Cyber Ghosts

The moon shone bright in the dark sky, light piercing through the clouds and casting a dull glow over the forest below.

I hid in the corner of an old stone building, half collapsed by time. I wasn't sure what I was doing here, hiding behind what was left of the old wall. Was I waiting for something? Running from something?

"Bring him here!" somebody yelled from the other side of the wall. "Bring me another animal, too. A sika deer should work."

Startled, I turned and pressed myself to the wall, leaning out a bit so I could just see them out of one eye.

There were about seven men in black clothes. Two of them had a younger man pinned to the ground. The moonlight shining on his pale skin gave me a clear view of his face and fashionable clothes.

"I heard you're a very disobedient young man," one of the figures said. "We've been asked to help you fix that."

The young man stared back stubbornly.

"I'm not disobedient. I just won't be part of their plans."

The man standing over him sneered.

"Oh? You're just a free thinker, I guess! I'm so sorry for the trouble. We'll just tell our employer we only accept jobs from upstanding citizens now," he said mockingly. He turned to his cohorts. "Let's begin."

As he finished speaking, another man pulled over a sika deer. The man who'd been speaking extended his hands, pressing one against the deer and one against the young man. As he pulled his hands away, a small light drifted from each body. Against the dark forest, I could see the shape of each light clearly. One hand held a prancing deer, the other a small replica of the man on the ground.

He showed the two lights to the young man.

"If your soul won't listen, we'll simply switch it out for a more compliant one."

He pushed the light of the deer into the young man, allowing the human soul to enter the body of the deer.

"Much better. From now on, you'll be an obedient young man," the man in black said with a laugh. He pointed to the young celebrity on the ground and turned to the crowd around him. "From now on, this man's name is Lu!"

"Alright," the man who'd brought the deer said. He knelt down, pulling a strange object from his bag, and wrote on the young man's forehead. Even far away, the strange light of the characters made them easy to read. The words 'Lu', written with the character for deer, held for a moment, then sunk beneath the skin. The young man writhed in pain.

As the he tried to struggle up, he saw me peeking out from behind the wall and met my eye.

"Help... me..."

His eyes were full of pain, but as he looked at me, there was a moment of hope.

From behind me, a hand closed over my throat and another stranger in black lifted me. Yet another walked forward with a white rabbit, smiling cruelly.

"We'll just switch you soul with an obedient little rabbit, alright?"

"No!" I screamed.

I rolled and hit the ground hard. When I opened my eyes, I was not in a forest. I was laying on the floor of a coworker's house. I must have fallen asleep at the desk.

My colleague Zhou Yuan looked over indifferently, still holding a book open in his hands. At least he didn't get mad that I'd fallen asleep.

My own feelings were more complicated. I'd had dreams like that every night this week.

"Hao Ning, come here," she said, pulling me into the next room. She lowered her voice. "What happened to my Zhou Yuan?"

I braced myself.

"What do you mean?"

"For the past few days, it seems like his mind is always wandering. He doesn't eat much. He'll take a bite or two, then go right back to bed. He won't even talk to me." Mrs. Zhou glanced at her son, but he didn't show any interest in listening in.

"Well... maybe something happened?" I said, scratching my head. I had no idea how to explain it to her. "Sorry to leave so soon, Mrs. Zhou, but I have an urgent matter at work."

Mrs. Zhou looked even more puzzled.

"Today's Sunday. Do you have overtime?"

"Uh... yeah," I smiled awkwardly. "It's a really important project."

The moment I was out the door, I ran home like my life depended on it. Nobody else was home. I gulped down a cup of ice water. It cooled me down a bit, but I was still so lost.

"He's still liked that?" asked a voice. It came from the mirror beside the TV.

I turned to face it. Inside the mirror was another man, handsome face devoid of color. I looked around, making sure I really was alone.

"That's right. And you're still in the mirror. You still can't get out?"

"I can't..." The man reached over to ruffle my reflection's hair. I ducked away without thinking and he smiled. "What are you trying to hide from?"

A week ago, seeing somebody in a mirror would have scared me out of my mind. After this week, I didn't even have the energy to lose my mind.

-

One Week Ago

It was Friday afternoon and I was sorting documents before I left for the week.

"Hao Ning," Zhou Yuan suddenly asked me, "do you have plans this weekend?"

I was the company's Internet Marketing Director. My primary work focused on how to advertise products. The title sounded grand, but my job mostly involved getting yelled at by my boss and resented by my colleagues.

