Liu Yingying was scared half out of her wits, her liver and gallbladder nearly burst. Her hands kept shaking, and several times she tried to lift the child but had no strength to raise her.
“Let me.”
A very clear, cool voice.
Lu You came up behind her, scooped the child up in one motion, and carried her into the shop.
Liu Yingying could already picture being returned like a defective product from grad school; her legs gave out and she crumpled to the ground, eyes instantly brimming with tears, and clamping a hand over her mouth she began to sob.
Qin Shuheng had some grace about him after all. He half-crouched beside Liu Yingying to comfort her: “Don’t panic. Master is here. Nothing will happen.”
Liu Yingying kept crying, tears falling in strings: “What good is a masseur? I’m finished! The professor will definitely expel me—all these years of effort, wasted!”
She sobbed until she couldn’t catch her breath, head buried deep in her hands.
Qin Shuheng said: “Who told you my Master does massages? Did you not look around when you came in? We’re a Spiritual Consultation shop.”
Liu Yingying’s sobs hitched: “Huh?”
The little girl was very thin, hardly any weight to her at all, floating-light in the arms. Lu You laid her gently into the Executive Chair.
He Zhuchun hurried over and asked: “What’s wrong with the child?”
The girl had cried a few sobs on entering, and now the tear tracks had dried on her face, leaving it ashen.
Lu You first pushed back his sleeve and took her pulse, brow tightly furrowed as he felt for a while, then pressed the root of her left middle finger, sensing the faint throb beneath. Lu You let out a breath, laid his hand over the little girl’s face, closed his eyes, and sat still.
About a minute passed before he opened his eyes again, tone certain:
“This child has been getting less and less bright in recent years. Doesn’t like to talk, low intelligence, blank stare. Is that right or not?”
He Zhuchun thought back over the few times he’d seen the girl and nodded: “I didn’t know before, but the times I saw her, yes.”
Lu You nodded and continued: “When this child sleeps at night, does she often have night terrors, sleep-talking, waking crying? Is that right or not?”
He Zhuchun turned his gaze to Liu Yingying—he remembered she had lived and eaten with the little girl for a stretch of time.
Liu Yingying had cried herself out and come back to herself by now; hearing this, she nodded: “Yes, yes she does.”
Lu You said: “One last question. This little girl’s family enshrines something, with incense Offerings kept up year-round, uninterrupted. The Altar Offering Table isn’t big, and it’s made of cypress wood. Is that right or not?”
Cypress was also a yin wood, commonly used for making coffins.
“I don’t know,” Liu Yingying said softly. “The professor never lets me go to his home, but I’ve never smelled incense on Yuanyuan.”
Yuanyuan was the girl’s pet name.
Lu You gave her a very strange look.
Liu Yingying looked back at him, bewildered.
Lu You said: “There’s a problem with this child’s soul.”
“How can a soul have problems?” Qin Shuheng waited for Lu You to step away, then squeezed in to look, his questions always coming in piles: “Master, a kid whose soul has problems is just a simpleton, isn’t she?”
Lu You had always spoken rather sharply: “Isn’t that child already half a simpleton right now?”
He Zhuchun suddenly said: “But two years ago she wasn’t simple.”
He Zhuchun was in his third year of grad school now; he had met Yuanyuan when he first got in.
He Zhuchun: “The first time I saw this child, she was at most a bit slow—not what you’d call simple. But in these two years, strangely enough, she moves less and less. At the age when she should be most lively, she’s always lifeless.”
“Because her soul was swapped out.”
Lu You turned and explained to Qin Shuheng: “The soul-deficit and soul-loss we usually speak of, causing childhood simple-mindedness, generally comes in two kinds. The first: due to sins from a Previous Life or Karmic Debt from one’s ancestors, the child is born deficient in souls. A normal person has Three Souls and Seven Po, but a newborn might arrive with only one soul and one po. That is Heaven’s will.”
