Chapter 30

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Original Title: 挖坟挖出鬼

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural, Yaoi

This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 30

Is she calling me? Lin Yan nodded his head in a daze. His mind was spinning, his legs were weak like he was stepping on cotton. The light in the living room dimmed even darker. Wind blew in from the window. His hair was still slightly wet from the shower and the cold wind made his head go numb.

“Why doesn’t it look like you?” Lin Yan asked.

The little girl struck a big cross across the face in the drawing with a black crayon, a thick black bar slashing across her teeth: “Why doesn’t it look like me? This is how I looked when I died.”

“Brother.” The little girl stood up. She tilted her head and stared at Lin Yan. Her head was crookedly rested on her right shoulder, but her thumb was still in her mouth. When she took it out after a while, the top part was gone, the nail chewed halfway down her finger. The girl grinned, her mouth full of scarlet blood flowing past her lips.

“Brother, follow me, follow me.” The little girl threw the crayon aside. She tugged on Lin Yan’s hand and dragged him towards the bathroom: “I’ll show you what I looked like when I died, it was beautiful.”

Lin Yan muddled behind her. He instinctively sensed something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell what it was. His head felt like a steel nail was being nailed into it, throbbing intensely.

Why was the wind so strong? Did he forget to close the windows?

“My brother bought me new clothes and then I died, hehe. Grandma is dead, Grandpa is also dead. Everyone is dead.” The little girl took Lin Yan’s hand and jumped forward. The braid on the back of her head was tied with a faded pink string. The bow was coming undone and the long string was stretched out and hung behind her head. “Brother, you are dying too. I’ll draw a picture for you too when you die.”

“Brother, hee hee, come with us.” The little girl pulled the old padded jacket on her body. Her head became even more crooked as if it would accidentally fall off. “Come on, hurry. We have to catch up.”

His vision was distorted. The dark corridor looked like a giant beast’s gaping mouth. Lin Yan quickened his pace and suddenly kicked something with his toes. Lin Yan subconsciously climbed onto it and went up onto a platform. It was so cold, so windy…

Why wasn’t he there yet?

“Lin Yan!” An anxious voice sounded like it came from another world, a distant echo: “Come back.”

It was a familiar voice. Lin Yan twisted his stiff neck and tried to look back, but the little girl grabbed his wrist harshly and yanked him forward: “It’s too late, hurry up.”

Lin Yan nodded and took a staggering step forward, but his foot didn’t land on anything and he lost his balance and fell. As soon as he fell forward, a huge resistance suddenly came from his torso, aggressively holding his waist. The fresh scent of shower gel jolted him back to his senses as if he had suddenly awakened from a nightmare. He looked around in confusion and saw that the old movie-like dark surroundings had returned to their usual appearance. The little girl was gone. Lin Yan looked down. The scene in front of him left him utterly speechless, only able to suck in a sharp breath.

He was standing on the windowsill in his bedroom. The window was wide open, the curtains were billowing out in the night wind, rustling and rattling. Half of his body had already stepped out. Looking down the outer wall of the apartment building, the flowerbeds and dark shadows of the trees seemed to stretch towards him on the twelfth floor. Two hazy figures in the garden were looking up and waving at him. One was the little girl in the old cotton jacket, and the one holding her hand was the second was the soul that they hadn’t been able to recover today, Second Immortal Gu!

“We’re dead, we’re all dead, and you’re going to die too.” The little girl’s voice echoed in his head: “Hurry up, you have to catch up to us.”

“Xiao Yu, Xiao Yu!” Lin Yan yelled out in despair. He instinctively backed away and slammed into the arms of someone behind him. The hand hooked around his waist squeezed tighter, spinning him around. The deep voice repeated over and over again: “I’m here, I’m here.”

That cold body had never been as warm as it was now. Shocked, Lin Yan buried his face in Xiao Yu’s chest, but Xiao Yu didn’t reciprocate intimately. He immediately led Lin Yan down the window sill and closed it. He stared at the flower bed on the ground and frowned.

Lin Yan looked at Xiao Yu’s profile. His serious expression made him almost forget for a minute that Xiao Yu was a ghost. Lin Yan pursed his lips. He felt that he must be really disturbed to come up with the idea of letting him hold him for a while longer.

After shaking his head to drive the weird idea from his mind, he leaned on the windowsill and looked down. The green courtyard was surrounded by trees and the tiled path was empty. Second Immortal Gu and the little girl were gone.

“The little girl and the old lady were standing down there just now.” Lin Yan stammered. “They waved to me…”

“I can’t see them.” Xiao Yu’s expression was serious. and he raised his hand to straighten out his damp hair. Raising his hand to fix his wet hair, Lin Yan realized that he seemed to have rushed straight out of the bathtub. His clothes hanging loosely on his body, exposing his marble-like chest. Lin Yan felt himself blush and hurriedly turned his head to the side to hide it.

“They’re not like me.” Xiao Yu closed the curtains. “Don’t go too far away from me.”

Lin Yan was silent for a while then asked softly: “… how are they not the same?”

Xiao Yu didn’t answer. He took a deep look at him and abruptly dragged Lin Yan from the bedroom back to the living room and pressed him into the sofa. Just when Lin Yan thought he was going to force himself on him again, Xiao Yu let go. He picked up the ancient books that had fallen on the ground and shoved them at him. He said seriously: “Learn these.”

