No matter how prolonged the process of death, the rules compressed it into three minutes. Those three minutes were excruciating for Xun Ruosu, but over the years, she had learned to count seconds amid nightmares. Once the one hundred eighty seconds were up, she could open her eyes.
Still, jumping into a well in the depths of winter made Chen Huaiyue something of a suicide prodigy.
Xun Ruosu was chilled to the bone. When she suddenly gasped for air, the frigid rush filled her chest, nearly snuffing out the last flicker of warmth in her heart.
She pinched the topmost copper coin between two fingers and retreated a step, her waist slamming into the wooden table. From the thud, it would surely bruise.
The instant Xun Ruosu pulled back, a sinister, eerie smile crept across Chen Huaiyue’s face. She drew her lips into a flat line, the corners yanked upward by some invisible force, twisting her jaw into a grotesque deformity. What passed for a smile looked more like a ghost’s grimace.
A most reluctant grimace at that.
Xue Tong hadn’t stirred. Her gaze slid past Chen Huaiyue to the swaying locust tree.
The tree looked lush and thriving, towering seven or eight meters high. Moonlight traced its shadow on the ground, but the shadow was pathetically small—no bigger than two handspans—and bald as a cue ball. No matter how the canopy thrashed like a horde of demons, the shadow stood stock-still.
Xun Ruosu gripped the copper coin between her fingers. A blood-red woven rope threaded through its square hole bound Chen Huaiyue’s wrist. The rope stretched taut, the coin humming with vibration atop it. Confronting the thing that had abruptly turned ferocious before her eyes, Xun Ruosu’s voice remained utterly calm. “The karma coiled around her is ‘love’… the most intractable kind of ‘love.'”
The debt ghosts Xun Ruosu had sent packing earlier had lingered in the world over “money.” Once their accounts were squared, they could enter reincarnation of their own accord. Zhang Yue’s case afterward would have been straightforward too, absent his father’s meddling—
Zhang Yue had died in profound isolation. The living’s memories of him had not only ignited the soul-guiding lamp but also dissolved his obsession.
But what plagued Chen Huaiyue was “love.” That single word encompassed endless interpretations. Persuading someone drowning in it to let go? Far easier said than done.
The red woven rope quivered faster. The copper coin pinched between Xun Ruosu’s fingers was mere mundanity—two pounds of copper could forge a hundred and eighty like it. It couldn’t contain such potent baleful energy. Cracks spiderwebbed its center soon enough, followed by a shrill clang as it sheared in two and clattered to the floor.
Xun Ruosu’s fingertip sliced open, blood pooling along the wound into her palm.
As the copper coin perished, Chen Huaiyue’s smile widened. “Ferocious demon” scarcely captured it; Xun Ruosu thought that if it stretched further, her mouth corners would rip free to join her sagging eye corners.
Chen Huaiyue embodied stark contradictions: mouth grinning, eyes weeping; feet shuffling forward, hands clamped to the door frame; aura reeking of slaughter-lust for living flesh and blood, lips pleading, “Save me.”
Xun Ruosu’s hand trembled. The red woven rope disintegrated into windborne ash. She drew yellow paper from her sleeve next, smearing her blood across it.
The Xun family line was the sole surviving branch of diviners, nurtured under merits’ aegis, their bodies veritable treasures—from vital organs to the finest hair, all anathema to ghosts and spirits. Blood in talismans outshone the finest cinnabar.
Water pooling at Chen Huaiyue’s feet had crept toward Xun Ruosu unnoticed, only to halt before a drifting paper talisman and recede in haste.
The talisman paper stayed dry, igniting of its own accord and burning to nothing. Dozens of butterflies materialized in the air, wings of paper ash, golden-red veins flowing like molten lava. They fluttered about Xun Ruosu, savage chill lurking beneath fragile splendor.
Xun family folk truly sucked at brawling. Souls besieged their door daily; ghost encounters were inevitable. For survival, they carved their own path. Others’ command talismans dazzled without delivering. Xun Ruosu’s strokes were hideous, but her mastery unparalleled.
Xue Tong uttered an “Oh?” “More interesting than I imagined.”
One butterfly alighted on Xun Ruosu’s fingertip, wings quivering as it settled. When it took wing again, her cut had sealed; sated on blood qi, the butterfly shed its ashen husk in a blaze of stellar radiance.
