Chapter 32: Settling the Startled Soul

The events of the past few days made me deeply aware that the unseen and unknown are the most terrifying. Considering that there were various spirits at home that I couldn’t see, I once again asked Wen Ye if he knew of any remedies that would allow me to see evil entities.

A remedy without side effects.

He frowned and said, “Do you really want to see those things?”

“It’s not about whether I want to or not anymore, but that I have to see them…” I bit my lip, not daring to mention that Ni Chang was spying on us.

Having an invisible camera at home was unsettling, to say the least.

Ni Chang was a jiao dragon spirit transformed from a snake, having cultivated for a thousand years. Her cultivation was higher than Wen Ye’s, a fox spirit, allowing her to conceal her aura from him.

Wen Ye tilted his head, pondering, and looked at me earnestly, “There’s no foolproof method in this world. The kind of method you want, one without any consequences, doesn’t exist. However, there are two methods that would cause you the least harm, and if used well, would have almost no ill effects.”

My eyes lit up, and I pressed him, “What methods?”

He leaned lazily against the porch pillar, basking in the sunlight, eyes half-closed, “Firstly, you could unite with a yin person, using your virgin blood as a contract. What he sees, you will also see. However, yin people who can unite with you are not easy to find, and there’s no guarantee you can withstand the intrusion of yin energy into your body. But once the contract is established, you can straddle the yin and yang realms.”

My face flushed red, and I clenched my fists. I jumped down from the porch railing, grabbed Wen Ye’s long hair, and roared, “You, you, what a terrible idea! You dare to let me, let me and a ghost…” have sex!

This little animal was indeed shameless, uttering such words in front of an elder without batting an eye!

“Le Xiao Mai, you asked me! I’m just telling you the truth! Let go!” He grabbed my wrist and glared at me.

Great-Grandmother puffed on her pipe, chuckling without saying a word.

I sullenly let go of his hair and asked grumpily, “What’s the second method?”

He smoothed his hair, crossed his arms, and harrumphed, “Raise a xiaogui. The ghost eye can share its vision with you…”

The veins on my forehead throbbed, and I interrupted him, “Alright, alright, shut up! Each one is worse than the last!”

Raise a xiaogui? If it backfires, I’ll be the first to suffer! I didn’t want to become the second Lin Miao. What terrible ideas!

He glanced at me disdainfully, jumped and sat on the porch railing, ordering me around, “Hey, Le Xiao Mai, I’m hungry.”

“Don’t you have hands? There’s porridge in the kitchen. Go get it yourself,” I said unhappily, rinsing the bowl I had just used with the water pipe in the yard.

He leaned against the pillar, one leg bent and propped on the railing, the other dangling in the air, leisurely saying, “I don’t want to eat porridge. I want to eat the noodles you made the other day.”

I was so angry that I put my hands on my hips, “Where am I supposed to buy seafood for you?”

“I don’t care…” he said, acting as if it were only natural.

“You!!”

Before I could lose my temper, someone rang the doorbell at the pharmacy outside.

The pharmacy was in the front courtyard of the siheyuan, separated from the inner courtyard by the Great Welcome Screen and the Moon Gate. From the inner courtyard, you couldn’t hear anything happening in the pharmacy. So when people came to see a doctor, they would ring the electronic bell on the counter.

Besides the medicinal herbs, an old counter, a stove for decocting medicine, and a simple army cot, there was nothing valuable in the shop. So it was left wide open during the day, without fear of theft.

I went to the kitchen, scooped a bowl of porridge, and forced it into Wen Ye’s hands, not caring whether he ate it or not. Then, I helped Great-Grandmother to the pharmacy.

A middle-aged woman with a sunburnt, flustered face was sitting on the simple cot, holding a four- or five-year-old girl in her arms.

Seeing Great-Grandmother, she stood up excitedly and said anxiously, “Granny Cai, please take a look at my child. Has she been afflicted by something evil?”

She held the child upright, revealing the girl’s flushed face. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes were rolled back, and the corners of her mouth twitched occasionally, resembling the symptoms of encephalitis.

I frowned and asked, “Didn’t you take her to the hospital?”

The middle-aged woman quickly explained, “We just came back from the children’s hospital yesterday. My daughter has had a fever for the past ten days. I first took her to the village clinic for injections and medicine. The fever would go down during the day, but it would come back at night.”

