Chapter 27: The Lie

She was just about to walk toward the mirror when Qi Ran grabbed her sleeve first, stopping her.

Jiang Zhique looked at Qi Ran, puzzled, but Qi Ran offered no explanation. She just continued questioning, “Is the layout of every floor the same?”

The young man sighed. “Of course. Every floor has these damnable coffins. The mirror is likely the shopkeeper’s final act of mercy, left for us to look at to relieve boredom.”

“Mercy?” Qi Ran chuckled. “Wouldn’t you say this kind of hope, visible but intangible, is more torturous?”

“That’s true enough, but one still needs some psychological comfort. Without that mirror, we few wouldn’t have lasted this long,” the young man laughed helplessly. “Of course, I suggest you don’t look too long. A glance strengthens resolve, which is good. But looking until you’re broken by despair is not.”

“Broken?” Qi Ran asked. “You’re quite… trendy with your words.”

“Two students often came to this restaurant to eat. Hearing their crosstalk comedy was a rare way to kill the boredom,” the young man sighed. “Thanks to them, I learned a lot about the future world. So I comfort myself this way: I treat it as God granting me a chance to glimpse the future.”

“God? Are you a Christian?” Qi Ran’s tone was slightly odd. “I didn’t expect that.”

The young man laughed. “Don’t judge a book by its cover. The things I believe in are many: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism… Whichever religion has the most followers, that’s what I believe in. After all, you know, in our line of work, you never know when bad luck will strike and you might die. Maybe some deity will pull me back before death. That’s what’s called casting a wide net.”

“Does that actually work?” Qi Ran seemed intrigued. “Is it too late for me to start believing?”

“How could it be too late?” The young man was amused. “I’ll be honest, I’ve always thought I had a talent for missionary work. The old man upstairs initially said he didn’t believe in such things. After I worked on him for a while, he started believing too.”

“The old man upstairs? Why not introduce us? Anyway, we’ll all be stuck here together for who knows how long. More friends means more diversions,” Qi Ran suggested.

The young man laughed. “Sure, I’ll go ask them.”

Jiang Zhique watched Qi Ran, who was looking toward the staircase and humming a tune, and tapped her fingertip rhythmically against the tattoo on her slender hand. Only this act could calm her heart slightly.

She understood one thing with crystal clarity: her current state of mind wasn’t great. The mysterious young man on the second floor was in much better spirits, his speech full of witty remarks, nothing like a prisoner trapped here for thirteen years. Qi Ran’s state of mind was also much better than hers, as if she had instantly accepted this sudden predicament without any internal struggle.

But thinking about it, it made sense. If someone’s mentality was weak, wouldn’t that young man have long ago been tormented to death by despair in the first few years? But why could Qi Ran have such a good state of mind? She clearly hadn’t encountered any paranormal phenomena before the car accident.

Jiang Zhique took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the mess of tangled thoughts in her heart. Even though she’d long mentally prepared for the possibility of a bizarre and violent death when she entered this line of work, learning she was about to be trapped in this shop with coffins of ghosts for an unknown number of years before any escape still brought a suffocating weight pressing on her heart.

It was too sudden.

She hadn’t even adjusted from the gossipy mind-blow that “Qi Jianguo’s eldest daughter and youngest daughter are completely different” before she was directly confronted with this irrefutable fact. Everything came on far too suddenly.

Qi Ran recognized her tattoo and was willing to help keep her secret. The connections she’d previously prepared were almost fully in place. She only needed one year, no, not even that long. Just half a year, maybe even four months. Four months and she could realize the scene she’d dreamed of countless times. But now, it clearly had turned to foam.

Perhaps she should memorize her plan well now, deduce it anew, and use the perhaps years of tedious, perhaps decades, time ahead to continuously extrapolate and eliminate flaws, ensuring absolute perfection? Jiang Zhique curled her lip with some difficulty. Of course, a more likely outcome was that she would wait until she died of old age and never see the visitor the young man spoke of, the one who could lift this curse.

Pessimistic emotions are a terrible thing in their line of work, for they become nourishment that feeds Yin entities. Jiang Zhique knew this all too well, so she shook her head forcefully, as if trying to forget those things. But the more she tried, the heavier the oppressive weight became.

