Chapter 16

All the items Xun Ruosu had asked Yuan Jie to prepare during the day were now laid out on the table. Soaring Firmament Temple was indeed wealthy—the copper coins they had brought were even strung together on a red thread, and a quick count showed about twenty of them.

Of course, these copper coins were not antiques. Xun Ruosu kept them for self-defense, though most met tragic ends. If she went around rattling genuine “Kaiyuan Tongbao” coins all day, she’d end up rotting in jail.

The coins were newly cast, perfectly round on the outside and square on the inside. The cinnabar was brightly colored and already ground into a porcelain dish, alongside twelve sheets of trimmed yellow paper.

Xun Ruosu tucked the copper coins into her sleeve, then picked up her brush and dashed off a few scribbled talismans. Xue Tong considered herself worldly and well-traveled, but even she was stunned today. Forget the Xun Family—among all the iron-mouthed fortune-tellers and disaster-averting diviners from ancient times to the present, Xun Ruosu’s drawing skills had to be the worst.

They were ugly enough to shock the heavens and move the ghosts to tears.

In a way, that brushwork alone could drive away spirits.

The well by the door was still kicking up a fuss. That old locust tree, with its withered, skeletal branches swaying in the wind, was somehow contorting itself into a Z-shape like a yogi in a trance. Moonlight poured down, blanketing the granite table—polished smooth as a mirror—in pale white light, its surface now covered in a layer of frost.

Suddenly, every sound ceased.

Xue Tong raised an eyebrow. “It’s here.”

The water that had overflowed earlier had formed a puddle on the muddy ground. In moments, it settled completely, calm as a mirror with clear, rippling reflections. From its depths emerged the face of a woman.

There was no one around the puddle. The face floated there all alone, not touching the edges, as if someone had sliced off a flap of skin and tossed it in.

The yin chill grew heavier, frosting over the wild grass sprouting in the courtyard. Yet Xun Ruosu smelled no blood. The woman in the well hadn’t turned into a malicious ghost—not yet.

Becoming a malicious ghost required a key condition: killing someone. Otherwise, even if resentment overwhelmed her and her soul shed a layer of skin in hatred, a couple of days of quiet solitude would restore her to her original form. And so the cycle repeated.

This woman was trapped in the courtyard, suppressed by the feng shui. Dead or alive, she couldn’t escape. The place was like forbidden ground—no one could enter. So she threw everything she had against the stone table and bronze cauldron sealing the well. When she finally broke through the first layer of illusions, she sensed living people in the courtyard.

Though the scent of the living was strange—like chocolate that didn’t belong, sweet yet somehow nauseating.

Chen Huaiyue slowly crawled out of the puddle. Her clothes were dry, her hair pinned up with a gold spring clip edged in black netting. She was young and beautiful, but her abdomen was flat. According to Yuan Jie, Chen Huaiyue had climbed the mountain pregnant, though he hadn’t mentioned what happened to the child. Odds were nine in ten it hadn’t survived.

Where had that Infant Spirit gone?

“Should I go first?” Xun Ruosu asked, seeking Xue Tong’s opinion.

This wasn’t a lamp vessel. As a diviner, Xun Ruosu had been able to see ghosts the moment she opened her eyes. As a child, she hadn’t known to fear them or even recognized boundaries—she’d played house with hordes of them and complained to the neighbor kids about having too many friends and not enough bowls, scaring them into high fevers.

Even without Xue Tong, Xun Ruosu would have performed exorcisms on some lost souls to accumulate merits. People like them lived off merits, and she had no family fortune to fall back on. Two days without work, and she’d be begging for scraps.

Xue Tong nodded slightly and stepped aside, clearing a path for Xun Ruosu.

Chen Huaiyue was facing her own room. Only when Xun Ruosu spoke first did she turn her head.

“Fortune-telling?” Xun Ruosu said solemnly. “No charge if it doesn’t work.”

“…”

Chen Huaiyue’s gaze darkened as she sized up the madwoman before her.