Zhou Yuan was our company's graphic designer. People said eyes were the windows to the soul, and Zhou Yuan's most distinctive feature was his notably large eyes. His eyes, however, seemed mostly decorative, as his art was filled with mistakes. He couldn't even seem to tell if his work was aesthetically pleasing, and the director often mocked his work.

The frustrating thing was despite all the flaws pointed out in his work, part of the blame would also fall on me. 'Hao Ning, as marketing director, shouldn't you care about what the designers do? How could you allow him to bring me such a shoddy product?' and so on.

Still, whatever taste Zhou Yuan lacked in art he made up for in his taste for food. He knew every good spot in the city. Every weekend, he devoted himself to trying different types of food, so when he asked me if I had plans, my hopes were high.

"What can I do?" I asked. I'd just been berated over his work and was still angry with him. "The boss just said I have no sense of design and can't lead my team. I'm going to head to Nanshan Book City and find a few books to read up on design."

"Hey, don't talk like that. You've got a good sense for aesthetics. Besides, if you need help, I can teach you!" I rubbed my forehead and listened helplessly as he charged on. "Speaking of my taste, I was just making plans to go to Heaven's Eye Lake. The scenery is lovely, and there's a hot spring to relax the body and the mind. You could even use the scenery to hone your sense of aesthetics. You've been under so much pressure. Come relax with us. There's plenty of wild game, and we'll-"

"We'll eat wild game?" I looked at him with distain. "How will you catch it? Attack them with your basin sized face? Hunting needs good eyesight. You can't even match colors. Hey, don't beat me up! It was the director who said it! But still, can you even hunt?"

"Of course, I can't, but the locals can help us hunt and- what do you mean, my face is the size of a basin? I may eat a lot, but I don't gain much weight!" He totally ignored my dig at his work.

Still, the trip sounded nice. I had been under a lot of stress, especially since I'd been having nightmares. They featured some sort of devil, a heavenly book, and a divine seal. I had been spending too much time with my head buried in ancient legends, so I agreed to the trip.

Heaven's Eye Lake was a two-hour drive from S City. Zhou Yuan drove. In the backseat sat Liu Shuai, a coworker and friend of ours.

Liu Shuai was a bit of a bookworm. He was in the biomedical department and knew a great deal about human hair, but he'd lost all of his before graduation and been unable to coax it into regrowing. He was totally unable to make any of his theories work.

After that had failed, Liu Shuai had devoted himself to learning programming. Now people tended to assume it was the strain of IT that had stressed him bald.

"How much further?" I asked. The scenery was pleasant, but that could only stay interesting so long. "Zhou Yuan, how about you tell us a story?"

"Alright," Zhou Yuan said. "Then I'll tell a very long story that can last us until we get there."

"Okay, okay," I said, getting ready to listen.

"Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On the mountain, there was a temple. In the temple, there was an old monk telling a story. Do you know what that story was?" Zhou Yuan asked with a laugh. "Once upon a time, there was a mountain. On the mountain, there was a temple. In the temple, there was an old monk telling -"

"Stop!" Liu Shuai yelled. "Forget lasting until we reach our destination, that could go on until the end of the earth."

Zhou Yuan laughed again, taking a sharp turn.

"But I told the truth, didn't I? Here we are!"

Ahead of us, we could now see a verdant mountain forest filled with small villas overlooking the lake. Birds flew between the trees, cutting through the morning fog.

I got out of the car and took a deep breath of the cool air.

"The mountain feels so much further from the city when you hear the birds sing."

"Stop being melodramatic. Let's get inside," Zhou Yuan said, gesturing for us to take out our luggage.

In typical villa style, there was space to cook your own food, or you could ask the locals to cook. The 'wild game' was most likely a half-domesticated type the locals bred in the mountains for tourists to hunt, but not quite the type you'd find in a store.

I was about to enter when I heard a burst of laughter, light as silver bells.

"Mister Wang, you really are awesome! We have plenty to eat tonight!"

Three men and a woman walked towards us. One of the men carried the bodies of some wild rabbits while the other two carried bags. The woman looked at me and frowned a bit, but Zhou Yuan stepped forward to meet her.

"Miss Lan, it's you!" Seeing me hesitate, Zhou Yuan called me over. "Hao Ning, let me introduce you. This is Miss Lan. She's a fellow foodie. Miss Lan, this is Hao Ning. We work together. Who are these gentlemen with you?"

I looked more closely at the men. Miss Lan was hard to read, but they looked simple and honest, if a bit quiet.

"These are my friends. They also enjoy the mountain air and wild game. Look." She pointed at one of the rabbits. It didn't seem dead quite dead and kept twitching every once and a while. "Tonight, we'll have plenty of good food. Will you join us? We brought plenty of other things to eat too."

