Grey-green walls choked with withered vines, a temple door gasping like consumptive bellows against the early winter gale — Qingwei Temple felt less a sanctuary than a relic clawed from some bankruptcy auction inventory, shabbier even than the three greased strands Master Qingxu painstakingly wound over his barren crown.
Gloom pooled within the hall. Half a mould-speckled candle guttered on the altar; a lopsided statue of King Yan glared blindly with its single eye at the line seated below: one decrepit master, one hapless disciple, and a speckled hen busy pecking grass seeds from fissures in the worn red-lacquer altar table, its claw occasionally flicking pungent droppings my way. Opposite me, Master Qingxu's desiccated fingers drummed a furious staccato on a spread of bills before him, his face darkened like soot scraped from a cookpot.
"Ye Thirteen!" His voice cracked with each recited sum, eyes sharp as needles pricking my skin. "Last week! City Third Psychiatric Hospital! Diagnostic fees plus behavioral intervention! Three thousand eight hundred!" A yellowed slip snapped towards me, startling the hen into a flapping descent.
I stared numbly at the cracks crisscrossing the flagstones. Last week hadn't been my fault. How could I know the new CBD skyscraper's flashing neon sign projected, with every pulse, a spectral Hyakki Yakō directly into my vision? Ghostly, mangled figures waltzed and shrieked across the glass curtain wall, drowning even the electronic pulse pounding in the white-collar workers' headphones. My brain buzzed; I pointed and cried out at the ghoulish spectacle wilder than any nightclub. The consequence? A luxury five-day 'wellness retreat' courtesy of City Third's psychiatric ward.
Another slip flicked into the air. "The week before that! City Second Hospital! Specialist neuropsychiatric consultation! Non-discounted VIP rate! Two thousand!" An even crueler injustice. Along one stretch of Subway Line Three, the veil thins at midnight. To resentful spirits, passengers' life force glows like fireflies. From a station corner, I watched pallid "overtime workers" suck down the vital essence of a sleeping commuter like noodles. Emptied, the victim would stumble off, lucky with only a cold. Unable to stand it, I grabbed one clammy wrist: "Release that woman!". They branded me a deranged pervert.
The bills piled up like snowdrifts, forming a grim cairn on the altar:
"Guangji Hospital: Psychiatric Assessment & Observation: Four thousand five!"
"Community Mental Wellness Center: 'Special Population' Care & Medication: Seven hundred!"
"And this absurdity!" His bony finger nearly pierced the blurred receipt. "An'ding Pharmacy! This month's haul: Haloperidol! Chlorpromazine! Lorazepam! Twelve hundred yuan, seven mao, three fen! Ye Thirteen!" His roar shook dust from the rafters. "This temple is no wishing well! Not your designated psychiatric care facility! The meagre coin on the altar couldn't plug your medicine jug! Look!" He scooped the pile and flung it. "These aren't receipts! They are summons from hell! A ledger stained with my tears! Qingwei Temple's bankruptcy notice!"
I flinched. Paper sliced past my ear. The air hung thick with cheap incense, bitter herbal brews, and the hot reek from the hen's end. On the altar, the dying candle spat a furious spark, mirroring my frayed nerves.
"Master, this affliction..." My voice grated like sandpaper. "Since childhood... Not intentional…"
"Affliction? Affliction?" Master Qingxu slammed the table, his precarious topknot trembling, revealing the polished scalp beneath. "Born with the True Sight? Communicates with both worlds? Fine stock! Rare talent! Millennia scarce!" He surged towards me, spittle sizzling on candle flame, a finger like ancient root stabbing my forehead. Cold. Reeking of cinnabar and talismans. "Fine stock? Horse manure! You're merely an oversized, flesh-bound, permanent relay node! A shoddy knock-off leaking signals everywhere! Couldn't install a Ward if your life depended on it! Chanted the Mind-Cleansing Hymn like it was poison! Result? Anytime! Anywhere! Like broadcasting for the netherworld! See a roadside suicide portrait and feel compelled to quip, 'Strong rope!'? Spot a drowned ghost rising and inquire, 'What conditioner survives decades submerged?' Hah?"
Each stab punctuated his rage. His weathered face, creased like ancient bark, flushed crimson. But beneath the fury lay a deeper exhaustion, a peculiar pain. The final shove sent me staggering against the altar leg, sloshing a bowl of greasy water.
*Thud!* A heavy bundle — swaddled meticulously in yellowed newspaper — landed atop the cairn of debts.
"Ye Thirteen!" His inhalation was a bellows rasp. The following roar shook the rotten rafters: "Mark me well! You... are no prodigy!" Each word struck like an ice-forged nail into my eardrums. "You! Are! A walking sinkhole for silver! A gaping maw of ruin! The shame of Qingwei's centuries! The consuming abyss of my twilight years!"
He pointed a skeletal finger towards the temple door, its yellowed plastic sheeting flapping uselessly.
"Before your cursed sight rips heaven's purse wide—"
His voice scaled to a near-tearing pitch, eyes frigid daggers,
"GO! Descend this mountain! Now! Fend for yourself! Pray for fortune! Not a single grain of incense ash remains to squander! Your spirit's burden is too trivial to anchor this madness! Qingwei's vessel... is too small. It cannot withstand the churning of your chaotic tide!"