After a while, the young man’s voice sounded again. “Done. Got the answers, more or less. You’re the first floor. I’m the second floor. As for how to address me, just call me Qi Si. Entered in ’04. The old man on the third floor seems to have entered in ’99. He’s from the Northeast Lu Family, you can just call him Old Master Lu. The one on the fourth floor is surnamed Liu, not in our line of work. A female student, entered out of sheer bad luck. The uncle on the top floor, he’s like the fourth floor, also an ordinary person. His surname is quite rare, Zuo. Entered in ’92.”

“An ordinary person also fell prey to a ghost? That really is bad luck.” Qi Ran sighed, silently memorizing the man on the top floor.

She looked at Miss Ah Qiao, who seemed to be curiously trying to poke the long mirror that was tightly sealed with white paper.

“With that kind of talk, if a ghost asked whether someone was ordinary before eating them, it wouldn’t be a ghost,” the young man said. “And how should I address you two ladies?”

“Qi Ran,” Qi Ran stated frankly. “The one over there is from the Jiang Family.”

“Jiang Family?” The young man sounded amused, a hint of laughter in his voice. “Didn’t the Jiang Family die out completely alongside the Tao Family back in the ’80s? Everyone in the Circle knows this. Little miss, you wouldn’t have been tricked by her, would you?”

“Little Si, trying to sow discord at a time like this, as a friend, isn’t that a bit unkind?” Qi Ran similarly laughed, catching the sudden tension on Jiang Zhique’s face from the corner of her eye.

“What’s there to sow discord about?” The young man’s tone turned abruptly serious. “Don’t blame me for not warning you. Back then, the Jiang Family publicly sided with the Tao Family. Over two hundred people in the entire Jiang Family, even two-year-old infants not exempt, were all entered into the Ghost Archive and vanished without a trace. Not even illegitimate children hiding in other places escaped. There hasn’t been a Jiang Family for a long time.”

He seemed to recall something and chuckled. “I thought I heard earlier that your friend has the lost Snake Tattoo of the Jiang Family…? You had better hope her tattoo is also a fake. If not, enjoy the days ahead, my dear new friend.”

“Alright, alright. To spare your annoyance, I’ll only warn you this once. Either way, caution is never wrong.” He sighed lightly.

Jiang Zhique opened her mouth, seeming to want to defend herself. But in the end, she just gritted her teeth and closed it. To avoid any misunderstanding from Qi Ran, she even stopped tapping her finger against the Snake Tattoo.

She had no way to defend herself. Even without the young man exposing this point, she was carrying many, many lies. Each one was a monumental falsehood capable of shattering an alliance. That was the truth.

“Don’t worry, I know he’s lying.”

Just then, Jiang Zhique heard the words of the girl beside her. The voice was as low as a gnat’s buzz, yet carried unexpected, firm trust. “Don’t touch that mirror.”

“How do you know?” Jiang Zhique froze, then caught on and asked in a lowered voice.

She released a heavy sigh of relief in her heart. Since Qi Ran believed the second-floor young man was lying, this was the best news possible for her. At least she could avoid another exposed lie.

“This little snake is about to be completely spun around by you,” Miss Ah Qiao drifted in the air, observing the subtle expressions of the two girls below and sighed. “She wasn’t that bright to begin with, and you’re doing this to her. How conscience-less.”

“Come to think of it, what’s the clock on the wall for?” Qi Ran didn’t answer Jiang Zhique’s question. She simply asked the young man on the second floor abruptly.

“Clock?” the young man asked, puzzled.

Qi Ran reminded him. “The one hanging above the cabinet on the left side. It seems to still be ticking.”

Jiang Zhique glanced at Qi Ran, puzzled. Above the cabinet on the left side was just an empty wall. There was clearly nothing there.

“Ah, that. It’s like the mirror. It corresponds to the clock in the real world and runs on the outside world’s time. It has nothing to do with us,” the young man said, his voice becoming somewhat more serious. “However, you’d best not touch the cabinets below it. That’s advice from a veteran. I don’t know what will happen if you open them, but it’s definitely not a good thing.”

“I see,” Qi Ran said. “Thanks for the warning.”

The young man laughed. “We’re all grasshoppers tied to the same rope. Isn’t helping each other the natural thing to do?”

Jiang Zhique glanced at the tightly closed cabinets and the nonexistent clock above them, then looked again at the paper-covered mirror. Her face paled slightly.