"I can't accept this," Zhou Yuan said with a laugh. "One shouldn't eat what they haven't earned."

"There's no need to be so polite. We'll go and clean up. This is your villa, right? We can talk about that other matter later." Miss Lan gave a polite smile and pointed next door. "This is our place, so you can come over later."

"Uh..." Zhou Yuan said with an unnatural laugh, "really?"

"Of course, silly boy. It's finally your lucky day," Miss Lan said cheerfully. She turned to leave.

I turned to Zhou Yuan. Something felt off.

"What is it you two need to talk about?" I asked.

"It's fine," Zhou Tuan said, but I thought I heard him mutter, "Maybe I will be lucky."

We spent the afternoon chatting and playing cards. Midafternoon, Zhou Yuan said he needed to talk to Miss Lan about something. He came back calm, telling us he'd confirmed plans for dinner, and he blushed when we asked if he and Miss Lan had really just 'talked'.

"Hao Ning," he said, subtly showing me his phone, "what do you think of this map?"

"It's the weekend and you're still trying to make me work? I thought I was supposed to rest," I snapped, but I took his phone anyway.

The second I looked at it, I couldn't look away. Everything about it was beautiful. The colors were carefully chosen, the layout clean and readable, and each detail had been attended to. It was genuinely perfect, but I worried that I wasn't the best judge and handed it to Liu Shuai.

"Alright, you ass," I said fondly, passing the phone back to Zhou Yuan, "if you can find a map this beautiful, it's proof of your taste. If you copy it well, the director will love it!"

"Yes!" Liu Shuai said, nodding in agreement. "Study this design. If you had this skill, no, a third of this skill, nobody would laugh at you. Look, I don't mean to gossip, but your pictures are just really not up to our team's standards. It can be frustrating."

"Hey, go to hell," Zhou Yuan said. "I drew this map myself, okay?"

Liu Shuai laughed, putting a hand to his head.

"Have you lost your mind? Or are you some great designer in a Zhou Yaun mask? We know what your work looks like. Do you remember how the other night your drawing was so horrible that my team couldn't accept it and you had to work overnight to fix it?"

My heart sank. Why did he have to keep going on about this on the weekend?

Zhou Yuan's lack of aesthetic sense often delayed launches, but saying his art was too horrible to use was going too far. This was going to be an awkward start to the weekend.

Surprisingly, Zhou Yuan didn't seem bothered.

"That's the Zhou Yuan of the past. This is the new me. From now on, my designs will touch the hearts of all who see them."

There was no fight, but, when time for dinner came, Liu Shuai seemed to have lost his appetite. He ate a few vegetables without even touching the meat. We joked that he was already bald as a monk, now he ate like one.

It was already dark when we finished eating. Everyone else went to the hot springs to bathe, but I had work to do and went back to my room to catch up.

All the site data looked standard and I was thinking of shutting my computer when the lights flickered. I looked up and saw a man sitting in front of me. He was handsome, but his face was eerily pale, and he sat like he'd been staring at me for a long time. Worse, he was smiling.

Chills ran down my spine and my heart started to race. I'd heard some people robbed hotel rooms while the occupants slept, but I didn't expect anyone here, especially not while I was still awake.

"Who are you?! What do you want?"

I picked my laptop, ready to throw it at him if he tried to get closer.

"Don't you remember me? Did you forget the story you wrote about our conversation that night?"

"Ah? A story I posted?" I stared at him. "You mean 'A Visit from the Devil'? That was just a dream I had. Are... are you a demon?"

"A demon? What a joke. I am the person in charge of guiding souls in the region of Greater China. My name is Yan."

He pulled out a name card and was about to stand up and hand it to me but stopped when he saw my expression.

"Don't mess with me. Just tell me what you want?" I stared at him. "I don't plan to sell anything, lend money, or buy insurance. I'm only carrying 500 yuan. Do you want my computer? You have to let me back it up first but... oh, and my phone-"

"Calm down. I don't want your things. I was here to collect a soul, and since you were nearby, I thought I'd visit."

He stood up and fumbled around in his pockets, then pulled out a small, glowing bottle. The light was bright, but I couldn't see the source.

"This is a soul."

He waved it at me, and I stared back in distain.

"If you don't learn to lie better, you'll die a broke man," I told him. "Your scams are on par with Master Wang. Are you going to summon some snakes now? *"

He smiled awkwardly.

"Ah, I forgot you can't see this yet."

He took another step towards me.

"What are you doing?!" I yelled, holding my laptop, ready to strike at any moment.