The final words drained him. He sagged, collapsing onto his worn rush cushion like a snapped, withered staff, leaving only laboured gasps and the shine of newly exposed scalp beneath his askew topknot.
Silence smothered the temple, broken only by the wind's lament through broken slats and my heart hammering against my ribs.
Sinkhole...
Spirit trivial...
Anchor madness...
Each word was a barbed lash on my nerves. Sourness surged behind my nose; moisture blurred the sight of his gleaming crown. Gritting my teeth, swallowing the sob clawing at my throat, I dug nails into my palms, a spike of self-directed venom.
"Fine! Fine!" My chair shrieked as I surged upright. "I go! Ye Thirteen leaves Qingwei! Drinks not a drop of its incense water! Fend for myself? Nothing would please me more!" I snatched the hard-edged newspaper bundle from the floor. Cold, metallic glints escaped its layers. A severance fee?
I swiped a hand across my face and bolted for the door. The winter blast, knifing through the gap, bit into my damp skin.
"Wait!" The voice rasped behind me, threadbare and oddly strained.
I halted. Didn't turn. My back turned to stone.
"Cough…" He cleared his throat, a peculiar, almost ritualistic weight in his lowered tone. "…Should a light appear… fiercer than molten steel, darker than spilled gore… streaking from east or south… westbound fast as judgment, sharp as Yama's blade…"
I stole a glance. In the dancing gloom, he was a hunched shadow, a skeletal finger nervously shredding a bill corner, paper whimpering. His murmur was dreamlike:
"…That's the one! Once seen… where you are, what you do… shit mid-dump, you halt and cover yourself!"
He sucked in a breath, voice pitching towards an edge of mania:
"DIG UP MY GRAVE! I LEFT YOU A SURPRISE!"
He spat 'SURPRISE!' like biting bloody gristle. Then silence. He hardened into weathered clay, only harsh, suppressed breathing filling the frigid void.
Madness. His? Mine? Both?
I clenched the frigid package. No lingering. I plunged into the blinding snowstorm outside. Feathery flakes slapped my burning eyes, cold as betrayal. Behind me, the temple door groaned its final, hollow complaint.
*BANG!*
Shut. A butcher's cleaver severing eighteen tangled years.
As my boot touched the first frost-slicked step—
*Phht!*
A tiny, distinct hiss of escaping air, absurdly loud, issued from the bundled 'severance'. Before comprehension—
*Kachunk-Phht-phht-phht!!!*
The box convulsed in my grip! It vibrated like a faulty motor. Suddenly—
RAINBOWS!?!?!
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—seven viscous beams of garish, paint-thick light erupted from cheap seams! No elegance. Only brute force and a grinding metallic whine, instantly splattering the pristine snow ahead into a ghastly chromatic blotch.
Simultaneously, a mind-numbingly jaunty jingle, toneless and soulless as a broken plastic toy, began chirping from my palm:
"Beep-beep… Little Ye goes down, down, down… Saves his life from all around! Trouble? No fear! Beep-beep… Master's Magic Speaker… Chants alone… Beep-beep… Saves your old life on your own… Beep-beep…"
The lurid rotary light contorted my face, illuminating the snow-choked path. The cheap plastic's furious tremor numbed my arm. The brainless 'beeping', a senseless taunt, clanged like an overture to some cosmic jest.
As the temple's last shadow dissolved into the blizzard…
A thousand miles away. The core of deepest Yin.
Within the silent Judgment Hall. Upon the icy Executioner's Altar, forged from primordial iron. The Executioner's Blade — ten feet long, etched with dire vermillion seals — the Underworld's supreme artifact against demons, quivered!
*VOOOOOM!*
A bass resonance, so deep it vibrated the souls of every lingering shade, exploded! From the platform's shadow, Zhong Kui stirred. His iron countenance, harder than his namesake bell, hardened further. Eyes darker than void snapped open, witnessing the terrifying spectacle of the Executioner's Blade vibrating violently, straining against its sheath! His dense beard shifted as a rumbling growl of profound alarm tore from clenched teeth:
"Twenty winters… A score of years… It stirs… Again?"
Elsewhere. Within a different desolation. Snow lashed the stark corridors of a sanatorium. At its cold terminus, behind a steel door labelled Critical Spiritus Perception Hazard: Maximum Containment, a physician gazed through the viewing slit.
A young man lay strapped to a frigid bed, seemingly asleep.
But as her eyes brushed the stack of thick case files beside him—
*SHHRRRK!*
An unseen, intangible, soul-scraping resonance — the palpable edge of Death's scythe — ripped along her nerves. Her fingers locked on the topmost dossier, labelled in stark relief:
YE THIRTEEN · ULTIMATE SECRECY · SPIRITUS COGNITION HAZARD LEVEL: ABSOLUTE PERIL
Outside, the storm howled. Against the window's violent white, the characters spelling "Ye Thirteen" seemed to seep a faint, unsettling tinge of… dried gore.