“Not good!”

“I don’t care whether you think it’s good or not. I care whether I think it’s good.”

“Seriously, what a grandpa.”

Zhong Cheng rolled his eyes. Of course Grandpa didn’t care. It wasn’t happening to him.

How could marriage be treated like child’s play? This was a ghost marriage, and his bride was the Ghost Emperor. It practically screamed disaster.

And what if his girlfriend found out that Zhong Cheng was already married and had a family?

Wouldn’t she turn the whole world upside down?

What a scumbag. That was how breakups happened.

A breakup would be fine. What scared him most was getting cut down without even being given a chance to explain.

Fortunately, Zhong Cheng didn’t need to worry about that.

He’d been single since birth. He hadn’t even had a girlfriend.

There. His dignity was saved.

“Your grandpa was wrong about this, kiddo. I shouldn’t have decided without asking what you thought. But you’ve always said this was feudal superstition, right? You don’t believe in it. So if you don’t believe, just treat it like a drunk walking past a graveyard at night. Keep your mind clear and walk straight through. Don’t take it seriously.”

“Are you afraid the Ghost Emperor will drag you away and make you his bride?” Grandpa asked.

Emmm… That actually made sense.

As long as he had no worries in his heart, evil spirits naturally had no way to exist.

As a materialist socialist, Zhong Cheng believed that demons and ghosts were matters of personal interpretation.

Just like the old saying went: If you had done nothing shameful in life, you wouldn’t fear a midnight knock on the door.

Having thought it through, Zhong Cheng felt a little more at ease. He wasn’t nearly as bothered as he had been at first.

The deed was done. What else could he do?

He might as well take things as they came.

“Even if something really happens, our ancestors will protect us,” Grandpa said. “Our family has strong fates. We should be able to withstand it.”

They said that a high-ranking official had once appeared among the Zhong family’s ancestors.

He had helped many common people and accumulated great fortune and merit, which could bless his descendants.

But Zhong Cheng didn’t really believe it.

There were no surviving records about the man. No one knew which dynasty he had lived in, what office he had held, or even what his name was.

The story had merely been passed down by word of mouth.

Zhong Cheng strongly suspected that some ancestor had made the whole thing up to elevate the family’s status and fool the ignorant villagers.

People often fabricated stories like that in ancient times, when news traveled slowly.

It was no different from forging diplomas or resumes nowadays.

As long as you printed a business card covered in impressive-sounding titles, paid a designer a little extra, and made it look polished and prestigious, you could fool people with ease.

If people could still make up nonsense in this information age, ancient people could take it all the way to the heavens.

Cutting down a white serpent, hidden writings in a fish’s belly, a one-eyed stone man…

Those obvious tricks had still fooled plenty of people.

All Zhong Cheng could do was sigh. Ancient people had been far too innocent.

“Ahem. Grandpa’s finished talking. Can I have the hookah back now?” Grandpa asked, his eyes full of longing.

“You’re getting old, Grandpa, and your health isn’t great. You should smoke less. I’m giving this hookah to Grandma for safekeeping. As for when you can smoke again, ask her.”

“You unfilial grandson!” Grandpa cursed.

Grandpa was a notorious chain smoker.

He had once had a fine set of teeth, but frequent smoking had dyed them yellow and black.

He was nearly seventy and shouldn’t be smoking so often, especially hookah. The stuff was harsh and especially harmful to the body.

Everyone in the family had urged Grandpa to quit.

But everyone also knew that asking a chain smoker to quit was like asking a plum pig to climb a tree.

Quitting was impossible.

He wouldn’t be able to quit in this lifetime.

It was just like quitting masturbation.

Every time, people swore they would stop. They steeled their resolve and convinced themselves they could do it.

Some even vowed that if they failed, they’d do this or that. They might even livestream themselves cutting off their own junk.

Yet they never managed to quit.

Then came the inevitable “Nice try” warning, while the promised self-mutilation never happened.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think they had several of them and couldn’t finish cutting them all off.

All that stroking, and nothing but emptiness.

Right. This was about cat slaves quitting masturbation.

Zhong Cheng grabbed the hookah, nimbly dodged Grandpa’s American tackle, then floated over the threshold and entered the house.

His flashy footwork made him impossible for Grandpa to track.

He had already smelled the food inside.

Grandma should be preparing lunch.

He hadn’t eaten much before leaving that morning to catch the bus. Then he’d walked a long stretch of mountain road to reach Bao Hua Village.

He had burned through plenty of energy.

Now he was hungry and wanted something to eat.

When he reached the shabby kitchen, he saw Grandma squatting by the stove.

She was holding a piece of firewood and feeding it into the firebox.

It was an extremely primitive brick stove.

A furnace burned below, while an iron pot sat above it. Flames blazed, and pale smoke curled lazily into the air.

After greeting Grandma, Zhong Cheng handed her the hookah.

Grandma complained that the old deadbeat never learned his lesson.

He smoked and drank every day, ignored everyone’s advice, and this time she was definitely going to hide the hookah.

She wanted to see how he planned to smoke then.

Grandma soon asked about Zhong Cheng’s studies.

When she learned that he had successfully been accepted into a prestigious university, her face filled with relief.