“The second kind comes from postnatal factors—external causes. Say a child suffers some injury or fright when young, and the soul leaves the body for too long and can’t return. The child is then incomplete in soul and po, and slowly, naturally, becomes simple.” Lu You poured a cup of tea.
Qin Shuheng asked: “But Yuanyuan doesn’t really fit either of those, does she?”
“So she belongs to the uncommon kind—the third kind, a deliberately performed Soul Swap.”
Of everyone present, no one worried more about Yuanyuan than Liu Yingying. Her face went white: “Soul Swap?”
“A Soul Swap is an illicit folk art that exchanges a child’s soul and po with the soul and po of some other thing. Once the art takes effect, no change shows in the short term, but the longer the time, the more apparent it becomes.” Lu You took a light sip of tea.
The tea had gone a bit cold; he set the cup back down. “Yuanyuan’s situation involves two problems. First, her soul and po are incomplete—these past few years she must have suffered some fright that scared off part of her souls. That will need someone to Retrieve them.”
“Second, and far more serious.”
At some thought, He Zhuchun’s expression shifted, but he pressed his lips together and said nothing.
Lu You: “Something is trading its own soul and po for Yuanyuan’s. That thing carries a very heavy Yin Energy, and it violently rejects the hall of Patron Spirits I keep here.”
Qin Shuheng’s brain was working much faster now, and he said in sudden realization: “So Yuanyuan cried so hard on entering because that thing was afraid of the spirits and wanted to flee, and she fainted because the yin energy and the Altar Hall’s energy collided—the child’s body couldn’t bear it, causing a temporary faint.”
Lu You smiled: “Clever.”
Liu Yingying couldn’t really follow any of this. Trembling, she asked: “Yuanyuan won’t be harmed, will she?”
Perhaps because Lu You seemed so calm, her color improved a little: “Master, you have to save Yuanyuan. If anything happens to Yuanyuan, I’m finished too!”
Lu You said flatly: “She can be saved. Nothing will happen.”
Just two short sentences, yet like a super-strength heart pill—Liu Yingying’s heart settled all on its own.
Lu You pulled open the desk drawer, fished out a key, and crooked a finger at He Zhuchun: “Come out with me for a trip.”
He Zhuchun asked: “Where to?”
“Didn’t you want to call back her soul? We’re going to pick up a professional.”
He Zhuchun was ordered to wait in front of the shop, and soon Lu You came wheeling back his own mount from who knows where.
—Lu You’s mount was a Yadea electric scooter of unknowable age. Half its paint had been scraped away, exposing the frame’s original color; the front basket was crooked—perhaps over these years of wind and rain it had weathered real storms alongside its master, and still bore traces of that hardship.
Lu You pressed the scooter’s remote, and it was remarkable that at its age the vehicle could still chirp two crisp, clear beeps.
“Hop on.”
He Zhuchun hesitated: “On… where?”
“The back seat,” Lu You said. “Though if you absolutely insist on riding in the basket, I could reluctantly accept that too.”
He Zhuchun asked: “Is this basket crooked like this because people sit in it?”
“No.” Lu You’s eyes slid vaguely toward the shop, tone resigned: “Qin Shuheng went out grocery shopping last year and had an accident at an intersection. The person was fine; the vehicle took light injuries.”
He Zhuchun asked: “Crashed into another scooter?”
Lu You replied placidly: “Into a semi-trailer.”
“……”
He Zhuchun gaped for a moment, then finally said: “No wonder they say fools have fool’s luck. Your disciple’s fortune is really something.”
Neither of them had brought helmets when they set out, but fortunately Lu You had no intention of riding on the main roads; he wobbled along the small streets, twisting and turning, and in a little while had rounded several bends.
He Zhuchun deeply doubted this old thing’s battery capacity: “It’s not going to die halfway and dump us on the roadside, right?”
“No. The battery was replaced earlier this year.”
“If you replaced the battery, couldn’t you just add a bit more and buy a new scooter?”
“The battery was two hundred fifty; the scooter twenty-five hundred. Nine times the price—that’s not called ‘adding a bit.'”