“We went to the city for a checkup the day before yesterday, but they couldn’t find anything. She was hospitalized for two days for observation. She stopped having a fever, but when we came home yesterday evening, the fever came back, even worse than before.”

Great-Grandmother’s only requirement for accepting patients was that they had to go to a major hospital first, no matter what the illness, and only come to her for medicine if they couldn’t be cured there.

Now that people’s living conditions had improved, and they had access to more information, they were no longer blindly superstitious. But many mysterious and inexplicable ailments really couldn’t be cured by hospitals.

Great-Grandmother used her dry, withered hand covered in age spots to touch the child’s forehead. She closed her eyes and murmured a few words I couldn’t understand. The girl, who had been rolling her eyes and unconscious, suddenly began to groan, looking very uncomfortable.

Several minutes later, Great-Grandmother opened her drooping eyelids, “The child’s life spirit is unstable. Her eyes are pure. She’s been frightened by something unclean in the house. We need to settle her spirit first.”

The middle-aged woman looked horrified, “Granny Cai, are you saying there’s something unclean in my house?”

Great-Grandmother tremblingly scooped millet into a bowl, “Yes, it should have been following your family for some time… Has anyone else in your family been feeling unwell lately?”

The middle-aged woman pondered for a moment, then her eyes widened, and she nodded, “Yes, yes, yes! My mother-in-law has been complaining about leg pain for the past few weeks. I thought it was her rheumatism acting up, so I kept applying plasters to her.”

“These past two days, she hasn’t been complaining about leg pain, but instead, she’s been complaining about headaches. Oh dear, I’ve been so bothered by my child’s fever these past few days that I haven’t paid much attention to her,” the woman said, scratching her head in frustration. She added in confusion “Could my mother-in-law’s leg pain also be related to the unclean thing in the house?”

“We need your mother-in-law to come here once to be certain.”

Great-Grandmother covered the bowl filled with millet with a piece of red cloth, all the while muttering incantations and circling the bowl over the child’s head.

This was a common method used by many sorceresses in the north to settle the spirit of a frightened child. I didn’t know the principle behind it. If the child was frightened, a piece would be missing from the bowl full of millet.

Fill it up, then circle it again. If it’s missing again, fill it up again, then circle it again…

Until the millet in the bowl no longer decreased, the child’s soul would be almost stabilized.

Great-Grandmother filled it five times before the millet in the bowl remained intact. The girl in the woman’s arms, who had been twitching and sobbing, was now breathing steadily and asleep.

The villagers had more or less come into contact with these mysterious and inexplicable things and didn’t find it surprising. But I found it magical every time I saw it.

I had asked before where the missing millet went. Great-Grandmother said it was eaten by the little ghosts. Only by feeding them would they release the frightened soul and allow it to return.

I used to scoff at this explanation, but now, I believed it.

The middle-aged woman didn’t speak while Great-Grandmother was performing the ritual. When she saw Great-Grandmother put away the bowl and the child fall asleep, she said, “My mother-in-law fell and broke her hip last year and is paralyzed in bed. My husband went to work again today, and there’s no car at home. Could you come home with me?”

I directly refused, “My great-grandmother has bad legs and feet and doesn’t make house calls. If you want her to see a doctor, carry your mother-in-law over here. You take such good care of your own child, but you don’t care about your own mother-in-law’s headaches and fevers…”

“Xiao Mai, I’ve indeed been too busy these past few days and have been a bit negligent,” the middle-aged woman said, trying to excuse herself. “How about I pay a little more, and you accompany your great-grandmother to my house? You can also take a look at whether there’s anything unclean in my house, or else it’ll just be treating the symptoms and not the cause.”

“You’re quite sharp…”

Before I could finish, Great-Grandmother slapped my arm and slowly said, “Let Xiao Mai go with you. This old woman’s legs and feet are indeed not very convenient.”

“Ah?” Both the middle-aged woman and I exclaimed in surprise.

“Xiao Mai, is she capable?” the middle-aged woman asked with a forced smile.

I didn’t want to argue, but since you said that, then I’ll definitely… bring Wen Ye along!

If I’m not capable, the fox spirit.