Students were still trickling into the library, folding their rain-beaded umbrellas and propping them at an angle by the entrance before walking in over a scatter of messy footprints.
Lu You and He Zhuchun sheltered from the rain under the eaves. Huang Kuaipao hovered at their feet; spirit body though he was, he seemed terrified of being stepped on, and the small Little Huang kept darting between the legs of students ducking in from the rain—slapstick bordering on adorable.
He Zhuchun glanced at the rain, then turned his head with irritation gathering between his brows, lips pressed down unhappily: “Without you, I’d already be back at my dorm.”
Lu You knew the campus map by heart. He rebutted mildly: “Without me, you’d already be soaked halfway home.”
He Zhuchun shot back: “So I’m supposed to thank you, then?”
Lu You nodded with great solemnity: “You’re welcome.”
He Zhuchun gave a couple of cold laughs: “Are all you gays this shameless?”
“Classmate He Zhuchun.” Lu You stated: “Sexual orientation falls within the sphere of private life that citizens of this country enjoy by law, deserving of respect and protection under both statute and public decency. Besides—even if I did like men, that would still be more presentable than you liking the dead.”
“Who are you calling someone who likes the dead?” He Zhuchun clenched his fists and glared at him like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.
“The Negative Yin Peach Blossom Karma on your back told me.” The moment Lu You touched on such matters, his occupational disease flared and he wanted a cigarette; his hand had gotten halfway to his pocket when he remembered this was a school and forcibly reined it back in.
Negative Yin Peach Blossom Karma—just as the name suggested—referred to the situation in which a spirit already dead in the Underworld attached itself to a living person for romantic reasons of one kind or another: love, unfinished Predestined Affinity from a Previous Life or this one, or simply to feed on a person’s Yang Energy. It was a fairly common species of soul.
Outside of work, Lu You carried a cold, languid, half-dead air, but the instant work was involved he turned razor sharp. His irises were pale to begin with; standing there under the walkway amid the pattering rain, if He Zhuchun accidentally met his eyes, one lapse of attention was enough to produce the illusion that the man didn’t belong to this world.
Like a gust of wind—drifting outside the world, impossible to catch, impossible to read.
He Zhuchun’s voice went hoarse: “…You can deal with it?”
“I can.” Since he couldn’t smoke, Lu You rubbed his cigarette pack inside his trouser pocket to scratch the itch. “Perhaps you’d be willing to tell me the story between you two. It would save me some effort.”
The rain gradually eased. It had been a thunderstorm today—all sound and fury, poor stamina, as though it existed purely to bind two people meeting for the first time under one awning and make them exchange a few civil words, adding a few suitably atmospheric flourishes while it was at it.
He Zhuchun was silent a moment, then said: “I did know something had been following me around—and for a very long time at that. Sleep paralysis, erotic dreams, all the illnesses that came of it—old news to me… It’s been at my side since I was very small. I’ve consulted plenty of Great Immortals and Daoist Priests; I’ve heard every theory there is. I’ve had piles of Ritual Services done, and none of it worked. The day after every ritual I’d run a fever, and the fever would last half a month. I knew that was its way of warning me.”
Lu You nodded along as he listened, expression grave. Huang Kuaipao seized the chance to climb back onto the shoulder and, imitating Lu You, propped his chin on his paws as well, little dark face scrunched, cheeks pushed up by his own claws.
He asked: “So in the end you just stopped dealing with it.”
He Zhuchun grinned, still in the mood to joke: “How could I deal with it? I value my life, Great Immortal. What if it nagged me to death for real?”
“Understood.” Lu You rose, gazed into the distance, and said softly: “The rain’s stopped.”
He Zhuchun looked too.
The downpour had lasted only a spell—barely the length of a few sentences. The clouds withdrew, the sky brightened, and just like that it cleared, the air thick with the smell of wet earth.
“Your matter is an easy fix, but I need a cigarette.” Lu You said. “You pick the place, or my shop?”
“My dorm’s fine.”
“Your roommates won’t mind?”
“I don’t have roommates.” He Zhuchun explained: “It was assigned as a double, but the other guy moved out to rent an apartment, so the room’s just me.”
Lu You looked him over: “Grad student?”
He Zhuchun: “Mm.”
“A high achiever.”