"You're much more stubborn when you're awake. I really don't know why you're the one..." He frowned and snapped his fingers. Suddenly I couldn't move.

He took my hand and placed it on my forehead.

"Say this – 'Lend Me Your Mana!'" he said impersonally.

"Lend Me Your Mana?" I asked, realizing I could still speak. "What in the world are you talking about?"

As I said it, the whole room was flooded with strange colors. The light from the bottle in his hand gradually shrank and took form until I could see the outline of a person.

As the details became clearer, the room seemed to grow cold until my teeth were chattering. The tiny figure in the bottle was weeping. Looking closer, I realized the tiny figure was Zhou Yuan.

*Wang Lin was a popular spiritual advisor among the Chinese elite. He made a good deal of money until two documentaries came out framing him as a stage magician and fraud. He was sentenced to prison for fraud and fled the country.

Yan looked at me in surprise.

"What's wrong?" He didn't seem to realize the soul he held was a friend of mine.

I gave up on trying to discredit Yan's claims. If this was Zhou Yuan's soul, a good friend of mine was no longer in this world. I didn't dare press Yan for too many details.

"You took this man's soul?" I confirmed

Yan looked at me and laughed.

"That's right. Didn't I just explain it? When someone dies, I come to take his soul."

"When did you take it?" I asked, still holding out hope that I was misunderstanding something.

"Let me see. In the morning, I ate some sliced white chicken and double-skin milk pudding on North Ninth Street. I drank a cup of Miso Tea, then played King Strike on my phone for a couple of hours." After quite a bit of mumbling, he announced, "That's around 3 PM. So the man died around 2 PM."

"Oh, alright. That's good." I patted my chest in relief. Zhou Yuan had shown us his design around 5 PM, and we'd had dinner at 6 PM. It couldn't be him.

Despite that, the man in the bottle looked like he was yelling to me, but I couldn't hear what he was trying to say through the glass.

"This man... hmm, this ghost...? This soul seems to want to say something?" I pointed to the bottle. "Could I hear him?"

Yan looked at me, then looked at the bottle and scratched his head.

"Yes, but there'll be problems if we leave the soul out too long. Hold on." As he spoke, he used his finger to draw patterns on the ground, then carefully opened the bottle. The soul came out, stood on the ground, and looking up at me, still crying. "Hao Ning, it's Zhou Yuan. Please save me! They want to kill me! "

"What?! You're lying!" I shouted at the tiny soul, jumping to my feet in shock. I thought through every possibility I could, but none of them made sense. "Zhou Yuan showed me his design for a map this afternoon. We had dinner together! "

"That's not me! No, that's me too, but..." Zhou Yuan faltered anxiously. "How can I explain it to you?"

"Oh, I understand what's happening," Yan said thoughtfully. "Did you make some sort of deal with someone? An agreement to improve yourself somehow, maybe to become a better person? "

The soul in front of me stood silent for a moment, looking at the floor. I looked at him anxiously.

"I did," he said quietly, "but not to be a better person. To improve a skill."

"Ha! You deserve it!" Yan said, leaning back on the sofa in laughter. Maybe he really was a demon. How could he laugh so heartlessly? "What were you expecting? Nothing comes for free."

"Shut up." I wasn't afraid of offending Yan anymore. I looked at my friend's soul. "Tell me exactly what happened this afternoon. Why were you so desperate to improve yourself? Explain every detail."

"Alright ..." Zhou Yuan lowered his head. "I went to see that horrible woman, Miss Lan. There was a pattern like this one in her room."

He gestured to what Yan had drawn on the floor.

"This is definitely not the same thing. This is a Spirit Convergence Array. Your Miss Lan most likely used a Fallen Soul Array. They have some similarities, but there's several obvious differences. You really have horrible insight," Yan told him. He stopped talking when he saw my glare and gestured back to Zhou Yuan. "You go ahead and tell your story. "

"I don't know what they did, but they gave me a glass of water. I lost consciousness after I drank it. When I woke up, I was in a cage surrounded by large rabbits. After a while, the cage opened, and I saw myself walk towards me."

"Wait! You saw yourself walk over? What do you mean?" I frowned. "You are yourself. How could you see yourself walk over? "

"I don't know. I was so scared. I wanted to yell for help, but no sound came out. My body walked over, grabbed my ear, lifted me up, and slit my throat with a kitchen knife. Then I lost consciousness again. When I came to my senses again, I was in this man's, this..."

"Just call me Yan."

"In Yan's bottle, and then I saw you," Zhou Yuan said, pointing at the glass bottle. "Which brings us to the present moment."

