CH 93

The elderly aged woman had quite a loose mouth, and Yan Yu was not in the mood to give her the time of day. He went to close the door when she stopped it with her leg, 

“Ack, Xiao-Su hasn’t come back for a few days now, and she won’t even pick up her phone. I’m still waiting for her rent, so when you see her, make sure to tell her to respond back to me.”

Yan Yu: “No time.”

The landlady glared at him and unloaded on him, 

“No time then you make time. You are the only unemployed out of this entire building. If I don’t come find you, who will I go find? I’ve given you so much leeway on your rent from last month until now because I know how difficult it is to venture out into the city by yourself. If it was someone else, I wouldn’t be so nice. You aren’t even willing to help me out with such a small favor?”

Yan Yu half heartedly raised his hand, expressing that he would comply in fear of any more words coming out of her mouth.

Seeing this, the landlady became satisfied, 

“Ack, if you also clean up the hallway, and clean it up well, I’ll take off the water and electricity bill from your rent this month. I’ll come by to check at night.”

In a month that has thirty days, the water and electricity wouldn’t be online for at least fifteen of those in this beaten down apartment building, so who really cared. Yan Yu shut the door and went back to sleep instead. Fortune telling and catching ghosts took quite a toll on the body, and besides resting, there was no other way to recover.

Yan Yu slept all the way until late afternoon. When he woke up, the room was deathly quiet and the last drops of sunlight from the setting sun were just shining through the glass window. It was getting dimmer, and it was so very quiet, so quiet one could hear the sound of their own breathing. 

Yan Yu patted his phone out from under his pillow and found that quite a few of his hooligan friends had given him a call. Yan Yu didn’t plan on responding and instead flipped through his feed and group chats, before realizing that Dong Zi was dead.

Early yesterday morning, he had been drunk as he walked out of a nightclub, and then he fell asleep right in the middle of the road. A truck speeding down the road ran over him, rolling over both of his hands and feet and mashing them into a bloody pile of flesh and bone. He was found dead in the morning, and it was even on the news.

Messages were flying nonstop in the group chat and everyone was talking about this and lamenting at how he died so young. But who knew if what they were saying truly came from the heart. Yan Yu took a look through and then closed his phone. 

After a quick change of clothes, he went out to grab some food. Close to the last hours of the day, there were many stalls open at night by the alleyway entrance, making it an extremely boisterous and lively place. Yan Yu ordered a skewer at the open air barbeque store underneath his building and sat around to wait.

Yan Yu lived on the third floor and so the moment he tilted up his head, he could see the window of his own home. But as the entire building had been out of power since this afternoon, no light came from the windows. Only the window of the fourth floor tenant was still bright and shining, a sharp contrast to everything else around it.

Behind that window stood a lady whose body looked very graceful and elegant. Wearing a red spaghetti strap nightdress and revealing snow white skin, all the no-lifers downstairs were whistling and catcalling. This was evidently the woman the middle-aged landlady was referring to: the one who could not be contacted, Xiao-Su.

Yan Yu couldn’t help but narrow his eyes slightly as Xiao-Su seductively flipped her hair. Through the glass window, she hooked her fingers up to signal one of the watching men, a middle-aged bald man whose wife had died. Following her call with weightless feet in the midst of all the mocking laughter of everyone around, the man looked as if his soul had been hooked away.

Not long after, the light on the fourth floor turned off.

Seeing this, Yan Yu slightly raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t really have the mind to care. After he polished off his dinner, he went back home. At around 7pm, the building’s power went back online. 

Yan Yu was sitting at his table, cutting paper and then drawing talismans on the paper. Cutting and drawing, cutting and drawing until about fifty or so were sitting on the table. Yet only about eight could actually be used.

The light inside the room suddenly flashed and as Yan Yu wrapped up the talisman he just finished, an ice cold body suddenly appeared within his arms, freezing him up.

“Why are you drawing talismans? Thinking of killing me?”

TL Tidbit:

Just a quicker reminder that was previously mentioned in Volume 1 and 3: “xiao” can be a part of a name or as a prefix for someone younger, or for an affectionate way to call someone (at least someone a bit better than acquaintance). Xiao-Su here is a nickname of sorts/affectionate way to call her, rather than her actual name, which will be appearing later (and we’re using the dash here to our advantage to hopefully be helpful in denoting difference. As I mentioned in the updates section, we are currently in progress to update previous chapters of better wording (could be debated) and just fixing up some inconsistencies between the volumes/chapters and this is sort of a change we’ll looking to adopt. But in any case, just a note, in case it gets confusing of the two separate names used for Xiao-Su later!) 

Hope you all had a great weekend, and see you thursday, Galactic Judges ( ´ ▽ ` )ノ