He Zhuchun laughed: “Do Great Immortals have a thing for credentials? Or do advanced degrees get a discount on rituals? I’m more concerned about the second question.”
By the time he finished speaking, Lu You had already stepped out of the library and was standing on the half-damp gravel path. Looking back, his skin showed an unhealthy pallor in the sunlight, and his voice had returned to its cool, detached register:
“No discount.”
He Zhuchun shrugged: “Fine.”
Chengchun University covered nearly three hundred fifty hectares; the library was a fair distance from the graduate dorms, and the two walked side by side. Golden rain trees lined the campus paths as well; beaten by the rain just now, wet blossoms and leaves lay clumped in soggy heaps in every corner.
“Senior Martial Brother! Senior Martial Brother He!”
Halfway there, a girl in a white sundress came running toward them from a distance, waving. She hugged a stack of A4 paper to her chest, a small bag slung over her shoulder, bouncing up to them step by step.
He Zhuchun stopped, and Lu You halted too. The girl was rash and breathless, and a distinctive fragrance drifted over on the breeze she brought.
“Back from the library again, Senior Martial Brother He?” she asked with easy familiarity.
He Zhuchun nodded: “Hid from the rain there for a bit. Off to see the advisor again?”
“Yep, he asked me to help organize materials for something about to go to press.” The stack was too heavy; Liu Yingying shifted it to her other arm for a breather, her gaze sliding aside. “Senior Martial Brother, and this is?”
He Zhuchun glanced sideways and said: “A friend.”
Liu Yingying: “Senior Martial Brother, you have a friend this handsome? How come I’ve never seen him?”
“Met him just today.” He Zhuchun didn’t feel like elaborating and made a show of checking his watch. “What time did the advisor say to come? Watch your timing, don’t hold things up.”
“Ah—right!” Liu Yingying hugged the papers more securely: “I really do have to run, I barely made it out the door on time as it was… We’ll talk next time! Bye, Senior Martial Brother! Bye, handsome!”
Encumbered front and back as she was, Liu Yingying’s figure was surprisingly nimble in motion; within moments she had shrunk to a white dot in the distance. Lu You drew back his gaze.
Huang Kuaipao scrambled up onto Lu You’s head to look too, and told him: “Something on that girl isn’t right.”
Lu You acknowledged it in his mind.
Catching the way his gaze had lingered, He Zhuchun teased: “No way, Great Immortal—really do have a thing for credentials? You fall for anyone who’s read a few years of books? And I remember you don’t do that, do you?”
“Don’t.” Lu You couldn’t be bothered to explain and lifted a foot to leave. “Let’s go.”
The housing the school provided its graduate students was far better than the undergrad blocks, its amenities nearly hotel-grade. He Zhuchun swiped the door open and stepped aside.
Lu You strolled in at leisure. First he sat down at the provided desk, fished the half pack of Soft Pack Zhonghua Cigarettes and his lighter out of his pocket, and tossed them onto the table.
“Mind?”
He Zhuchun shut and locked the door behind them, shaking his head: “I smoke too.”
Lu You first spread a sheet of scratch paper flat across the desktop, then drew out three cigarettes and laid them on the paper in a row. Remarkably, the cigarettes didn’t topple—they stood straight and steady where they stood. When the lighter passed over each filter in turn, wisps of blue smoke began curling up like ribbons.
Only after this was done did Lu You bite one between his teeth and light it. As he exhaled his first mouthful, He Zhuchun couldn’t tell whether it was an illusion, but in the instant Lu You raised his head, even his face seemed to change.
The originally hard, clean lines of his features softened considerably; a barely-there smile hung at the corner of his mouth; his eyes turned limpid as water, where even the slightest excess of emotion would have been enough to ripple ring after ring across the surface. These changes draped the Incense Bearer Medium in an airy thread of… allure?
He Zhuchun froze.
Huang Kuaipao was on the tabletop rubbing against the smoke to eat it; he too looked at Lu You now and said, delighted: “Sister Tianjiao, you’re on shift today?”
Right behind Lu You, a red six-tailed fox had her forepaws resting on her Disciple’s shoulders, occupying a Semi-Aperture Possession. This Fox Immortal spoke with an air of pampered hauteur; she flicked her tails at an unhurried pace.
Hu Tianjiao: “It’s only a minor Specter. Me coming out is more than enough.”