Zhou Yuan had explained it clearly, but I only felt more confused. Zhou Yuan's soul had seen a bunch of huge rabbits, and then saw himself come over. What kind of story was this? It sounded more like Alice in Wonderland than something that could have happened to a friend. I pinched my leg to wake up until the pain made me grimace.

"I get it. What a perfect scheme, and so well executed!" Yan jumped up in excitement, then saw our puzzled expressions. "What Zhou Yuan saw wasn't an extremely big wild rabbit. If I'm right, your friend's soul had been stuffed into the body of a wild rabbit. So, at that time, you were not an average sized human in a cage of rabbits. You were another rabbit."

I looked at Yan in horror, but he kept talking.

"If you try to take a living human's soul, the nether world will investigate the case. If you kill yourself, however, you've given up your right to live. If anybody else had walked over, it would have drawn attention, but it was your body that killed the rabbit containing your soul. In addition, killing a human is a crime, but killing an animal is not, especially if you do it with your own hands. If this was handled properly, in most cases, nobody would investigate your death. You leave an empty living body, and no one investigates why. What a delightful plan!"

"Did you piss somebody off?" I asked Zhou Yuan, ignoring Yan's muttering. "Could you have upset Miss Lan?"

"No. We've known each other for a long time. In the past, her work was very bad. She was so miserable." Zhou Yuan's soul frowned as he went through his memories. "Then, one day, she was different. Every time we had dinner, she was happy. She kept telling me how successful her work was. I was so envious, so I asked how she'd done it, but she didn't answer my question. Instead, she asked me a question..."

Just as Zhou Yuan trailed off, a second voice cut in from the door.

"She asked what these words meant to you: If you walk fast enough, your soul can't catch up." The door opened and Zhou Yuan walked in. To be more accurate, Zhou Yuan's body walked in.

Zhou Yuan's human body sat on the sofa and stared at his soul for a while, then laughed.

"I really appreciate your answer, though it was a little self-deprecating. Until now, I agreed. I didn't know it was my soul in the rabbit, but it doesn't matter now. I don't care. We are separate beings now. "

"I know what my body's talking about," Zhou Yuan's soul said in a quiet voice. He sat on the ground and buried his head in his arms. I could still hear his voice. "When she asked, I told her that nowadays, those who can't keep up will be left behind. If your soul can't keep up, then you get even further from the crowd while you wait for your soul, so sometimes you have to leave it behind. Go forward, forget the soul."

"What are they talking about?" I asked Yan, "Why can't I understand?"

"Hum, what they are talking about really exists," Yan didn't mock me at this time, but instead explained things sincerely, "Many people's lives are constant struggles. It's not that he doesn't have the ability, but that he's forced himself to spend every day doing something his soul doesn't want. His family had expectations, his colleagues were watching, he kept comparing himself to the people around him. When the soul disagrees with the mind, most people have to compromise their ideals to function in reality. Your friend here, however, seems to live in extremes, and literally abandoned his soul and kept only his body."

"At the start, I wasn't sure if I should give up my soul," Zhou Yuan, the physical body, on the sofa, said with a smile, "but after Miss Lan explained things, I realized that I'm much better like this. I don't need to care about if what I'm doing is actually what I want to do. As long as I'm able to do something, I can give it my full concentration. I could never really focus on my designs enough, but now I can easily find all the mistakes and problems."

Zhou Yuan turned to me.

"I only spent five minutes drawing that map, and you all praised me. The feeling is simply too wonderful, and this is only the beginning. I'm going to be a huge success."

So that map, in some sense, really hadn't been made by Zhou Yuan, at least not the Zhou Yuan I knew. His soul had already been missing.

The soul of Zhou Yuan raised his head.

"That's because I don't want to be a designer at all!" he roared. "I just want to write, to tell stories! It's the only thing I ever want to do with my life."

"What kind of fucking nonsense are you going on about!? You can't survive like that!" Zhou Yuan's body roared. His expression was furious, and I edged away a bit. "You never wanted to do your work, so you never paid attention? You know what? Every time people criticized my work, it broke my heart! You just pretended nothing happened, but it was destroying me. Your lousy dreams dragged me back! I'm twenty-seven. I lay awake every night wondering if this will still be my life at thirty. I'm a failure. If I don't change things, I can never provide for a wife, for children. A soul is a small price to pay. You won't change, so I took care of it myself. You will be a ghost, and I will build a good life for myself."

The body pointed to Yan.

"If you want to write stories so bad, follow him to the netherworld and write all you want, but you will not keep interfering with my life!"