He Zhuchun said: “I thought your line of work paid well.”
Lu You said nothing.
The two were quiet for a while, and then Lu You suddenly asked: “What you wanted to tell me earlier—you can say it now.”
The rain that had fallen at noon had all but evaporated by now, and He Zhuchun’s eyes had lingered over a half-dried ditch.
“What?”
“Right before I spoke of the Soul Swap—you had something to say to me.”
“Oh, right.” He Zhuchun’s legs were cramped together awkwardly on the footrest; he gathered his words: “Actually, before today I didn’t think much of it, but once you pointed it out, I remembered some things about my senior martial brothers and sisters.”
Lu You was riding in front, and the words came through unclear: “Louder.”
He Zhuchun leaned closer and raised his voice to work with the solid-borne transmission; his voice came through much more clearly: “Last time our college dean held an academic exchange conference, a lot of the professor’s former senior students came. I looked around roughly, and they all seemed to be doing poorly.”
Lu You asked: “How so?”
“Financially, visibly strapped. A whole crowd of them standing together—and at a glance, the most shabbily dressed ones were basically all the professor’s former grad students.”
“I went and asked several of them specifically, and learned that after graduating, everyone inexplicably could only find badly paid jobs. These were people who’d spent years studying under a famous professor—pride in their bones—so they’d rather drag things out waiting for opportunities than rush into employment. That’s why most of them aren’t doing well.”
Lu You asked: “Was there no one who wanted to keep studying upward?”
He Zhuchun answered: “There were.”
“How did that group do?”
“Nearly all of them died. Terminal illness, and also accidents.”
Lu You didn’t seem surprised at all; his expression unchanged, he asked: “Anything else?”
“Also, the ones who chose employment after graduating all have poor health.” Having connected this much, He Zhuchun frowned too: “Everyone’s complexion is the kind where you can tell at a glance the body isn’t healthy.”
A sharp brake squeal sounded by his ear as Lu You squeezed the brake.
“We’re here.”
He Zhuchun shut his mouth and looked around.
A very old residential compound, its style like a relic left behind by the last century. The whole building seemed wrapped head to toe in rust, and any spot you examined had a record as damning as a convict’s file—fit to be called “a litany of misdeeds.”
He Zhuchun said: “Did you buy your scooter here? It matches the aesthetic.”
Lu You ignored him, dismounted, and walked toward the gate.
He Zhuchun hurried after him and hooked Lu You’s shoulder: “Great Immortal, actually I have one more question.”
Lu You: “Ask.”
“The Soul Swap you mentioned—does performing it require some medium or trigger? You can’t just swap on the spot, right?”
Lu You opened his mouth and recited a passage from a law scroll: “If one desires to swap a soul: take the living one’s nail clippings, hair, and blood, and seal them away. Know the living one’s Eight Characters of Birth, birthplace, and childhood name. Vermilion brush on black paper, all laid out upon the offering platform. With secret arts, arrange a Formation, placing the yin one at the other end. Once the Formation is complete, the yin one must receive day-and-night Offering Tributes, the Incense Offerings wrapping around the living one for one round of Samsara—twelve years—whereupon the Soul Swap succeeds.”
“I came across this once in an obscure side volume. I’ve never practiced it, so I don’t know if it’s true.”
He Zhuchun frowned: “But Yuanyuan doesn’t smell of incense at all. The medium part doesn’t add up.”
Lu You stopped and raised a hand—only then did He Zhuchun realize they had arrived before a battered old iron door.
Lu You rapped the door lightly three times, withdrew his hand, and turned: “Remember the aromatherapy on Liu Yingying?”
I only said the Soul Swap needs a medium—never said the medium had to be on the living one’s body. As long as she can smell it, isn’t that enough?
He Zhuchun froze, then it clicked: “No wonder you said her magnetic field was filthy.”
Lu You gave an “mm,” turned close to the door handle, and just as he felt the faintest tremor, he stepped back with practiced ease.
The next instant—click—a crisp snap, and the door opened.