The smoke drifted through the air, circling He Zhuchun once, deliberately or not. That familiar chill crawled up his spine to his neck; He Zhuchun rubbed at his goosebumps, feeling a tightness in his chest. Hesitantly: “Has it started?”
Lu You answered evenly: “A girl. About seven or eight at the time of death. Drowned. She’s followed you a long time, with a very deep Lingering Obsession. Most likely, before she died, you made her some kind of promise—marriage, something of that sort. That’s why she’s clung to you ever since.”
Another mouthful of smoke. Lu You smiled and looked at He Zhuchun with amusement: “You haven’t dated in all these years, have you? Every time something starts to sprout, it gets inexplicably wrecked—you don’t even have a single woman in your daily life, do you?”
He Zhuchun nodded without pause: “So it’s all been her?”
“Figured out who she is yet?”
Amid the curling smoke, He Zhuchun closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, through the thin haze, he met a pair of extraordinarily clear ones.
He said: “She was the girl next door when I was little. We played house—she was the mom, I was the dad. I did say things like that, but we were only children; it was all just play. For her too. How could she have taken it seriously?”
“The living and the dead aren’t the same.” His amber irises lowered; Lu You always carried a note of compassion when he performed Spiritual Consultation—whether it came from the spirits behind him or from himself, it was the same, whether he looked at people or ghosts. Eyes lowered, a pair of tender peach-blossom eyes paired with a man of no feeling and no thought, forcibly composing a peculiar flavor.
Lu You said: “A person has the Three Souls and Seven Po, has work, has a life, has a fate. A ghost has none of it. Especially ghosts adrift in the world of the living—they have nothing, nothing left to hold on to but that one tiny thread of Lingering Obsession.”
Lu You pinched his index finger and thumb together to show He Zhuchun: “Just that little bit of obsession. If they can’t even hold on to that, they truly have nothing left to grasp.”
He Zhuchun’s mind wandered: this Great Immortal has nice hands, long and fair. He opened his mouth: “…Then she’s rather pitiful, isn’t she.”
“Now you’re pitying a ghost.”
Lu You was much more animated at this moment. Resting a hand on the back of the chair, he even had emotions to spare for mocking He Zhuchun: “Have you checked whether the ghost pities you? Fake kindness.”
Snapped at, He Zhuchun choked for a beat and said: “Great Immortal, maybe you should go back to that cold marble statue from earlier. I feel like the current you is a bit aggressive toward me.”
Lu You ignored him, shifting the cigarette to his other hand, and casually tugged a sheet of paper over.
“Here. Write your name and your lunar-calendar birthday.”
He Zhuchun took the paper and obediently wrote out his information. Lu You took it back, read it through carefully, then glanced up at He Zhuchun once more. He Zhuchun rubbed his nose:
“Is there a problem?”
“You were born on the ninth of the ninth month?”
“Yep. What about the date?” At this moment He Zhuchun’s mental state was that of a patient watching a doctor read his physical exam report—the smallest move from the doctor could sweat him cold.
“No problem at all.” Lu You said. “We share a birthday. What a Predestined Affinity.”
He Zhuchun: “…Great Immortal, I am really not that way. Having an affinity doesn’t make me that way. You can’t force this!”
Lu You laughed again.
Through Huang Kuaipao’s eyes, Sister Tianjiao in human form stirred Lu You’s emotions. The Fox family’s peerlessly beautiful face was luminous and sultry, a smear of red at the corner of the eye, that about-to-cry expression pressed onto the Disciple’s cold face, the two of them in a sense merged into one, the Disciple’s frosty bearing now tinged with the fox family’s amorous allure—every gesture carrying something ineffable.
Little Huang thought to himself: this Fox Spirit really is different from other families’ spirits—just draping her aura over a person is devastating. And the Little Disciple happens to have such a handsome face too…
By all reason, an ordinary person could hardly withstand such a test. Take He Zhuchun at this moment: heat came rushing up his cheeks. The face in the chair seemed veiled in a layer of gauze—close enough to want to see, too blurred to truly make out; and beneath that maddening, clawing desire, he still didn’t dare approach, awed by this person’s unfathomable power.
But Lu You leaned back, crushing out the cigarette between his fingers with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile, and asked lightly:
“Is that so?”
