knew what happened. Maybe it was the change of dynasties, maybe their ambitions differed. These five men, almost like figures from legend, each went their own way. Over the long years, they gradually formed the five regions of east, south, west, north, and center, and people in the trade collectively called them the “Five Masters.”

The Yin old woman’s family was the one that eventually settled in the east. But in my memory, my grandfather’s description of that family was pitifully sparse. The only thing I still remembered clearly was that my grandfather often used their ghost stories to force me to sleep, so much so that I always thought the Yin old woman was something he’d made up just to scare me.

I was most interested in this kind of old, half-buried history, so I hurried up and asked, “What, is it hard to invite people from the Yin old woman’s family?”

Tian Yuqing smiled. “The Yin old woman’s family has the surname Lu. They don’t have a fixed shop or business. I heard that in their hardest years they couldn’t even afford a sack of rice. They can set aside anything, and they have almost no ties to the other four families. People like that, with no desires or weaknesses, are actually the hardest to persuade.”

As he spoke, we reached an old building with a faint light glowing inside. I studied it. The building stood alone off to one side, like a long-abandoned unfinished high-rise that had gone to ruin years ago. It was a three-story structure, but only the first floor had firelight. It was honestly a little strange.

At that thought, several classic horror movie scenes had already started playing in my head.

Tian Yuqing stepped up onto the stone stairs in front first and pushed open the old wooden door, which was barely hanging together. My gaze passed over his shoulder and locked onto the things laid out inside the house. A cold wind swept in, and I immediately shivered, taking a step back.

If I’d come here alone, I definitely would have been scared out of my mind.

Inside the first-floor room, directly opposite the door, there was a square red table. Behind it sat a woman with her hair hanging loose. She slowly tapped the tabletop with her slender, soft fingers.

Tian Yuqing was still standing at the door. If he didn’t move, I didn’t dare move either. Even standing in the wind, cold sweat kept sliding down my back. I didn’t know how long we stood there frozen in that position before Tian Yuqing finally gave me a gesture from behind.

His gesture wasn’t complicated at all. I understood at once that he wanted me to go first. With such a good thing coming to me, I certainly turned around without looking back and headed down the way we’d come, moving faster and faster as I went. Anyway, there was only one road back. We should be able to meet up with Old Master Tian Xiao soon.

I walked for nearly fifteen minutes until I was exhausted, then stopped to catch my breath. When I looked up, a fork in the road appeared in front of me, and my mind suddenly went blank. All my fatigue vanished in an instant.

As I’d mentioned before, because of my grandfather’s brutal periodic training, paying attention to details anywhere I went had become a habit. So although I’d been chatting idly with Tian Yuqing along the way, the habit I’d developed as a child was almost forcing me to memorize the route.

I could say with complete certainty that when Tian Yuqing led me onto this road, there had only ever been one alley from beginning to end, with not a single fork. But now another road had appeared out of nowhere, and on top of that, in this pitch-black wilderness. The alley was made up of row after row of unfinished buildings, a damn place with not even a single lightbulb.

I really wanted to curse.

There had been plenty of strange incidents my grandfather had encountered while reading houses in the past, but a ghostly maze was nothing that would shock those capable and extraordinary people. For someone like me, though, someone who knew absolutely nothing about divination or the *Yijing*[[1]], this was fatal.

I could wander in there for a whole lifetime and never get out.

“Gentlemen, I wasn’t bothering any of you to rest, so why did you change the road on me?” I said with a bitter smile.

I didn’t dare take either road. In the end, I simply hugged the wooden box and sat cross-legged in the middle of the road, thinking that if it came to it, then no one would have a good time. I wasn’t taking either path. I’d just sit here and wait for daylight. The Tian family would definitely notice one person was missing, and I’d wait for their people to come find me.

Being alone in a place like this was its own kind of torment. It was dark all around, and the wooden box in my arms had started to feel icy. After sitting there for too long, I even began to hallucinate, feeling like a black shadow had appeared on the road in front of me.

Wait! I rubbed my eyes hard with my hand and squinted to look carefully. At the end of the road ahead of me, there really was a black figure, and that person even had a flip-top lighter in his hand.

Ghosts probably don’t use lighters.

I scrambled to my feet at once, not caring about the dirt on my body, and shouted to the person with the lighter on the road, “Hey! Hello! Can you see me?”

The person saw me and slowly walked closer, holding the lighter up in his right hand. His left hand seemed to be carrying something else.

When he finally came fully into view, I saw that what he was carrying was a plastic bag full of steamed soup buns. Even while walking, he didn’t forget to keep stuffing hot buns into his mouth.

Eating buns at this hour. Hmm, that was a pretty good eating habit.

This person should have been about my age. He was wearing a matching set of little brown bear pajamas, which showed that Jiangsu’s climate really did suit people well. His skin was very well cared for, at least much smoother than mine. On his palm-sized face was something as thin as paper, stuck on over half of it. The lighter’s flame was too weak, so I couldn’t really see clearly.

He gave me a casual smile, not the least bit surprised, then took a bun out of the plastic bag and tossed it to me. “Eat this. It’s hot.”

I barely caught the scalding bun he’d thrown over when he passed by me, humming a tune as he continued down the road. I hurried after him and asked, “Excuse me, are you a resident here?”

With the bun still in his mouth, he muttered, “Don’t ask so much. You came too early, and you brought so many people to block the place too. So noisy at night, and nobody can even get any peace.”

What he said was a little all over the place, but I could hear from it that he seemed to be complaining that the Tian family’s motorcade had arrived too early. At the very least, he should have known we were coming here.

They say the Yin old woman’s descendants are few. Could the person in front of me, besides that woman from earlier, also be one of their descendants?

Following the pajama-clad man, it took less than ten minutes before we were back in front of that eerie, ghostly building. The door of the unfinished high-rise was already open. Tian Xiao was sitting in a wheelchair with his eyes closed, resting. Tian Yuqing was anxiously preparing to make a call. When he saw me, he clearly froze.

His gaze then moved to the pajama-clad man, and he slowly lowered the phone he had only half-dialed.

Tian Yuqing walked up to me. “There was only one road in the alley leading back. Where did you run off to?”

The pajama-clad man cut in from the side, “Sorry, I went out to buy a bun to eat. I was in a hurry when I went out and forgot to put things away.”

Before I could even explain, I saw the pajama-clad man stretch lazily, step casually across the threshold of the unfinished building, and go around behind the redwood table. With two fingers, he pinched the woman behind the table hard by the chin. His palm lifted upward, and the woman’s tapping on the table immediately stopped. Her body also seemed to lose all life as it toppled to one side.

The pajama-clad man put down the bun, picked up the woman who had slumped onto the chair, carried her to the cabinet beside the unfinished building, lifted the curtain and placed her inside, then lowered the curtain completely.

As he cleaned up the copper coins and divination chart on the table, the pajama-clad man said, “Under normal circumstances, there’s only one alley here. But at certain special times, two or three roads can appear too.”

“Young Master Gan, you have to stay alert everywhere from now on. If you accidentally walk into a dead gate, even if I went over there, I wouldn’t have much of a way to solve it.”