Late Night Bookstore - Chapter 41

Xu Qinglang, the female corpse, and the middle-aged couple all came out together. The middle-aged couple’s faces were full of joy; apparently, with the help of the female corpse, they had managed to seize the first incense offering.

Whether it was useful or not, it was, after all, a good omen.

Even parents who were not superstitious would still give their children a rice dumpling and a glutinous cake before an important exam, symbolizing “gao zong”.

The female corpse’s complexion didn’t look very good. As the group walked back, she fell behind, walking alone.

“Let’s go have some late-night snacks, how about barbecue?” Xu Qinglang suggested.

Although he ran a restaurant himself, he certainly wouldn’t make himself prepare barbecue in the middle of the night; Xu Niangniang’s skin was far too precious to endure such smoke and scorching heat.

However, as soon as Xu Qinglang finished suggesting it, he regretted it.

Among this group, there was a zombie and a living dead who didn’t partake in the smoke and fire of the mortal world.

Just imagining them sitting still at the table while others ate, like clay statues in a temple enjoying the worldly smoke, was enough to kill his appetite.

“You all go ahead, we’ll head back first,” Zhou Ze said.

“Oh, we couldn’t possibly,” the middle-aged man said politely.

“It’s fine, Uncle, we’ll go eat. Let the young couple take a walk.”

Xu Qinglang pulled the middle-aged couple away.

Zhou Ze didn’t rush to hail a taxi. He and the female corpse walked slowly along the small, quiet street.

The weather was starting to warm up, and the night was no longer as chilly as before.

“What’s wrong?” Zhou Ze asked the female corpse.

Ever since leaving the Confucian Temple, she had been gloomy.

“Uncomfortable,” the female corpse replied.

“You haven’t stopped menstruating yet?”

It had been two hundred years.

“……” The female corpse fell silent.

After a moment, she finally said, “The statues in the temple were staring at me. It felt strange.”

“You think they were looking at you?” Zhou Ze asked.

“Mm.” The female corpse nodded.

“You think they dislike you?”

“Mm.” She nodded again.

“You think that because you’re a zombie, you shouldn’t have gone to that place?”

“Mm.” She nodded once more.

“The sages preached that education should be for all without discrimination,” Zhou Ze said with a small smile. He reached out and patted her head. “You’re a zombie, something despised by both humans and ghosts, but you went to the Confucian Temple to burn incense, helping others and adding to the incense’s vitality.

You think they were looking at you, but maybe it was simply because you’re different, and that drew their attention. Like a husky suddenly appearing among a pack of wolves, who wouldn’t look twice, right?

Of course, it could also be that they’re just clay figures. I heard their eyes were made of donkey dung balls, so they look more vivid and glossy that way.

All of it is just psychological pressure you’re putting on yourself.”

“But what if… they really were looking at me? What if they truly had a problem with me?” The female corpse was still hesitant.

“Then they don’t deserve to be worshipped as sages in a temple!” Zhou Ze said firmly.

“Sages have enjoyed incense offerings for thousands of years. If they cannot even show a little tolerance, what right do they have to sit proudly on the offering table in the temple?

A false sage is nothing to be afraid of.”

The female corpse looked at Zhou Ze, a faint smile on her lips. “Boss, what you just said was really domineering.”

“Of course,” Zhou Ze said, enjoying the flattery of his maid.

“But, Boss, you’re a Gui Chai. In the netherworld, there is destiny and order. For ordinary people, it may not matter much, but for you, it’s different. Besides, you run a bookstore, which falls under the domain protected by the sages’ fortune. Speaking ill of the sages like this is really not good for you.”

The female corpse rarely spoke so earnestly to Zhou Ze. In the past, she would have loved to see him courting death; let him jump into trouble, die, and she could handle his corpse afterward, scrape off his fingernails, grind them into powder, and use it as pearl tea—oh no, feed it to the pigs instead!

“It’s still the same old saying. If you don’t do anything against your conscience, you don’t have to fear ghosts… or sages knocking at your door.”

Zhou Ze lifted his head to glance at the streetlamp and continued, “In my previous life, I practiced medicine and saved people. I never accepted red envelopes, never violated my principles, and always upheld medical ethics.

In this life, even though I became a ghost and returned to life through another’s body, I haven’t done anything to betray my conscience. So what is there to fear?”

He took a deep breath and repeated, “There’s nothing to fear.”

Hearing this, the female corpse’s eyes revealed a hint of contemplation.

Zhou Ze’s words weren’t some childish declaration; they sounded more like a warning to himself.

The two continued walking aimlessly forward. The night breeze was cool, yet pleasantly so.

Finally, the female corpse stopped and asked, “Boss, where are you going?”

Zhou Ze halted, instinctively looking around, and was startled to find that he had unknowingly walked to the entrance of a residential complex.

Familiar surroundings,

The familiar security booth,

The familiar night-shift guard inside who secretly napped on duty,

And the familiar delivery lockers.

Just like that, during their casual stroll, he had somehow walked back to the neighborhood where he used to live.

Although he had been staying at the bookstore for a month, subconsciously, this place still felt like home.

Having grown up in an orphanage, he understood the meaning of “home” better than most and was more attached to it.

Fortunately, when he bought the apartment, housing prices in Tongcheng had not yet skyrocketed. Because he had rushed to buy a house right after starting work, he actually ended up getting a great deal, earning the envy of colleagues who bought later.

However, now Zhou Ze couldn’t even recover his old WeChat or QQ accounts. He could not get past phone verification, and if he asked friends from his contact list for help, they would either think he was insane or be scared half to death.

