I had a childhood friend who was also my neighbor—Huo Weiwei.
She was terrible at school, but exceptionally beautiful.
Ever since she was little, her father had taught her that the most important goal in life was to marry a rich man.
And in the end, Heaven rewarded her. By senior year, she’d succeeded.
She’d won over Zhang Yan, the famous rich young heir from the school next door.
The Zhang family was obscenely wealthy, one of the richest families in the entire city.
She called me to brag that everything was about to work out, and her father was over the moon.
But in the end, she died.
Cause of death: suicide.
Huo Weiwei’s father couldn’t speak Mandarin. At the accident scene, he wept bitterly, beating his chest and stamping his feet. He had only one daughter, a beautiful girl on the verge of adulthood with a bright future ahead of her, and yet she’d died at a time like this—and in such a disgraceful way.
But the surveillance cameras didn’t lie.
In the school’s video, Huo Weiwei walked alone toward the alley behind the school.
Under the alley’s dim, gloomy lights, she stopped in front of a manhole cover, bent down, lifted the eighty-jin cover with her bare hands, and jumped inside.
Her mysterious death stirred up a wave of commotion in the middle of college entrance exam season, even though everyone was supposed to be focused on studying.
“Probably because she couldn’t force him to marry her? She should’ve known her place. What kind of family is the Zhangs, and what kind is hers? Did she really think having his baby would let her marry up?”
“Exactly. Zhang Yan’s still young. If he wants a child, he can have as many as he likes.”
“But something doesn’t add up… Even if she wanted to die, why jump into a cesspit? That’s horrifying…”
“Who knows? Maybe she couldn’t afford to raise the baby and lost her mind.”
As I walked, I opened the group chat and found that someone had just sent a photo.
There was something wrong with it.
Under the blazing sun,
Huo Weiwei lay stiffly on the ground, covered by something. Her stomach was grotesquely swollen.
But according to what she’d told me on the phone yesterday, she was only one month pregnant.
Even if she really were carrying nine babies, they’d still be nothing but embryos at this point. How could her stomach be so huge?
Huo Weiwei had lived next door to me since we were little. We’d been neighbors for nearly nine years, and you could say we’d grown up together.
She’d once asked me to help her get pregnant so she could keep Zhang Yan, afraid he’d dump her after graduation.
She’d come to me because I was the heir to the Kun Dao tradition of female ritual practitioners, one of the lineages under the Three Great Talisman Sects. Though by my generation we could no longer control yin and yang, summon rain and wind, or command thunder, we still knew ordinary feng shui and fertility rites.
But one look at Zhang Yan’s face told me he and Huo Weiwei weren’t destined to be husband and wife.
What’s more, the method Huo Weiwei had in mind was a wicked art that would damage her body and her good fortune.
So we had a terrible fight. She even threatened to cut me off, saying that this was her father’s one wish, and that she and Zhang Yan truly loved each other.
She even said, “They say tearing down ten temples is better than ruining one match. You’re so coldhearted. If you won’t help me, I’ll find another way.”
The next time she called was yesterday. She was overjoyed and told me she was pregnant.
She also said the Zhang family had come around, and Zhang Yan’s parents no longer objected. She was about to get what she wanted, with victory all but certain.
And now she was dead.
I went to the funeral home. Huo Weiwei’s father, Hu Xin, hurried over to me at once, as if he’d found someone he could rely on.
He pulled me over to the Zhang family.
“This is Weiwei’s best friend. An, a descendant of a line of female ritual practitioners.” He put particular emphasis on my surname.
The An family was fairly well-known back home, but it seemed Zhang Yan’s family had never heard of us. Zhang Yan’s parents had brought along the company’s security team and a young man in a brown kasaya. They were chatting cheerfully with several teachers from the school, discussing feng shui and fate, without even glancing at us.
Zhang Yan showed no grief whatsoever. If anything, he looked a little relieved.
