Late Night Bookstore - Chapter 39

Zhou Ze sat down and stopped hitting. Indeed, he really had no reason to keep hitting anyone. Whether or not to have a child was someone’s personal choice, a freedom and a right they could control themselves.

Besides, even the one who had suffered the most didn’t want him to do the beating anymore.

“Heh…”

Zhou Ze lit a cigarette.

Sun Tao got up from the floor, pointed at Zhou Ze, and shouted, “Are you insane? I’m calling the police! I’m going to get a medical report!”

“You deserved the beating.” Zhou Ze didn’t even lift his head, exhaling a ring of smoke.

“You… you… you…” Sun Tao pointed at Zhou Ze, then pushed open the bookstore door and stormed out. He cursed inwardly, thinking what bad luck it was that he had ended up wandering into this damned bookstore today.

The infant tried to follow him out, but Zhou Ze grabbed it in one swift motion.

The infant struggled, full of dissatisfaction, but Zhou Ze ignored his reaction and pressed him down onto the floor.

“What are you following for? If you keep this up, you won’t even get a chance at your next life,” Zhou Ze said.

“Squeak squeak squeak…”

The infant was still struggling, completely deaf to Zhou Ze’s words.

“Esteemed Officer.” The female corpse sidled up to Zhou Ze, her gaze tender and ingratiating. Clearly, she thought Zhou Ze was leaving the infant behind so she could use it to replenish her strength.

Indeed, most men have a nurturing fantasy.

The female corpse felt she fit that perfectly, both in terms of age and figure.

“Esteemed Officer… mm… ah… mm… Boss… mm… mm… mm…”

The female corpse swayed her body gracefully, giving just the right amount of alluring tremor.

Then, though the will was still, the flesh was not; it was quite a sight to behold.

“I can keep growing, you know, as long as I get enough nutrition.”

“Scram.”

“……” The female corpse fell silent.

“Watch him for me. Don’t let him run. If you sneak a bite, you’ll die with him,” Zhou Ze said flatly as he stood up.

“Yes, Boss.”

The female corpse had no choice but to squat down and hold the infant with both hands.

“Boss, he won’t actually call the police, will he?” the female corpse asked nervously, afraid of trouble.

“No. He’s not the kind of man who’d let the whole world know he got drunk and then got beaten up.”

“Heh, such a prideful fool,” the female corpse said disdainfully.

In truth, Zhou Ze left one thing unsaid. That man’s temperament was actually much like his own back then.

Zhou Ze glanced at the palm of his right hand, slowly closed his eyes, and silently chanted something in his heart. Then he opened his eyes again.

Nothing happened.

Next, Zhou Ze crouched down, stretched out his palm, and reached it toward the infant.

Still, nothing happened.

The female corpse beside him, holding the infant, was at first confused, but quickly realized what Zhou Ze was trying to do. Her body began to tremble slightly as she tried to suppress her laughter.

Zhou Ze glanced at her. “If you’re going to laugh, then don’t hold it in.”

Indeed, Zhou Ze could only give a wry smile himself.

The little girl had said she placed the key to the Gate of Hell in his hand, but when he tried to open the gate for the first time to send a spirit inside, he had no idea how to actually open it.

After all, it was impossible that the little girl had just been teasing him by stamping something like a tattoo onto his palm.

“Hahahahaha… How could I dare to mock you, Boss… Hahahahaha… I wouldn’t dare be disrespectful to you… Hahaha ahaha…”

“All right, do you know how to open it?” Zhou Ze asked.

The female corpse shook her head. “Boss, I really don’t know. Maybe there’s some kind of incantation?”

Hearing this, Zhou Ze silently recalled the scene Xu Qinglang had described, of the little girl retrieving the souls of his parents.

He immediately opened his palm and said in a deep voice, “There’s a path to the underworld, and the Yellow Springs can be crossed.”

Whoosh…

Outside the glass door, withered yellow leaves blew past.

It seemed that a crow also flew away, crying, “Caw… Caw… Caw…”

Inside the bookstore, everything remained silent.

In short, there was still no reaction.

“Maybe try a different incantation?” the female corpse suggested. “Everyone has one that suits them, right?”

“Are you telling me to shout ‘Open Sesame’?” Zhou Ze retorted.

“Well, that depends on what position you prefer, Boss.”

The female corpse spoke with an innocent tone, like a child who didn’t know any better.

Zhou Ze recalled that night during the fight, when Xu Qinglang had also shouted the incantation “Heaven and Earth Unbounded, Profound Heart Righteous Law,” before casting a talisman and summoning his bronze mirror.

But afterward, just as Xu Qinglang had said, he had only used that line because he thought it sounded cool in TV dramas, like the way a protagonist makes a grand entrance in a movie.

In reality, it was completely useless.

Now that he thought about it, the line the little girl had uttered with her tongue sticking out, “There’s a path to the underworld, and the Yellow Springs can be crossed,” was probably the same kind of dramatic flourish.

Apparently, when it came to sense of humor, the little girl wasn’t much different from Xu Qinglang, even though she was a veteran Gui Chai.

A thought stirred in Zhou Ze’s mind, and the fingernail on his left index finger began to grow longer.

The female corpse showed a look of fear. She was afraid of Zhou Ze, and most of all, of his fingernails. From those nails emanated an aura that made her shudder.

This made Zhou Ze himself wonder whether the old man who had died in front of him back then had been as simple as he seemed.