Interference... That didn't sit right. Since when did we think of our souls as an interference?

Zhou Yuan's soul was silent, looking up at me in despair, hoping that I could say something. I'd never known how worried he was about the future or thought he'd been so drained by the gap between his work and his passions, but there was truth in the body's words. Both of them were really Zhou Yuan. I didn't even know which one to help.

"Did the person who arranged this happen to tell you," Yan said, "that you can only live seven days without a soul."

"What?!" Zhou Yuan's body and I asked at the same time.

"You are right, there is indeed the possibility that what your soul wants can't match the demands of reality, but how many people do you think feel that way? Wouldn't more people take the easy solution?" Yan shook his head, looking like an old teacher, though his face was youthful. "A few can leave their bodies freely, but most people can only leave for seven days before the body starts to have trouble. Souls often don't listen to our minds, but they are one of the most important parts of our lives. Why do you think so many people die from overwork? They starve their souls, and when it's almost used up, the body gives out. The only realize you're still alive to yell at your soul is probably- "

"The talisman water protected your body." The door opened, and Liu Shuai entered. I realized that he was staring at the ground, right where Zhou Yuran's soul stood. Could a normal human see it now?

"You can see him?" Liu Shuai and I asked each other in unison, but he realized that he'd revealed something and didn't ask further.

"In the past," Liu Shuai explained, "Jiang Zi Ya, the immortal Taoist, gave Bi Gan something similar, but the effects were a bit different. One could protect human body, and the other could protect the soul, but they can't protect a man for his entire life. They had flaws."

I was struck with the realization that I was the only person in this room with no concept of what was happening.

"Then why is Miss Lan safe?" Zhou Yuan asked, "Why she isn't dead?"

"Let me explain the problem with her method," Yan said. "A body without a soul can learn some amazing abilities, but if you want to keep your body alive, you need something called 'life exchanging talisman water'. It's called that because you must take another's life to extend your own. If Miss Lan is using this method, she'll need to take another life every forty-nine days. The technique was invented by Shang Yang during the Qin dynasty. His soldiers gained power, but they also had to keep fighting to survive.

Bai Qi killed four-hundred-thousand soldiers from Zhao just to obtain more souls to feed his army. After Ying Zheng united the six states, there was not enough bloodshed to feed his army and they slowly died off. It's part of the reason the Qin dynasty fell. Of course, this is all legend now. Since then, the cycle of rebirth has been fairly stable, and we keep a close watch on souls. This sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. But it happened today."

Yan sighed.

"That's why I came back so late," Liu Shuai said, biting his lip. "Something about Miss Lan felt off to me. At dinner, something about you was wrong. You had the faintest smell of a corpse, as if you were already dead. I thought it was because the game meat wasn't fresh, so I didn't eat any of it, but when we went to the hot spring together, things still smelled off. I was worried, so I followed you after I left, but I got lost along the way. Something was trying to mislead me, and I had to force my way in here. There's something wrong with this place. We need to get out of here as soon as possible."

I realized that Liu Shuai's breath was uneven. He seemed distracted.

As I watched him, a clap of thunder sounded, and a heavy gale began to pound the walls. The whole building began to shake. Liu Shuai grabbed the bottle and placed Zhou Yuan's soul back inside it, then rushed to the window to look at the situation outside. Confused, I followed him.

"Did you notice anything strange?" Liu Shuai asked me.

"It seems," I stared out, "it seems like the wind is only moving the trees around our villa. Look at the villa across from us. The trees are not moving at all!"

"This is a spell to make a boundary between worlds. I am definitely not a match for somebody powerful enough to do that..." Liu Shuai looked out of the window, then looked at Yan. He bowed. "Today, we are relying on you!"

"Ha! This kid has potential!" Yan looked proud. He glanced at me, as if he was hoping I would also be impressed by his power. "This little spell is still not strong enough to hurt me. Liu Shuai, you just need to seal all the windows in this room. Let's see who this Miss Lan really is! "

Liu Shuai nodded and pulled a sheaf of paper. He bit his finger until it bled and began to draw runes. When he chanted an incantation, they lit and burned to ashes in the air. Rather than drift to the ground, they held in the air, glistening gold in the lamplight. Liu Shuai drew something else in the air and the ashes exploded.

Yan looked at Liu Shuai approvingly.

"Not bad, young man, using the Divine Transformation technique to activate the Two Elements of Golden Light. It is extraordinary at your age."

The sky was pierced by shrill laughter and the lights on the ceiling started to shake so violently I thought they might crack. The golden light moved like a living creature. Every time a hole opened, the light flowed to it and sealed it back together. The constant breaking and sealing made the whole wall seem alive.