“I thought you’d brought someone who could actually help. This is the so-called master you found? I don’t think he’s worth one finger of my Master Lü… But still, looking at you…”
He gave me a contemptuous look. His eyes flickered with surprise for a moment, then swept over me again.
I frowned and went straight to the body beneath the white cloth.
The hearse had arrived only a short while ago.
I could smell something strange from a distance. As I approached, I noticed talismanic lines drawn in ink around the shroud. It seemed someone else knew there was something wrong with the body, too. But the ink they’d used was too cheap; they’d skimped on gold powder, weakening its power to suppress whatever was inside.
I crouched down, and everyone turned to look at me.
I dabbed cinnabar on all ten fingertips, then pulled the cloth straight off the corpse’s face.
Horrified screams rang out all around us.
Sure enough, something was wrong. Huo Weiwei’s face was unnaturally pale, with only the rims of her eyes a vivid red.
Just beneath her philtrum, where it met her nostrils, were two long red streaks.
I reached out and gently pressed her eyelid.
It was scalding hot. I closed my left eye, opened the yin-yang eye on my right, then lifted her eyelid.
At the bottom of her eye was a pitch-black patch tinged with red. Her pupil nearly filled the entire bloodshot white of her eye.
Something inside seemed to be looking at me.
In an instant, I pulled my hand away. The cinnabar on my fingers had turned black.
A tear silently rolled from the corner of her eye.
I stood up.
Huo Weiwei’s father hurried over and whispered to me, “Master An, you were Weiwei’s friend, too, right? Take a look for me. Was she possessed? Did she really kill herself? The police said there was no sign of murder, so I agreed to let her have a ghost marriage. But if she wasn’t killed, why did the Zhang family give me… fifty thousand? There has to be a ghost. There has to!”
He was right, and he was wrong.
There were no signs of possession, nor any trace of venomous gu poison. This wasn’t the work of practitioners of dark arts, and it didn’t resemble anything done by those of the Daoist sects.
But Huo Weiwei couldn’t possibly have killed herself. She had no reason to.
I took out a sheet of yellow paper and wipedhand.
“She wasn’t possessed. But that’s not the problem now. The problem is… the baby inside her.”
This baby wasn’t normal.
There wasn’t just one.
Hu Xin immediately came to his senses. “M-my daughter—what happened to her? That’s right, I only sold her body and forgot about the baby inside her! Nine of them, fifty thousand each—that should be four hundred and fifty thousand! How did I not think of that?! Fifty thousand was way too little! Master, I’ll give you a big red envelope later!”
I couldn’t be bothered wasting words on this cruel, stupid father. I simply asked him outright if he’d helped Huo Weiwei get pregnant.
At first, Hu Xin denied it. But when I looked at him a second time, he immediately admitted it. “I had no choice, I had no choice! She was grown up and had a mind of her own! She said she’d once heard her grandmother talk about some flower-planting spell…”
He was talking about Flower Planting to Change the Dipper.
It was a spell with two forms: the yang method and the yin method. For female practitioners who cultivated the Kun Dao tradition, it wasn’t difficult.
But the yang method had twelve steps and took a very long time.
Huo Weiwei couldn’t wait.
She had used the yin method.
The yin method required taking soil from a grave in a yin place, then planting a narcissus in it. It had to be watered with blood once a day.
To have a boy, you planted a white narcissus. To have a girl, a pink one.
But there was one taboo. The number of buds the plant produced determined the number of fetuses in the womb. The weak buds had to be plucked and left in the sun to dry, leaving only the single strongest bud.
Huo Weiwei had succeeded.
But she felt that one child wasn’t enough to be safe. The Zhang family already had an eldest son.
So she didn’t pluck a single bud.
All nine buds stayed.
I closed my eyes.
Hu Xin shrugged, looking helpless. “I couldn’t stop her. She said it’d be fine. Hospitals do fetal reduction surgery now, so if there were too many babies, she could just have a few of them reduced.”
“Idiot.”