Chapter 4: I’ll Find Someone to Exorcise You
Ding Peichen skipped class the next afternoon. Dora messaged to ask where he was, but he did not reply.
He had found an address online: an old street on the outskirts, where a master was said to handle supernatural problems.
He unlocked a shared bicycle. The place looked close on the map, but once he started riding, he discovered that part of the route followed the river.
The midday sun was vicious. White light glittered across the water, stabbing at his eyes.
As he rode onto the bridge, cold crept against the back of his neck again. He knew that force too well. A bone-chilling hand shoved him without hesitation.
The handlebars jerked sideways, and Ding Peichen toppled toward the railing. He fought to hold on, but his knee still scraped across the rough concrete.
His trousers tore. Blood seeped through the rip as he knelt on one knee and hissed in pain.
The voice sounded behind him. “Where are you going?”
Ding Peichen braced against the ground and stood, his knee still bleeding. “To find someone who can get rid of you. I heard there’s a Taoist priest outside the city who specializes in things that refuse to leave.”
Silence lasted for a beat. Then the voice laughed. “You won’t find anyone. I waited four years. Nothing capable of subduing me has been born yet.”
Ding Peichen sneered. “Then why did you push me?”
“Push you? If I truly wanted to, you would already be in the river.”
Ding Peichen spun toward the empty air and shouted, “Stop hiding! Come out and show me what you really look like!”
A hand abruptly seized his collar and forced him backward.
His lower back struck the bridge railing. Cold metal pressed through his clothes into his spine. Below, the river churned.
“You’re afraid of water.”
Ding Peichen’s fingers clutched the railing, every knuckle standing out. His breathing turned shallow and rapid. “Are you inviting me for a swim? I didn’t bring trunks today.”
“Still pretending to be tough.”
Darkness began to crowd Ding Peichen’s vision. Vertigo overwhelmed him.
He was afraid of heights. He always had been.
He did not know why an attack had chosen this moment. His body slid downward, fingers slipping from the railing as his knees gave way.
A force pulled him back from the edge.
“Afraid of heights?”
“You’re afraid of heights, yet you came onto a bridge to argue with me?”
Ding Peichen wanted to curse him. Who could have known a vicious ghost would be waiting on the bridge—or that a dead man could appear in broad daylight?
He had only been passing through on his way to hire an exorcist.
But he could not get the words out. In the last instant before consciousness faded, Ding Peichen realized he had not been left on the scorching pavement.
Someone carried him on his back.
The person’s shoulders were broad, his spine straight, and his stride steady—though he was painfully bony. Dazed, Ding Peichen wondered if this ghost had never eaten properly.
When Ding Peichen woke again, he was lying on the bed in his rented apartment.
The curtains were tightly drawn, and only the bedside lamp was on. The wound on his knee had been cleaned. It was not bandaged, but it had stopped bleeding.
He pushed himself upright and discovered that his head had been resting on the large doll’s stomach.
It had been leaning against the foot of the bed that morning. Now it lay beneath him, long arms spread wide, as though someone had moved it there.
“You’re awake.” The hoarse voice vanished as quickly as it came.
Ding Peichen snapped his head up. The room was empty.
From that day onward, the vicious ghost stopped appearing. One day. Three days. One week. Two weeks.
Guan Heng came every day. He invited Ding Peichen to meals, went shopping with him, and sometimes held his hand in the car. Ding Peichen did not refuse. Another person’s touch worked better than a life-sized doll.
Still, for safety’s sake, he decided to consult a master.
Nancheng’s City God Temple stood at the end of an old alley lined with shops selling spirit money, incense, and candles, as well as blind fortune-tellers with roadside stalls.
As Ding Peichen passed through the temple gate, an old woman crouching on the threshold looked up. Her cloudy eyes traveled over him.
“Young man, there’s something clinging to your shoulder.”
Ding Peichen glanced back. “I’m not here for a fortune. I’m looking for Immortal Wang.”
The old woman pursed her lips and pointed east. Immortal Wang’s shop occupied the eastern wing, with a bagua mirror hanging above its door.
Ding Peichen lifted the curtain and entered. Smoke made him narrow his eyes. Immortal Wang was a thin man in his sixties, curled in a rattan chair and shelling peanuts.
He first examined Ding Peichen’s face, then lowered his gaze to his throat.
“Well.” He tossed a peanut into his mouth. “Those marks were left by concentrated resentment. What have you provoked?”
Ding Peichen sat opposite him and expressionlessly recounted everything that had happened. “It ordered me to kowtow and said it would make me repay tenfold whatever I owed.”
Immortal Wang took a handful of copper coins from a drawer, scattered them across the table, and studied them for a long time.
“This is a life-claiming ghost.”
“Its resentment is heavier than an ordinary evil spirit’s. It doesn’t harm people indiscriminately. If it has fixed on you, you must be connected to its death.”
“Did you know it?”
The fishy smell of river water seemed to rise again. The indistinct face in his dreams. That April Fools’ Day afternoon four years ago. Someone had fallen into the water, and he had jumped in after them.
What happened next? He could not remember.
Whenever he tried, his memories seemed deliberately obscured behind frosted glass, leaving only blurred outlines.
“I’m not sure.”
Immortal Wang collected the coins one by one. “I can’t take this job.”
Ding Peichen stared in disbelief. “Aren’t you a master?”
“Masters have ranks too. This life-claiming ghost has accumulated resentment for four years. That amounts to four years of cultivation.”
Immortal Wang pulled a sheet of yellow paper from the bottom of the drawer and pushed it across the table. “This is a soul-suppressing talisman. It can restrain the ghost temporarily, but it treats the symptom, not the cause.”
He raised two fingers. “It can block most attacks, but it cannot stop the spirit’s core ability: shared sensation.”
“Any touch it imposes—pain, suffocation, cold, heat—the talisman cannot block those things.”
He looked directly at Ding Peichen. “Find out what unfinished grievance lies between you. Otherwise, once the talisman breaks, the ghost will become even more vicious.”
The yellow paper burned beneath Ding Peichen’s fingertips. Its cinnabar writing looked as though it were seeping blood.
He folded the talisman, put it in his pocket, and stood to leave. “Immortal Wang, what if the grievance can’t be resolved?”
Immortal Wang resumed shelling peanuts. He answered carelessly, “Then repay it. However much it wants, repay that much.”
“Once the debt is paid, it will be over.”
Ding Peichen remained silent for a moment before turning and lifting the beaded curtain.
How was he supposed to settle a debt between himself and a wandering ghost?