“Dude, are you kidding…” Lin Yan swept through the pages of the books, glancing at a large string of unheard-of terms. He couldn’t help but let out a pathetic laugh: “Putting aside the fact that there’s no way I can get through all of these, even if I look up each individual word to understand what it meant, I can’t become a Daoist priest in one day.”

Xiao Yu was silent for a while and said lightly: “If I leave one day, you have to know how to protect yourself.”

Xiao Yu’s hands pressed on his knees as he spoke, his demeanour as tame and gentle as usual, but something seemed different. Lin Yan hesitantly asked him in a low voice: “Are you going to leave?”

“Haven’t you been looking forward to it?” Xiao Yu replied coldly.

Lin Yan didn’t know what to say. He raised his hand and gently touched his face. His delicate and cold skin felt like fine porcelain. He slowly rested his palm on his face and stroked his jaw. Xiao Yu didn’t shy away, quietly lying on Lin Yan’s knees. Just when Lin Yan thought he was asleep and was going to take him back to the bedroom, Xiao Yu suddenly shot up. He spread open the book on Lin Yan’s lap and stared at him calmly, eyes almost sad.

“You really want me to learn this?” Lin Yan asked in surprise.

Xiao Yu nodded. Lin Yan still wanted to argue, but when he saw his serious expression, he swallowed his retorts.

The books from the online store covered almost every subject. Not only was there I Ching Feng Shui, the Five Elements of Yin and Yang, Astrology and Geomancy, Tomb Charms Guide, Qimen Dunjia*, but even calling back souls to raise corpses so they could continue their lives. Some of the books were reasonable and well-founded, but most of them contradicted themselves. The authors were shooting themselves in the foot trying to sound all-knowing with all the contradicting information. The more Lin Yan read, the more nonsensical it all seemed. He yawned sleepily. He had drunk three cups of coffee overnight and smoked almost a full pack of cigarettes without finding anything. Every time he wanted to stop. he was forced to continue by Xiao Yu’s murderous eyes. He wasn’t allowed to sleep at all until dawn.

*(T/N: 奇门遁甲 - a type of divination)

Feudal superstition kills people. People need to be selective about what they absorb from traditional culture. Keep the essence stuff and discard the rest. Lin Yan vaguely remembered his junior high Chinese history textbooks. He muttered that after years of atheistic education, he was forced to go to Liangshan* by a ghost.

*(T/N: 梁山 - this is where the Daoist heroes from the Water Margin were from. So kind of like a land of heavy spiritualism)

If someone really wanted to learn something, you can’t eat one bite to become a fat guy*. Lin Yan lazily lay on Xiao Yu’s lap, his cold palm stroking his shoulders down to his waist. After getting used to the coldness of his body, he felt very at ease. Lin Yan huddled up on the sofa and all the symbols and phrases in the book appeared in his mind; so much Yin and Yang, the sun rises in the east, how to disrupt a nightmare, avoid bad luck…

*(T/N: 一口吃成个胖子 - an idiom that means basically it’s not going to happen all at once)

He slowly nodded off as the dawn sky began to lighten.

The next few days were extremely hard. In addition to visiting the young Daoist priest in the hospital every day at lunch with Yin Zhou, Lin Yan spent almost all his time buried in a variety of old books. Xiao Yu seemed determined to train him to become a Daoist master. On the table were large stacks of white paper, each one scrawled with odd incantations taken from the books. Some of them weren’t even in Chinese. He could only trace them with a pencil, noting the patterns and corresponding them with their intended purpose.

The worst thing was that he had no way of experimenting with the effects of these charms. Lin Yan lay on the table and stared at Xiao Yu’s back, reluctantly thinking that the only thing he had as a test subject was this ghost. But no matter what talisman he tried, there was no reaction. After trying more than a dozen, Lin Yan’s patience had finally worn out. He uncontrollably swept the books onto the ground. He slammed his hands on the table and yelled at Xiao Yu: “Are you fucking playing with me?”

Xiao Yu wasn’t angry. He patiently picked the books off the ground, turning back to where they had been and placed them in front of Lin Yan. He stepped aside and looked at him quietly. Lin Yan felt like a dumb firecracker, extinguished by a pot of water before he had the chance to explode. It happened to rain for several days, the sound of rain and the sound of pages turning made the house extremely quiet. Lin Yan, for the thousandth time, wrote out notes on geomancy. Xiao Yu had more patience than him. No matter how long Lin Yan sat at his desk, Xiao Yu stayed beside him for as long as he could. Every time Lin Yan turned around, their eyes would meet. He had given up on the idea of slacking off. He lit a cigarette and continued to bury himself in the pile of books.

“You have been sitting here with me for ages, don’t you feel bored?” Lin Yan sighed. “The remote is on the table and there’s a notebook in my room. I’ll teach you how to use it. This is also your home. You don’t need to be so polite with me.”

“There’s some pens and ink. You’ll have to use it yourself. You can write or paint anything you want. I don’t have that kind of talent anyways. I won’t be able to tell if it’s bad.” Lin Yan chatted up and laughed a bit. “It’s a bit like filming a TV series.”

He still didn’t answer. The whole room seemed to grow mouldy in the rainy weather. Coupled with the chilly aura radiating from Xiao Yu’s body, Lin Yan felt that he had become a mushroom growing in one of the damp corners. Before Xiao Yu could speak, he always liked to hug him whenever he had the opportunity. Now that he had regained some consciousness, he didn’t touch him as much. He just watched from behind, the silence suffocating and making Lin Yan somewhat uneasy.