Chapter Ninety-Two: The Stray Cat

“What’s wrong? Is it inconvenient? Just keep things a little quieter with your girlfriend. Disturbing the neighbors would be bad.” Lu Jiu looked at me with open disdain, thinking I was still upset about him spying on me and didn’t welcome him.

I hurried to explain, “It’s not what you think. Granny Wan said that the thousand-year-old ghost will come looking for me again tonight...”

The moment he heard that, Lu Jiu’s face went as white as paper. “Don’t worry. I still want to live a few more years. I’d never, ever go anywhere near your place.”

After arranging everything, I finally felt at ease and returned to the room, anxiously waiting for nightfall.

For me, the whole day was pure torment. I could only distract myself with whatever I could find, and a novel I found online consumed most of the time.

At last, in my anxious and frightened waiting, night descended. A pale yellow moon hung high in the boundless darkness, and its cold, bleak light fell over my shop.

Granny Wan lit every candle before the memorial hall, changed me into funeral garments, and had me lie flat upon a straw mat.

The oil lamps held by the paper figures lining both sides of the mat were also lit. Those two rows of paper figures stood like beings from another world, clearing the way for souls, staring fixedly at me as I lay there.

Then Granny Wan poured a bowl of clear water, wrote my name on a talisman, murmured ancient incantations, waved the talisman three times before my eyes, and casually chose an oil lamp from which to ignite it.

But she did not throw away the burning talisman. Instead, she placed it into the bowl of clear water. No one knew what that talisman was made of; in the water it continued burning in silence until it turned to ash and sank away into the clear depths.

“Come, drink,” Granny Wan said, bringing the bowl to me and telling me to finish the water.

I took the bowl and drank it all down in one gulp. A scorching heat surged down my throat and into my stomach. The next second, I felt my whole body grow weightless, as if I were floating, lifted up and drawn into one of the oil lamps—the fifth lamp from the one where Granny Wan had burned the talisman.

So this was what it felt like for the soul to leave the body?

From where I was, I could see my own body lying on the straw mat. The skin of that corpse was deathly pale, utterly no different from a real cadaver.

“Piao Yangxi, whether you live or die now depends on how strong your fate is.” After speaking, Granny Wan placed three sticks of incense before my spirit tablet, then left the room.

Inside the oil lamp, for the first time I found those three sticks of incense indescribably delicious. No wonder people said the living eat food, while the dead eat incense.

And this was only ordinary, run-of-the-mill incense, yet it already seemed to me extraordinarily appetizing. If it were high-grade incense, I could not even imagine how good it would taste.

Time passed by the minute and the second. The three long sticks of incense had already burned down by nearly half, and clumps of ash had collapsed and scattered across the floor.

Just then, a strange sound came from the doorway. I, inside the oil lamp, turned my head toward it.

A skinny black stray cat was stepping in, one cautious pace at a time. The cat was filthy, its fur tangled and matted, with streaks of black blood still clinging to it. In the darkness, its gleaming eyes were locked tightly on my body lying on the straw mat.

This was bad!

The cat reeked of corpse rot. At a glance, it was a creature that fed on the dead, and now it had set its sights on my body.

No matter how I calculated, I never could have guessed that a wild cat would suddenly come out of nowhere to ruin everything.

The stray cat glanced around. Seeing that no one was in the room, it began to approach my body step by step.