On Sunday morning, as planned, Lin Feiran and Gu Kaifeng went to the Ji Mansion.

The Ji Mansion was an old-style bungalow on Binghe Road. The bright red and gray brick had been weathered by years of wind and rain, becoming spotted and faded. The decorative flowers carved along the porch and the windowsills were no longer blooming, and the shade-loving plants growing in the shadows of the house, shielded from the sun, had become monsters secretly consuming it. The tall steel doors of the garden gate hung crookedly, and could not keep people out. The whole bungalow was bathed in sunlight, but it still seemed to give off a dark and chilly air. Between the bricks, dark energy seemed to be seeping out. But when one focused and looked closely, there seemed to be nothing at all.

Both of them had their Yin-Yang eyes open. Lin Feiran tugged at Gu Kaifeng and asked, “Do you feel that the whole house is giving off Yin energy?”

“I feel it. You aren’t wrong,” Gu Kaifeng said with certainty.

Since it had become famous in the city as a haunted place, there was surely something going on. Lin Feiran stood at the entrance to the garden and took out a full plastic bag.

He came prepared!

Gu Kaifeng glanced over. “Rice?”

“Glutinous rice.” Lin Feiran opened the bag and took a small handful of rice. “It’s written in my grandfather’s notebook. Glutinous rice has some cleansing properties towards negative energy. We can repel evil spirits with it. Although the effect can’t be compared to a real exorcism, it’s convenient. If we meet a powerful ghost, we can throw it and block the ghost.” As he spoke, Lin Feiran held the bag out to Gu Kaifeng. “You can take a handful too, in case the ghosts inside are unfriendly and you need to defend yourself.”

“I’ll just throw this.” Gu Kaifeng flexed his arm and showed off his muscles. “I’ll use physical retaliation.”

According to Lin Feiran’s grandfather’s book, genuinely formidable ghosts had powerful energy, and could exert some small influence on the physical world. This is why ghosts with very deep hatred could hurt ordinary people without the Yin-Yang Eyes.

“All right.” Lin Feiran very casually put his own bag onto Gu Kaifeng’s shoulder.

Lin Feiran narrowed his eyes at Gu Kaifeng. “Hey.”

Gu Kaifeng laughed even more uproariously.

“What are you laughing at?” Lin Feiran went slightly red. Both of his hands were occupied so he plunged headfirst into Gu Kaifeng’s arms, using his head to nudge Gu Kaifeng’s chest twice to show his dissatisfaction.

“I’m laughing at you.” Gu Kaifeng took a deep breath to calm down, his lips curving up joyously. “Using glutinous rice as a weapon. You’re really a little sticky cake.”

The raw material for sticky cakes was glutinous rice, so this was very appropriate.

Lin Feiran: “... What nonsense.”

Gu Kaifeng’s heart was softened by the sweetness of his fantasies. He held Lin Feiran’s face and kissed him several times, but was still dissatisfied. His gaze was pervertedly heated as he said, “Say, ‘I’m a little sticky cake.’”

“Can you be serious?” Lin Feiran felt blue-balled. “We should go in now, and we can talk again when we come out.”

“If you don’t say it, we won’t go in,” Gu Kaifeng said coldly.

Lin Feiran hesitated for a moment, then held his handful of glutinous rice bullets and repeated with embarrassment, “I’m a little sticky cake.”

Gu Kaifeng was almost overcome by cuteness. He calmed himself and said with satisfaction, “Good, let’s go.”

The two slipped through the gap in the crooked gate. The bungalow’s front door was locked, so Gu Kaifeng took Lin Feiran around the building and found the window he and his friends had broken as children. After so many years, the window was still broken, and forest green moss had grown around the edges. Lin Feiran followed Gu Kaifeng, the two of them nimbly jumping through and landing on the rotted floorboards that creaked horribly under their feet.

They had landed in the living room, and in the center of the room was a dirty, old sofa. Perhaps the sound of the two of them entering the building had disturbed the owner, as a female ghost slowly floated through the wall as if suspended on strings. With a disappointed expression, she fell onto the sofa. She looked about forty or fifty, and aside from her deathly pale face, looking at her features, she had been a beauty in her youth. She wore a bright red silk dressing gown, and she did not seem to have seen Lin Feiran and Gu Kaifeng. She looked as if her regrets were deep and her mind unclear. She repeated in a murmur, “How can our great Ji family let a man marry in? We’ll have let our ancestors down... Where shall we hide our faces...”

