Chapter 18: Cause and Effect

It was already noon by the time Xie Sui returned to Zhaoping City.

The Urban Village was as chaotic as ever, dominated by a pervasive, oppressive gloom.

Power lines were strung haphazardly between buildings, tangling together like unraveled balls of yarn, slicing the already sparse blue sky into even smaller fragments.

Xie Sui navigated through narrow alleys piled high with clutter, nimbly dodging a sudden cascade of wastewater falling from above, and arrived at the apartment building where he rented a unit.

The soundproofing in these Urban Village buildings was terrible. Even standing downstairs, he could hear the sound of knocking coming from the top floor.

That middle-aged man was certainly persistent. He had been knocking that hard for over a day; were his hands really okay?

Xie Sui hesitated. If the man truly intended to admit his mistake, he could actually tell him how to remove the curse.

The Blood Calamity on his neighbor was caused by offending the spirit tablets. If he was willing to take the tablets back and worship them sincerely, it would benefit both him and the owners of the tablets.

One could call it a twist of fate, though such a connection was more of a karmic disaster.

However, when Xie Sui climbed the stairs to the top floor, he realized he had overestimated the man.

The neighbor wasn’t knocking with his hands. Instead, he was using a small, foot-operated hammer to strike the door. There was no panic or fear on his face, nor any sign of remorse or intent to repent.

The greasy, disheveled man looked entirely impatient. His left arm was in a cast and hung from his neck in a sling. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his face was covered in various scrapes.

He had set up a small folding stool in front of Xie Sui’s door, with several empty liquor bottles scattered at his feet. His flabby belly protruded in an exaggerated curve due to his posture, and several open bags of dried meat rested on top of it. He tossed pieces of meat into his mouth while rhythmically stepping on the hammer’s pedal, looking as if he intended to stay there forever until Xie Sui came out.

Looking at this setup, it wasn’t an apology; it was pure harassment.

The landing of this old residential building was very narrow. As soon as Xie Sui stepped up, the man spotted him.

Seeing that Xie Sui was actually coming from outside, the neighbor’s expression turned worse than if he were constipated. It turned out all that knocking throughout the night had been for nothing; Xie Sui hadn’t even been home.

Sun Danian was nearly dying of rage. Ever since Xie Sui moved in, nothing had gone right for him.

He used to be a cashier at a mahjong parlor. This year, not only had he been inexplicably fired, but he also encountered all sorts of bad luck every time he stepped out the door.

Sun Danian had always wondered why his luck had turned so sour.

Then, just the day before yesterday, when Xie Sui was fired from the TV station, Sun Danian had encountered his neighbor during the day for the first time. He had caught a glimpse of the layout inside Xie Sui’s room through the open door.

In that small one-bedroom apartment, rows of Ash Urns and wooden spirit tablets were so conspicuous that a single glance made Sun Danian’s skin crawl.

To think there were so many unlucky things right next door to him!

Sun Danian instantly found the reason for his year of misfortune. It was definitely because this elusive neighbor of his kept unclean things in his home, causing his own luck to plummet.

That was why Sun Danian had taken advantage of Xie Sui’s absence yesterday to pick the lock, break in, and throw out everything he considered sinister.

He only threw out the spirit tablets. He didn’t touch the Ash Urns because he was afraid that spilling ashes at his doorstep would be difficult to clean, and since the landing was so small, it would be bad luck to step on ground where ashes had been scattered every time he left the house.

But what Sun Danian hadn’t expected was that, when confronted, Xie Sui didn’t apologize or admit fault. Instead, he cursed him.

In all his years, Sun Danian had never met someone so unreasonable.

Since he couldn’t win with ‘reason,’ Sun Danian planned to find some of his old associates from the mahjong parlor and have them use force to teach this arrogant kid a lesson.

However, before he could even leave the Urban Village yesterday, he fell into a sewer that was missing its manhole cover, breaking his arm instantly.

Seeing that Xie Sui’s curse – ‘a Blood Calamity within three days, resulting in disability at best and death at worst’ – had come true so quickly, Sun Danian was truly terrified.

Fortunately, just as he left the hospital, he ran into someone dressed as a Taoist priest.

The priest seemed to see something interesting and took the initiative to stop Sun Danian.

Sun Danian couldn’t remember the cryptic, archaic language the priest used. He only remembered that the priest saw the curse on him at a glance and accurately identified his problem.

Truly, when one door closes, another opens… Sun Danian had wept with joy at the time, kneeling on the ground and begging the priest to save his life.

The priest didn’t follow Sun Danian back to the Urban Village. He simply gave him a piece of Talisman Paper for free, saying that as long as he gave this talisman to the person who cursed him, his problems would be solved.

Sun Danian treated it like a precious treasure. He hurried home with the Talisman Paper and began frantically knocking on Xie Sui’s door.

Yesterday, he hadn’t realized Xie Sui wasn’t home. Consequently, he hadn’t slept all night, ‘sincerely’ apologizing while knocking at Xie Sui’s door until dawn.

Sun Danian had been wondering how Xie Sui could be so patient, remaining indifferent to the noise all night long. Then he saw Xie Sui walking back from the outside…

Watching Xie Sui leisurely walk up the stairs, Sun Danian’s expression twisted for a moment as he forced down the urge to scream insults.

He quickly stood up from the folding stool, brushed the crumbs of dried meat off his belly, and forced a stiff smile at Xie Sui. “You’re back.” With that, he deliberately moved toward him.