At the same time, Xun Ruosu was studying her.

Chen Huaiyue’s clothes were dry enough, but her body seemed made of water. The skin exposed to the air was swollen and pallid. She hadn’t been standing there long before a puddle formed at her feet.

There was no blood smell, but the air wasn’t pleasant either. Decades trapped in that cramped well had stripped the water of its sharpness, leaving only a dead stillness. Damp moss mingled with mottled mildew stains, until even smell gave way to utter desolation.

Chen Huaiyue was reasonable, at least—she didn’t lunge at the first living person she saw and try to throttle them. She slowly opened her mouth and rasped, “Who are you?”

Better if she hadn’t spoken. She almost had the look of a fragile beauty with a wasting illness, but the moment her lips parted, water like scorched oil gushed out. If Xun Ruosu had been closer, it might have splashed her half-body.

“I’m just someone who can read your fortune,” Xun Ruosu said with a faint smile. “Fair and square—no charge if it doesn’t work.”

Chen Huaiyue hesitated for a moment, then actually shuffled forward toward Xun Ruosu.

Xue Tong sat on the bed. From her angle, she could only see half of Xun Ruosu’s face. The fluorescent light flickered on the verge of shorting out, buzzing now and then. The illumination was dim, shadows claiming most of the space. Chen Huaiyue wasn’t tall, and as Xun Ruosu looked down at her, the slanted light painted gentle shadows across her features—a serene and merciful beauty.

“Swindling the masses with a fake reputation.”

Though Xue Tong muttered the insult under her breath, her eyes held a trace of tenderness. She forcibly tore her gaze away, fixing it on a blank stretch of wall. “Who are you showing that compassion to?”

In Chen Huaiyue’s era, superstitious practices flourished alongside the transition to modernity. Every ten miles or so in the counties and countryside, you’d find a feng shui master or fortune-teller. But they didn’t make a full living from it—just enough for salt and oil. Some even advised their clients, “I can help divine marriage or wealth, but if you’re sick, see a doctor. Don’t put your hopes in me over a pig.”

It was an age of contradictions, with superstition and science both taking root. That left Chen Huaiyue eyeing Xun Ruosu with wary doubt.

She was a solitary ghost, shut away with no companions to pass along rumors.

Otherwise, she would have heard the name by now: Xun Ruosu, the last diviner of the Xun Family.

For the living, she could divine from characters or read faces. But the dead? Those tricks didn’t work. Xun Ruosu said, “Extend your hand.”

To her credit, Chen Huaiyue didn’t act like some vengeful spirit bent on murder. She obediently stretched out her hand, staring at Xun Ruosu with open curiosity.

“Don’t be afraid,” Xun Ruosu reassured her. “I’m just giving you something.”

She was telling a ghost not to be afraid.

Xun Ruosu placed a newly minted copper coin in Chen Huaiyue’s palm, topped it with a cinnabar talisman, then another coin. She pressed her own palm down over them. A bone-piercing cold climbed up her fingertips. Snow suddenly began to fall in the courtyard, flakes of pale frost settling on Xun Ruosu—a chill visible just from looking.

“…”

Xue Tong instinctively grabbed the thin blanket on the bed to drape over Xun Ruosu, but her hand brushed the damp edge and she yanked it back with a sharp “tsk” of self-disgust.

In that instant their palms met, Xun Ruosu felt as if she’d plunged into well water in the dead of winter. It wasn’t the slow creep of a cold morning awakening but an instant submersion without air—skin and flesh prickling in agony everywhere, a hopeless, stabbing pain.

Then came suffocation. Icy well water flooded her lungs, the drowning cycle repeating endlessly until exhaustion set in. She stopped struggling, and the water poured unchecked into her airways. In the final moments, her short life flashed before her eyes in a frantic blur.

Every sensation Xun Ruosu felt now came from Chen Huaiyue’s final moments alive. The rules that bound Xue Tong bound diviners too—different professions, different prices to pay.