Even his apartment had been sold by the hospital after his death, and the money had been donated to the orphanage under his name.

Zhou Ze didn’t resent that decision. After all, he had no family in life.

“This was my home,” Zhou Ze said to the female corpse.

“Then, shall we go up and take a look?” she suggested.

“It’s already been sold,” Zhou Ze sighed.

“Just think of it as revisiting an old place.”

Zhou Ze nodded and walked forward.

They entered Building 8, Unit 2, took the elevator, and reached the fifth floor.

Zhou Ze walked to a familiar door. It was still the same one; perhaps the new owner hadn’t gotten around to redecorating?

Even the doormat hadn’t changed.

And the cactus at the door was still there.

Zhou Ze reached down and groped under the flowerpot, finding a key.

Back then, he was often called to the hospital at night for emergency shifts and sometimes forgot his phone or keys, so he’d hidden a spare key there to avoid locking himself out.

Holding onto a faint hope, he inserted the key into the lock and turned it.

Click…

The lock opened.

So the door hadn’t been changed, and the lock hadn’t either?

Zhou Ze was a little surprised. He pushed open the door and flipped on the light.

The furnishings in the living room were exactly the same as before.

He even saw his old slippers. He changed into them and stepped inside, the female corpse following behind.

“Boss, is everything still the same as before?” she asked.

“Yeah. That’s exactly what puzzles me.”

Indeed, everything was just as it had been.

But that didn’t make sense.

Normally, when someone buys a place, they’d throw out everything that belonged to the deceased, wouldn’t they?

How could anyone keep holding onto everything all this time without finding it inauspicious?

Maybe the person who bought it was just using it for investment, not actually living there?

Zhou Ze sat down on the sofa, and in that moment, it felt as if he had returned to his old self.

Every time he came home exhausted, he would watch some TV, cook a bit of late-night food. Life had been busy, but fulfilling.

The female corpse went to make some tea, poured him a cup, and then said, “Boss, you’ve been dead for over half a year now, haven’t you?”

“Seven months,” Zhou Ze replied. But somehow, this conversation felt… a little strange.

“But this place is so clean, it doesn’t look like it’s been unoccupied for seven months,” the female corpse reminded him.

Zhou Ze nodded. Indeed, it was true. The apartment was spotless, as if someone had been coming to clean it regularly.

Still, he found it hard to imagine that whoever bought his old apartment would be lazy enough to not throw away a single thing, not even bother to change the locks.

Zhou Ze pushed open the bedroom door and discovered that even the bedding and sheets were the same ones he had used before.

“Boss, I’m going to take a shower. After being stared at for so long by those old things in the Confucian Temple, I’ve got goosebumps all over.”

“Go ahead, turn on the water heater first,” Zhou Ze reminded her. “The bath towels are in the cabinet by the bathroom door.”

If everything here was really left as it was before…

The female corpse went to bathe. She loved cleanliness. Women are naturally fond of keeping clean, and she had been a lady of a noble family in her previous life. After lying in a coffin for two hundred years without being able to wash, it must have been unbearable.

That was why she basically bathed twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, costing Zhou Ze a good deal in water bills.

But when he thought about how she worked at his shop as a server without taking any pay, Zhou Ze decided to let it go.

He drew the curtains and stood on the balcony, looking at the glimmering lights in the distance.

This place was his home.

It hadn’t changed, but it no longer belonged to him.

Things remain, but people are gone.

Truly, in the most literal sense, “things remain, but people have changed.”

He took out a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled a puff of smoke.

Inside, he felt a pang of melancholy. He had thought he could move on, but in truth, he couldn’t.

Just like the time he had personally cast that infant into hell to await reincarnation, he now deeply understood that the attachment of a living soul to the mortal world was beyond words.

Even he, at this moment, felt a powerful urge to buy back his old home.

As for money… With his abilities, if he really wanted to break the rules to get some, would it really be that hard?

It took him great effort to suppress that impulse. ZZhou Ze knew that would be a path of no return, a Pandora’s box; once opened, he would never be able to stop.

He considered himself a disciplined man, but no matter the time or place, one should never test the boundaries of one’s own moral restraint.

Click…

Unexpectedly, he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock.

The owner was back?

Zhou Ze turned around and walked from the balcony into the living room. He was already thinking of how to explain his presence here, though he wasn’t particularly nervous.

After all, he was a Gui Chai. If he really got caught for trespassing and ended up in a police station, wouldn’t that be a little too degrading?

Self-discipline was one thing, but there was no need for self-punishment.

This had been his home, after all.

Only, when the door finally opened, the person who walked in was a familiar figure.

Dr. Lin stood at the doorway, staring at Zhou Ze standing in the living room, her face filled with shock and panic as she said, “You… Why are you here?”

Zhou Ze was momentarily speechless as well.

The person who had bought his apartment was actually Dr. Lin?

“Let me explain,” said Lin Wanqiu.

“Let me explain,” said Zhou Ze.

They spoke at the same time.

For Lin Wanqiu, panic filled her heart. She thought Zhou Ze had come because he had discovered evidence of her “emotional infidelity.”

He had found this place. She was his wife, yet she had bought an apartment once owned by another man and had been cleaning and maintaining it all this time. Because of that man, she refused to share a bed or live as husband and wife.

Dr. Lin knew she was in the wrong.

Fortunately, the awkward atmosphere didn’t last long, because something even more awkward happened.

“Boss, I accidentally got my clothes wet.”

As the female corpse spoke, she stepped out, wrapped only in a bath towel.

She walked into the living room and stopped right between Zhou Ze and Lin Wanqiu.