Xie Sui frowned and avoided him. “What are you doing?”

Sun Danian gave a simple-minded chuckle and pulled a crumpled envelope out of his pocket with his good hand. “I just wanted to apologize. I don’t mean any harm. This is compensation for your door lock. It’s not much, but it’s a token of my sincerity.”

Sun Danian’s tone was extremely earnest, as if he truly realized his mistake. The envelope in his hand was unsealed, revealing more than a dozen bills of various denominations inside.

Xie Sui looked at the envelope, then at Sun Danian’s stiffly smiling face. He felt like something wasn’t quite right. He didn’t take the envelope. “Fixing the lock yesterday cost one hundred and twenty. I only need that much.”

Sun Danian nodded repeatedly. “I understand, I understand. I’ll count it out for you right now.” He pulled several bills from the envelope and handed them to Xie Sui again.

Although he still had some suspicions, Xie Sui didn’t want to get further entangled with Sun Danian. Toward an ordinary person like Sun Danian, who was selfish but hadn’t committed any major crimes, Xie Sui wasn’t hell-bent on driving him to his death. It would be fine to settle the matter like this; after all, he still had to live here.

Once he collected the compensation, he would tell Sun Danian the method to eliminate the Blood Calamity. He hoped the man would be sincere in making offerings to the memorial tablets.

No longer hesitating, Xie Sui reached out to take the bills from Sun Danian’s hand.

However, the moment he touched one of the banknotes, a sharp, stinging pain shot from his fingertips, and an unstoppable chill instantly spread through his entire body.

The banknote Xie Sui touched split apart, revealing a talisman hidden in the middle. Sun Danian had actually glued a talisman between two bills!

The moment Xie Sui touched it, the talisman turned to ash.

Seeing the fleeting expression of pain on Xie Sui’s face, Sun Danian finally couldn’t help but reveal a smug smile.

He didn’t know what effect the talisman given to him by that Taoist would have, and he didn’t care if Xie Sui died after touching it. As long as it could resolve the curse on his own body, nothing else mattered.

If Xie Sui was unlucky enough to die, he deserved it for placing such a vicious curse on him in the first place.

Xie Sui didn’t notice Sun Danian’s reaction; he just stared blankly at his own fingertips.

The talisman sandwiched between the bills was a very complex Xuanmen ghost-catching charm. The moment he touched it, three Little Ghosts were forcibly pulled from his body.

The Little Ghosts Xie Sui kept on his person were all souls of infants or children who harbored resentment and were unable to reincarnate. He kept them by his side to absorb their resentment so they could eventually enter the cycle of rebirth.

Most of these child spirits were children adopted by his family’s orphanage, all of whom were very important younger brothers and sisters to him. Others were souls that had died beneath baby towers¹, most of whom had been left to starve or freeze to death because of their gender. In short, they were all pitiful children.

Xie Sui’s body could only accommodate forty-nine souls at most; the others resided temporarily in Ash Urns. As for those memorial tablets… those belonged to Ghost Infants that needed to be sealed. Their true forms were not with Xie Sui.

Those Ghost Infants were filled with deep resentment and lacked any reason. If they were released without a contract, they would only bring disaster to the area. Therefore, he could only set up memorial tablets to offer incense and slowly purify them.

It was precisely because their true forms were not attached to the tablets that Sun Danian hadn’t died immediately after offending them.

As for why so many children had died at the orphanage run by Xie Sui’s family, it was inextricably linked to the Xuanmen.

In recent years, it wasn’t just the children at Xie Sui’s orphanage who were dying mysteriously; the mortality rate of children in other orphanages remained high as well.

This was because someone in the Xuanmen was using orphanage children for life-swapping².

To avoid retribution after committing evil deeds, those sanctimonious hypocrites transferred all the sins they had committed onto innocent children.

The children who were victims of this life-swapping either died in freak accidents or suddenly developed irreversible illnesses, dying after being tortured by pain. Even after death, their souls remained burdened by those sins, causing resentment to flourish and preventing them from reincarnating for a long time.

When children in orphanages died of illness or accidents, it failed to attract any social attention.

If Xie Sui didn’t intervene, these poor children would only die silently while bearing sins that didn’t belong to them. Their souls would even be abducted and used by those Xuanmen practitioners until they were completely dissipated.

The recent troubles at Xie Sui’s home were caused by a Life-Swapping Talisman.

Two children in his family had suddenly been diagnosed with issues during a physical exam: one with a congenital heart valve defect and another with a hepatic hemangioma. Xie Sui’s father took the children for checkups every year, and both had been perfectly healthy the year before.

Another child had suffered extensive burns over a large area of his body. The cause of the burns was extremely strange: while passing a firework abandoned on the roadside, it had suddenly exploded, and sparks had splashed onto him.

Although Xie Sui’s father knew nothing about metaphysics, he had the blood Xie Sui had left behind. Using Xie Sui’s blood, he had detected traces of an activated Life-Swapping Talisman on those three children.

This kind of remote-controlled talisman was very difficult to trace back to the user, and it was hard to detect before it was activated.

Xie Sui had originally planned to return to his hometown to personally check on the children’s condition and see if any others had been cursed.

He hadn’t expected that before he could go looking for them, those from the Xuanmen would dare to come to his door.

Xie Sui withdrew his hand and looked up at Sun Danian. At some point, his pitch-black eyes had become completely saturated with the color of blood, and they slowly split into eerie Double Pupils.

“Who gave you this talisman?”

Translator’s Notes