“…” Chen Huaiyue looked thoroughly spooked.
In that moment, contradictions aligned. She bolted for the room across the way.
Xun Ruosu glimpsed fellow feeling in her frantic silhouette—these damnable flapping moths were horrifying.
Unlike Chen Huaiyue, though, every lepidopteran in nature gave Xun Ruosu goosebumps.
Oblivious to their role in Xun Ruosu’s chills, the butterflies flapped eagerly to curry favor with their mistress. She trudged onward to the opposite side room, draped in them.
Snow continued falling, the courtyard hushed. Xun Ruosu wore a single thin garment; the harsh environs dimmed her butterflies’ gaudy wings for a spell.
“Chen Huaiyue’s obsession runs deep, her skills middling at best,” Xun Ruosu said, one foot over the threshold. She glanced back anyway. “Infant spirits heed no right or wrong—mischievous, vicious things. Mind if I leave him with you?”
“…” Always fretting over others, this one.
Xue Tong lounged against the bedframe, eyes half-lidded, a soft chuckle escaping her. “Even fierce ghosts give me a wide berth. What’s an infant spirit to me?”
“I know you’re formidable,” Xun Ruosu said wryly. “Just don’t get cocky and take a hit.”
She’d meant to suggest another layer of clothing, but the room offered only sodden bedding and a flimsy sun jacket. Xue Tong swallowed the advice unspoken.
The snow fell in fat goose-feather flakes, blanketing the courtyard white in moments—like a shaken crystal ball.
Moonlight crowned the treetops. Xun Ruosu’s passage stirred a cacophony of wingbeats. The locust tree’s shadow stirred, tempted to trail the intruder, but Xue Tong’s voice cut through the window: “Where are you off to?”
The shadow snapped back, stock-still.
The opposite side room had been Chen Huaiyue’s haunt once. Her return spurred daytime mildew patches into rampant growth; mushrooms even budded on the beams.
Chen Huaiyue sat at the dressing table. A central fissure rent her face: a seventeen-year-old girl, pale-skinned with almond eyes, marred only by a faint scar beneath one—plainly visible, yet hardly unsightly.
A golden-red butterfly settled on the table, abruptly rent asunder by unseen force. Wings torn, it split down the middle—one half tumbling onto the surface, the other drifting floorward. Body convulsing, wings sprouted afresh from the gash.
One became two.
The rest itched to replicate, spawning twin sisters apiece.
Chen Huaiyue: “…”
Xun Ruosu: “…”
“With your power, you can’t hurt me—unless you turn full malicious ghost right here.” Xun Ruosu had no wish for double the butterflies.
“Don’t come any closer!” Chen Huaiyue’s voice turned hoarse and thick. She fixed Xun Ruosu with a glare. “Take one more step, and I’ll devour this child’s soul!”
Xun Ruosu halted abruptly.
The Chen Huaiyue in the mirror differed subtly from her counterpart. Souls cast no shadows, nor did they mirror in vanities—so the reflection was something else.
A mark seared Mirror Image’s collarbone: Sanskrit script reading “return.”
“Return”—an eternal cleaving “return.”
More curse than vow, it brimmed with manic fixation, romance a distant veneer.
Mirror Image pressed on. “You diviners can only ferry souls, never slay. I’m part of Chen Huaiyue—you can’t touch me!”
Butterflies careened wildly through the room, fraying her nerves to hysteria.
Xun Ruosu didn’t argue. She produced her remaining eleven yellow papers, flicking them like a moneylender tallying coin. Mirror Image deflated visibly, lips pursed in sullen silence.
“I hear decades back, rural spirit wives would cast gu or lethal curses for the right price,” Xun Ruosu said from behind Chen Huaiyue, mirror-staring. “Sometimes ‘penury’ packs more punch than ‘karmic payback.’ Besides, gu or curses killing by proxy make the caster mere accomplice—the paymaster’s the true culprit, so accomplices skate lighter.”
Such folk gamed the rules’ gaps.
In Xue Tong’s words: “Only suckers play by the book straight. Folks in our racket? All sly foxes.”
The figure in the mirror fell quiet, Xun Ruosu having prodded her history.
