CH 92

His furious yell attracted the gazes of everyone nearby. The man could feel their eyes and his face turned red. He yelled out in a more muted tone to the woman, 

“Let’s stop okay! You’ve kept asking for fortune telling these few days and I’ve let you do so. You want to ask Buddha, so we went to the temple. What more do you want?! I’ve already said that you cannot believe in these things! These people will just spit out nonsense!”

Yan Yu didn’t care about throwing more wrenches in their way as he watched the spectacle before him. He was even smiling with delight as he leaned on the railing. Tilting his head up, he slowly blew out a ring of smoke. His sexy throat slightly moved as he used the fingers holding his cigarette to point at the man and repeated himself, 

“You, will bring misfortune and kill her.”

With her anger rising from her husband’s rough handling, the woman angrily pushed his hand away and ran down the footbridge, running all the way to the bus stop. The man glared at Yan Yu before following along.

Cars were bustling away underneath the bridge and the woman, seeing the man following behind her, quickly turned away to walk towards the road. She reached out to wave down a taxi when suddenly a speeding white car lost control and flipped over the guard rails. 

In the midst of people screaming, the out of control car flew right in the direction of the couple. The woman couldn’t move in time, and so, following the sharp sound of wheels scraping against the ground, it crashed into her and propelled her far away with a bang. Her body rolled a few times once it hit the ground before roughly stopping in its tracks.

As if to prove Yan Yu’s words true, a pool of blood started flowing out from under the woman’s body, so bright and sharp it was burning to the eyes. Her husband, who had reacted just in time to escape, flapped his mouth open and close as he stared at the way his wife’s eyes were widened unnaturally, in a way that showed that she was no longer in the realm of the living. His legs weakened and brought him to his knees.

An intertwined standoff of life and death, leading to an ending…… one dead, one living……

The sun was setting and hundreds of ghosts were starting to pop out. On the road of this car accident, there were already a couple of headless ghosts coming to find their replacements. Yan Yu retracted his gaze and began to pack everything up into his backpack before taking his leave.

The old fortune teller across from him slowly raised his head. First looking at the car accident and the loss of life down under the footbridge, and then to the shrinking back of Yan Yu. He seemed to have remembered something interesting then, and he suddenly grinned, showing off his mouth full of yellowed teeth.

Yan Yu didn’t immediately return home. Instead he went to unlock a public bicycle by the road, rushing to reach the nearby graveyard before night arrived. At this time of day, pretty much no one would be coming to sweep the graves and pay their respects. Here, the streetlamps were also dim, so he turned on the flashlight on his phone and checked every grave until he reached Xun Chuan’s.

The ice cold stone gravestone was etched with his birth and death dates, a life lived that was honestly too short.

The graveyard had a rule where no one could burn joss papers at night, so Yan Yu only took a quick look at the dimming light in the sky before burying the bankcard into the ground. Whether it would be dug up by someone or picked up, well, that was none of his business.

Yan Yu rose up as to leave, but his ears suddenly caught a faint sound that was like nails scratching along flesh from above him. He raised his eyes and a long haired woman met his eyes. Crouching behind the gravestone, a pair of bloodshot eyes was the only part exposing her. In this dim moonlight, at this hour, at this place, it was enough to frighten someone to death.

……but at least Yan Yu could put a name to the face: she was Xun Chuan’s mother.

The wind was whistling and that nail scratching on flesh sound was still audibly heard when Xun Chuan’s mother walked out from behind the grave. She was dressed in a perfectly fitted outfit, with a very mismatched dark red scarf around her neck. 

When she passed by him, Yan Yu could visibly see blood and flesh clinging in between the space of her nails. Xun Chuan’s mother did not seem to register Yan Yu. Except for her eyes that depicted a pained, struggling and collapsing mentality, her face was entirely emotionless as she walked towards the exit of the graveyard. She would occasionally reach up with her hand to scratch at her neck, creating that eerie and unsettling sound of flesh being scratched. Her scarf also seemed to be drenched in a liquid like water, dripping some unknown fluid as she walked.

Even so, the dark cloud of negative energy swirling around Yan Yu’s neck followed his fingers, flowing back and away. The bloody atmosphere was dissipating, leaving only a faint scar behind. 

Notes:

*1 Messing around: the words used here mean to live in a mess or like terribly, without aspirations and living aimlessly/without need/fulfillment, sneakily/lawlessly, hanging out with not good members of society or in a way not accepted by normal society. Kind of like an idiom as the words are actually “ghost” and “mix/intertwine” so if the author had the intention (very likely) it could be seen as wordplay that he’s been fooling around with ghosts.

*2 peach wood sword: it’s very well known/believed that a peach wood sword has the powers to repel evil, attract good luck, hold down the fort, etc.

桃木劍 (peach wood sword)

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Most of you probably have already guessed who the “shou”/bottom is… 

(descriptions have been updated!)