"Yan!" an ear-piercing voice called, "you are an Officer of the Underworld. This is the mortal world, and we have not broken any rules. Besides, we are not dead. What right do you have to stand against us?"

"It seems that you fiends know a lot about how the Underworld works. No wonder you had such a tidy method of killing humans." Yan looked at the continuously moving wall, stretched out his right hand, and, with a snap of his fingers, the wall immediately returned to its original form. There was no movement from the wall. I looked out of the window and watched the gale slowly die down.

"A baseless accusation! We've never killed anyone. This man committed suicide and will not be allowed into the afterlife." The voice wasn't loud, but it felt like the speaker was right next to my ear. "You know perfectly well that has been the law since the May Fourth Seal. No need to play the hero."

Hearing that, Yan's face changed.

"Who exactly are you, and how did you learn these things?"

He raised his right hand above head and clenched his fist. The room spun around us, but I didn't feel dizzy. Looking outside, I realized we weren't the ones spinning. The world was spinning around us.

"Why is everything spinning?" I asked Liu Shuai quietly.

"He's using the Searching the World method, neither moving nor staying still, to find out the other party. It's very likely that the person we're looking for has no soul to trace, so most traditional methods won't work." Liu Shuai watched the process with wonder. "That's the only way to search for a being between life and death. Even my master doesn't know this method."

"What does that mean? Neither moving nor staying still?" It was now spinning so violently that I couldn't even look outside.

Liu Shuai took out his phone.

"Look at the scenery outside."

I glanced at the screen and looked at outside. I was surprised to see that the view in the camera had not rotated at all. The world around us was still spinning. Just as I was about to ask for a clearer explanation, the view stopped spinning.

"Got it!" Yan shouted.

Yan raised his hand and gradually leaned forward, and I felt the entire house floating up, then quickly flying forward.

It sped through the woods, and I was surprised to find that the trees went through our bodies. I reached out to touch them, but I felt nothing. Gradually, the house flew to the empty plaza at the entrance to the valley. Yan opened his fist, and the room dissolved around us. Now we could see three figures in front of us, Miss Lan and two of her men.

"Good work!" Miss Lan said, clapping. "But there is no conflict between us, right? Your job to take souls, but you probably shouldn't take the one you're holding. This person is still in the mortal world, so it would be strange if you brought him back to the Underworld. If you don't handle it properly, you might be convicted of forcibly taking the soul of a living human, so why don't you give it to us? "

"You trash. What makes you qualified to negotiate with me? Hand over the remaining talisman water now!" Yan snarled.

His body tensed, glowing with a faint golden light. Yan seemed surprised.

"It's the Immortal Tying Rope!"

"You actually know of it, High Immortal." Miss Lan said, flashing a brilliant smile. "Fortunately, Great Mother gave us this life-saving treasure. If you hadn't come to stop us and we'd been more careful, we would have lost the chance to try it out!"

"Do you think I'm stupid? The Immortal Tying Rope was lost a long time ago," Yan struggled, the golden light shattered and fell to the ground. "A forgery won't hold me."

Forgery? Even Yan's world had that sort of thing?

Miss Lan smirked.

"Of course it's fake, but this Immortal Tying Seal will still prevent you from using your magic for a while. That's good enough!"

Yan tried to move, and his face changed.

When Miss Lan saw he was stuck, she held her hand to the sky. Instantly, the clear sky filled with dark clouds. Heavy lightening bolts branched down, striking the plaza.

"Thunder Sovereign of the Nine Heavens!"

As Miss Lan pointed to the sky, Liu Shuai sat, tracing a seal with his hands and chanting. He reached his own hand to the sky and gold powder scattered, reforming the shape of the room Yan had dispelled. The bolts struck the thin layer of gold power as the thunder rumbled and cracked, but they didn't break through. With each strike, Liu Shuai grew a bit paler. Blood started to trickle from the corner of his mouth, and he looked to be on the verge of collapse.

Zhou Yuan had been frozen in terror, but now he reacted quickly and dropped to the ground, holding Liu Shuai in his arms and propping him up.

"He's used too much of his life force." Yan took out a pill from his pocket and put it in Liu Shuai's mouth. "That's a problem. If he's unconscious, we can't get out of here!"

Outside the golden room, Miss Lan seemed to have used up the last of her energy as well and fell to the ground. The men beside her had a dull look in their eyes and didn't react.