There were two kinds of “stowaways.” One kind was like his former self, forced to keep a low profile and behave. The other kind was like the one in Rongcheng that the little girl mentioned, who stirred up all sorts of trouble and even gave the Gui Chai a real headache.

In short, that old man who had infected him with “gray nail” was definitely not ordinary.

The black fingernail pierced into the sigil on Zhou Ze’s right palm. Then, as he withdrew it, a thread of black silk was pulled out.

It was like scalding caramel, thick and sticky, yet it did not break.

Zhou Ze used the pulled thread to draw a square in the air.

Then, the square began to float, its interior turning pitch black and hollow, as gusts of cold, ghostly wind began to blow.

The infant in the female corpse’s arms started to struggle violently. Clearly, he didn’t want to return to hell.

When a person dies, it’s like a lamp being extinguished, but few can truly accept that.

Many people, even those who had lived eighty years committing countless evil deeds, still clung desperately to life.

Let alone a small infant.

But Zhou Ze knew that sending him into hell to await a new beginning and a new cycle of reincarnation was the right thing to do.

There was no need to ask for his consent. At this moment, Zhou Ze was domineering. He directly took the infant from the female corpse and threw him into that pitch-black square.

The square gradually faded away, leaving only a faint burnt smell in the air.

The female corpse stuck out her tongue and said nothing.

Zhou Ze, however, was a little dazed. After all, this was the first time he had ever sent a spirit back to hell. The last time, with that woman who wanted to stay and watch her son take the college entrance exam, he hadn’t done so.

“Hell… Have you ever been there?” Zhou Ze asked.

“No,” the female corpse answered honestly. “And I can’t go down there.”

The female corpse had no soul of her own.

Zombies were outside the five elements, neither among the living nor the dead.

That might sound impressive, but there was a follow-up line: “Hated by men and ghosts alike, forsaken by heaven!”

In other words, if the female corpse ever decided to take a stroll for no reason, there was a real chance that a thunderbolt could strike her out of nowhere in broad daylight and turn her to ash.

The world, for her, was simply this unfriendly.

The living belonged to the human realm, the dead to the underworld.

Any existence that did not belong to either was an aberration.

Zhou Ze sat back down behind the counter. He didn’t feel pleased, only bored and a little weary.

If the world of the living were compared to a production line, then what he did was nothing more than tossing the defective products into the incinerator for recycling.

“Boss, there’s a stack of this here.”

The female corpse picked up a few sheets of ghost money from the tiled floor and handed them to Zhou Ze.

Zhou Ze was a bit surprised; he hadn’t expected to receive payment this time.

“It’s easier to see the King of Hell than to deal with his underlings.” The female corpse regretted saying this as soon as it came out, but she still forced herself to continue. “When a Gui Chai sends someone on their way, taking a little toll along the path is only natural. I suppose his mother once burned joss paper for him.”

Zhou Ze nodded and put the ghost money away. In the drawer behind his counter, there were still a few bills left from last time, and even with these new ones added, it was still a small pile.

“Do you have any other friends you could introduce? Bring me some business. Being a person—no, being a ghost, still requires learning. Only through study can one improve.”

“Boss, I only know some stray souls and wild ghosts. They’ve long since had their incense offerings cut off, so they have no money at all. And they wouldn’t dare come to you. If you took them in, wouldn’t that just be handing you free performance metrics on a platter?”

“Performance metrics?” Zhou Ze raised a brow. It was the first time he had heard that. “Do Gui Chai even have performance metrics?”

“Don’t they?” the female corpse asked, looking puzzled.

“I have no idea.” Zhou Ze shrugged. He really didn’t know, because that little girl had only said to him, “You’re the most self-aware person I’ve ever met,” and then—

biu!

She was gone.

She hadn’t even left him a “The Gui Chai’s Code of Conduct” or a “How to Be an Ambitious, Driven, and Purposeful Gui Chai” manual.

“I suppose there should be something like that,” the female corpse said, sounding uncertain. “It’s like my former mistress, who lingered in the mortal world for two hundred years, faithfully watching over the village. She only hoped that, when she returned to hell, she could atone for the sin of overstaying and perhaps earn herself an official position. If her temple hadn’t been destroyed back then and her incense offerings were still burning, she wouldn’t have had to wait that long.”

“You know any other Gui Chai?” Zhou Ze asked.

“How could I possibly know so many officials like you, Boss?”

“Oh.” Zhou Ze nodded. It seemed he’d have to find someone more knowledgeable to ask later.

Just then, the sound of an electric scooter came from outside; it was Xu Qinglang returning.

“Damn, I’m exhausted.”

Xu Qinglang walked into the bookstore and tossed Zhou Ze a cigarette.

“Weren’t you going to order the signboard?” Zhou Ze asked.

“It’s done. Then I stopped by to restock some supplies. Wanchai Pier is having a sale, so I stocked up a bunch. It really wore me out.”

“Your dumplings aren’t handmade?”

“Heh, the soda at fast-food restaurants is still bought from the supermarket next door and resold. How could I have the time to make dumplings by hand every day?”

“Wanchai Pier suits you well.”

“Right? I like the flavor too… Anyway, enough chatting, I need to get these into the freezer.” Xu Qinglang waved to Zhou Ze and went back to his own shop.

After Xu Qinglang left, the female corpse suddenly let out a “pfft” of laughter.

Zhou Ze looked at her in surprise. “You understood that?”

The female corpse grinned.

“He really is good-looking. Most men who hang around him probably end up turning gay. So… Wanchai Pier.”