She kept repeating the same few lines. It looked like she was the mistress of his household.

It was clear they could not communicate with this ghost. Gu Kaifeng walked ahead, one hand stretching out behind him to lead Lin Feiran over the creaking floorboards and towards the next room...

On the first floor of the bungalow was the dining room, living room, laundry room and the maid’s room. On the second floor were the master bedroom and the study. The two looked in every room of the house and saw maybe a dozen ghosts of all kinds. The ghost in the study seemed to be the master of the house, and in the other rooms were the servants, with cloth shoes and shaved heads... They didn’t seem to have obvious external wounds, but they all looked like they carried deep regrets, and circled the places they had frequented in life with expressions of deep hatred. They repeated several lines of their own, and could not be communicated with. They all seemed like NPCs in a game.

“Let’s go check the basement?” Lin Feiran said. He remembered Gu Kaifeng saying there was a piano in the basement.

“Let’s go.” Gu Kaifeng nodded.

The moment he turned, several indistinct strains of piano music floated from below their feet. In the instant the piano music began, a servant ghost who had been silently circling by Lin Feiran began screaming shrilly and took several steps backward like he had been terrified of something. He shrank into a corner, trembling all over with his head cradled in his hands. He screamed, “Don’t– don’t kill me! I just work here! Grudges have sources and debts have debtors! Look for my master and mistress!”

Lin Feiran met Gu Kaifeng’s eyes, then in unison they walked toward the basement. The piano music was still playing, a melody taking shape, but the person playing piano did not have good technique. He played wrong notes and repeated himself, so the melody sounded messy. Lin Feiran got anxious just listening to it. Unhappiness lodged in his throat; he wanted to rush over and play it properly for the piano player.

They walked downstairs, following the music. This section of corridor took a turn and then the piano should be right there. Gu Kaifeng whispered, “Baby, this piano player might be Ji Xuan. Are you ready?”

Lin Feiran swallowed, held his handful of glutinous rice tighter and said gravely, “I’m ready. If he tries to hurt us, I’ll throw glutinous rice at him, then you immediately turn off the Yin energy links.

After turning off the link where they shared Yin, Gu Kaifeng would turn back into a person with Yang energy constitution, and due to his strong Yang energy, even a powerful ghost would not dare touch him.

“All right,” Gu Kaifeng agreed.

The two reached the end of the corridor and turned the corner together. Lin Feiran looked in the direction of the piano music, and an ill-omened, purple-black aura met his eyes. The walls, the ground, the piano... all of them were covered with dried, blackened blood. Perhaps it was an illusion created from the great visual shock, or the aura of a powerful ghost, but Lin Feiran felt that he could smell a sweet, stinking scent of something rotting. On the piano stool sat a man; from Lin Feiran’s position he could see only his back. He seemed to be a novice who had not been learning the piano for very long. His upper body was angled slightly forward, trying to read the sheet music before his eyes. His fingers touched the music staves, tracing each line, and his hand was intact.

He counted up to the right note, then lowered his head and clumsily tapped several notes, then raised his eyes to the sheet music again.

Lin Feiran coughed lightly and called out tentatively, “Ji Xuan?”

The man’s silhouette trembled slightly.

His head swiftly turned to Lin Feiran, his neck turning 180 degrees while his body didn’t move an inch.

Lin Feiran was shocked by this sudden vision and flinched, clinging to Gu Kaifeng with a jump.

A very young man, about twenty or so, sat on the piano stool. Two terrifyingly dark eyes were set in a face pale and cold as marble. He wore a red Magua, in the style of grooms from decades ago, but the gold embroidery on his chest was stained with blood.

Lin Feiran was shocked but he did not forget to whisper to Gu Kaifeng, “My grandfather’s notebook said that if someone wears red and bleeds to death between 11pm and 1am at night, the ghosts they become are even more powerful than usual...”