Her smile deepened the wrinkles across her face.

Seeing that his grandparents were doing well and living peacefully, Zhong Cheng had completed the purpose of his trip back to the village.

Even so, he had no plans to leave immediately.

Surely the old couple didn’t want their grandson gone so soon.

“Get ready for lunch,” Grandma said.

“Okay.”

Zhong Cheng had already caught the scorched, savory aroma drifting from the iron pot.

The rice had formed a crispy crust.

Grandma knew he liked crispy rice, so she had deliberately cooked it that way.

Praise Grandma. Praise crispy rice.

Zhong Cheng left the kitchen, crossed the courtyard, and headed toward the main hall at the center of the ancestral residence.

Sunlight streamed through the courtyard.

There was no need to turn on the lights. The room was already bright enough.

Most old buildings had been designed this way: well-ventilated and well-lit.

It saved electricity and money. In the past, people hadn’t had nearly as many appliances as they did now.

The moment he entered, he smelled dampness and decay.

Through the small wooden window, sunlight revealed dust drifting through the air.

The room was somewhat dim without the lights, making the ancestral house look even more dilapidated.

Zhong Cheng wasn’t bothered. He began searching for a table and chairs to prepare for lunch.

There they were.

Just as Zhong Cheng bent down to lift the table, he faintly heard a noise nearby.

He turned toward it.

There was an unusually dark room over there. He vaguely remembered it being used for storage.

The wooden door stood open.

Inside was pitch-black. He couldn’t see a thing.

The longer he stared, the more he felt that something was inside.

Not clutter.

Something else.

It was a very subtle feeling.

The pitch-black storage room radiated a gloomy chill. It made him wary and caused his pores to tighten.

His instincts told him not to approach carelessly.

Rustle, rustle.

Tiny sounds came from inside the storage room.

They were incredibly faint. Without the quiet surroundings and Zhong Cheng’s excellent hearing, he wouldn’t have heard them at all.

Could it be…?

Zhong Cheng didn’t believe in ghosts.

Grandpa had mentioned that many strange things had happened in the village recently and believed that something unclean was lurking around.

But Zhong Cheng was more inclined to believe that the villagers had imagined it all.

Feudal superstitions ran deep in the village. They were too quick to mistake every breeze for a storm and scare themselves half to death.

Those incurable infectious diseases might simply have been psychological.

Modern medicine had already provided sufficient evidence that mental health could affect physical health.

Sometimes, people didn’t need injections or medicine.

A walk outdoors, some sunlight, a little fishing, or simply taking the day off could all be good medicine.

The villagers’ illness was mainly an illness of the heart.

After they held the ghost marriage and believed that the Ghost Emperor was protecting them, their worries vanished.

Once the sickness of the heart was gone, the physical illness naturally disappeared as well.

It came back to the same old saying:

If you had done nothing shameful in life, you wouldn’t fear a midnight knock on the door.

Zhong Cheng decided to investigate the storage room.

Otherwise, if he didn’t put his mind at ease now, he’d keep imagining things in the future.

He had reached the doorway.

The gloomy feeling grew even stronger.

As he stared into the darkness, he felt as if something inside was staring back at him.

Just like Nietzsche had said—

Because the storage room had no electric light, Zhong Cheng took out his phone and switched on the flashlight.

The flashlight was ready.

A powerful beam shone into the pitch-black storage room.

Whoosh!

The instant the light entered, a black shadow suddenly darted past Zhong Cheng’s feet.

It startled him.

By the time Zhong Cheng recovered, the shadow had already zigzagged away and vanished in the blink of an eye.

“A rat?”

The shadow had moved incredibly fast, but Zhong Cheng had still seen it clearly.

It was definitely a rat—and a huge one.

It was almost as big as a cat.

Who knew what it had been eating to grow that large? It had to weigh five or six pounds.

If someone from Guangdong had been here, this enormous rat would probably already have become a fragrant plate of wild game.

With a body that big, it definitely had plenty of meat.

It was a mountain rat that lived off the land, too. It wasn’t like those city rats that survived on garbage and were covered in viruses and preservatives.

Its fat content would be low, and the meat naturally fresh and sweet.

Just thinking about it made Zhong Cheng drool.

It seemed that the noises from the storage room—and that strange feeling—had all been caused by this giant rat.

As expected, he had only scared himself.

There were no demons or ghosts in this world.

Once his worries were gone, Zhong Cheng looked toward the dark storage room again.

He no longer sensed anything unusual. Everything was normal.

He left the storage room and returned to his original spot.

Then he continued his work, lifting the table and carrying it outside to place it in the courtyard.

After that, he went back for the chairs.

Rustle, rustle.

Once Zhong Cheng had finished moving the table and chairs, tiny rustling sounds came from the storage room again.

Something shifted in the darkness, sneaky and furtive.

The storage room had already been pitch-black.

Now it seemed even darker, swallowing up even the light that drew near.

[That was close.]

[He’s gone.]

[The groom has such tender skin and delicate flesh. He looks delicious. Hehehe…]

[He belongs to the Ghost Emperor. Don’t even think about it. If the Ghost Emperor finds out… heh heh.]