"Yan, although you do not have any supernatural power, you still have a title," somebody called from outside. The voice was sharp, and I couldn't make out the gender of the speaker. "I, the Great Mother, can trap you, but I cannot shatter your soul. However, you cannot save these young souls around you. Give them to me, and you can walk away unharmed. I will transfer the souls to animals before I kill them, so it will not be the jurisdiction of the Underworld. I can take the souls, and you won't be asked any awkward questions!"

As the voice faded, the scenery outside the square gradually blurred until I couldn't make out anything. It looked like another boundary between words, this time separating the entire square.

"Don't bluff! Your real body isn't here. The three outside already belong to you, and the woman with all the power has no energy left," Yan called. He frowned, and looked at me gently. "She's right. I don't have access to my magic. The best I can do is negotiate and convince her to let you go, at least."

"How can you say that? This a trap!" I watched the blurred world around us. "How can I just leave things like this?! These are my friends! How can you just stand by and watch them die?!"

"My job is to stand by and watch humans die," Yan replied.

I knew he spoke the truth, but the cold way he said it still stung.

Yan looked at me and bowed his head in thought for a moment, then looked back out the nothing around us.

"Where are you from? How dare you come destroy souls, you monster?! If the Underworld finds out, they will send you to the deepest level of Hell so your soul is never reborn!"

"Hah! There are so few talented people left in the Underworld. A few decades ago, that threat would make me nervous. But now, since you don't appreciate me offering you a good deal, you can't blame me if I break the rules!"

As the Great Mother spoke, the lightning began to flash outside and the thunder roared. Hail and wind began to batter the filmy golden wall that protected us.

"I've only got the basics of the Two Elements of Golden Light, and I won't be able to hold her off for long. The odds are against me tonight..." Liu Shuai said softly, slowly opening his eyes. "Fair enough. Zhou Yuan, help sit me up."

Zhou Yuan was terrified, holding up Liu Shuai with trembling hands.

"Zhou Yuan, even though this is happening because you were willing to give up your soul to improve your art, we're responsible too," Liu Shuai told him. "We made things hard for you and never understood how much you were struggling, so we deserve to bear this too. On behalf of all your colleagues, I want to make sure you know none of us ever doubted that you were a good man who worked hard. We criticized your work, but we never intended to criticize you."

"You saw today, because of your greed, we might all lose our future," he continued. "I hope if we do survive, you'll listen to your soul, and not allow it to become twisted..."

Liu Shuai's voice was getting weaker until it faded completely.

Zhou Yuan was already sobbing.

"Liu Shuai, you can't die like this. It's all my fault! I was stupid! I should have known there's nothing you can get without paying the price."

Liu Shuai opened his eyes and glared at Zhou Yuan.

"Who told you I'm dead? I am activating the Two Elements of Golden Light! "

Zhou Yuan and flushed with embarrassment, but Liu Shuai ignored us, muttering an incantation. He took out a needle, pricked his forehead, and his pale face went even paler.

"Quick, give him this!" Yan said. He took out a pill, and had me place it under Liu Shuai's tongue. "He's forcing himself to convert his life force into power. If he doesn't replenish some energy, he really will die."

"You have so many pills..." I couldn't help muttering. It was a brown pill, and not only did it have a strange shine, it had a pleasant smell.

"Of course," Yan said with pride. "It's caffeinated chocolate. They have a new recipe that's five times as strong.

I was speechless.

"You use chocolate to make your spiritual medicine? How poor is your Underworld!? I thought it was some rare concoction, but you aren't that reliable after all!"

Yan looked embarrassed.

"The magic pills in your TV plays that could save lives are just this kind of stuff, aren't they? What's more, he really needs to replenish his energy..."

The house itself began to blur and the hail outside the window seemed to stop. Looking out the window, I realized that the hail was rushing towards the window faster than I could comprehend. Strangely, when it reached the window, it disappeared, as if it had gone somewhere else.

"What is this? A Two Elements Dust Array?" the voice yelled. "No! Why was there only an Illusion Gate? Where are the other five gates?"

It paused for a moment, then laughed.

"You bald little donkey. A Two Elements Dust Array with just one gate is just a cheap imitation. You can't stop me with that. Soul Hunters, Go! "

The two men with empty eyes shuddered and their heads turned to look at as, eyes streaming green light. They ran at us and began to punch at the gold powder. Liu Shuai flinched with every blow as if they struck him directly and another mouthful of blood spilled out.

"The Illusion Gate can't block attacks from a human body!" Yan moved again, but he still hadn't recovered from the seal. "What do we do? These two have strength beyond normal human ability. Without magic power, I'm no match for them. We'll all be killed."