Chapter 10

"Hey! What do you think you're doing!" Ning Shu got up quickly and beat the dirt off herself. If he had not been a small child she would have liked to hit him.

"I'll tell you. A little girl turned out as neat and tidy as you doesn't look like a master with anything in her hands. Who'd have to be out of their mind to come to you for a reading? I'll bet you ten yuan that you can sit here until dark and not get a single customer."

The boy talked like somebody three times his age, which did not match him at all. Ning Shu heard something behind it, so she made herself patient and asked, "You're saying you've got a way round it, then?"

The boy scooped up another handful of dirt, came over and smeared it straight across her face. "Do as I tell you and you'll have customers for certain. And when you've made some money, give me a cut. I want a Shandong pancake."

Ning Shu was filthy from head to foot, mud on her face and on her clothes. She said doubtfully, "And this works?"

The boy said, "It's better than what you had, anyway. Some fool may well see how filthy you are and decide you're deep and unknowable and come over."

Ning Shu pulled a face at that and squatted down in front of her stall, and sure enough before long a woman came over, nervy with it. She had meant to go to the bone-feeling stall beside them, but there were too many people and she had been squeezed out of it, and so Ning Shu's turn came.

Ning Shu noticed she was quite young and good-looking, except that her color was poor and there was not much life in her.

"Can a little girl like you read accurately?" The woman opened with that.

So Ning Shu pitched her voice old and spun her a line. "I am a direct disciple of the Quanzhen Longmen school of Mount Qingcheng. I have come down from the mountain to settle people's troubles. You don't believe me, so why come and ask?"

The boy beside her snorted, and Ning Shu glared at him.

These days everything has to come from somewhere. However much skill you have, if you have no school and no name behind you nobody believes you have any. Which was a good part of why Ning Shu had wanted so badly to get through the Heavenly Master's gate and learn from her grandmother.

"Read for me, then. I've felt unsettled for days. See whether something's going to happen to me." The woman said, "I've a bad feeling about it. If you can read it accurately, money's no object."

Ning Shu asked, "What do you want read?"

"Read my marriage and my business."

Ning Shu handed her a sheet of paper and had her write down the eight characters of her birth.

Ning Shu began to count on her fingers the way the book had taught her, and the boy squatted on the ground watching her, finding it all very entertaining, and thinking that perhaps she did have something in her after all.

Her fingers stopped. Ning Shu looked up and said, "Your husband has money, but the marriage isn't a good one. He often comes home late, or not at all. Your own money luck is good, though. You started something of your own and you've done well out of it these last few years."

"Ah! That's right!" The woman's cry brought the attention of everybody around them. "Little master, you've got all of it right!"

Ning Shu raised her eyebrows. She had not expected it to go that smoothly either. She had looked at the eight characters and counted it out carelessly, and all of that had simply arrived in her head, and it turned out to be right.

The woman asked, falling over herself, "Then read what's coming for me."

Ning Shu counted again, and her brows drew together, and the woman's nerves went wherever Ning Shu's hands went and she could not keep still.

"You carry wealth in your fate, but it doesn't run smooth. There's a death-air at your brow. In the next few days you may lose money, and your life may even be at risk."

"Ah." The woman was plainly frightened, and then said at once, "Is there anything that can be done?"

"Of course there is."

Ning Shu was about to go on when the boy beside her coughed, warning her not to give it away so cheaply.

The woman understood immediately and pulled a wad of red notes out of her bag and handed them over. "I know how this works. Tell me, master. What should I do?"

Ning Shu felt the money. There had to be ten of them at least.

"For the next three days, don't part with any money, and it's best not to leave the house at all. Once the three days are past, the trouble will come untied by itself."

"Right. I'll do as you say, master." The woman went off with her worries.

The boy beside her sat there with his brows pulled together, not believing much of it. "Is that true or not?"

Ning Shu said, "If you don't believe me, come back in three days and see."

"Right," the boy said. "So do I get a cut of what you made today?"

Ning Shu thought about it, took ten yuan out of her bag and handed it over. "Here. Go and buy yourself a pancake."

"That's a bit mean, isn't it!"

"You said it yourself."

"I was being polite, wasn't I? You only got any business today because I told you how."

Ning Shu had been joking. She was not the sort to knock the donkey down the moment the grinding was finished, so she handed him a hundred instead. "I need money at the moment, so that's as much as I can give you."

The boy took it, well satisfied, and said, "By the way. I'm Fu Nansheng."

"Ning Shu."

"Right. I'll come back in three days to watch the fun." Fu Nansheng got up, slapped his trouser legs down and went off.

Over the next three days Ning Shu went down to the river every afternoon and set up. She did not get another customer like the first one, who had spent without blinking, but a few came, and she made a little running money.

Three days later Fu Nansheng came down to the willows by the river early to wait for the woman with her. Ning Shu was uneasy about it herself. A half-full jar is the one that rattles, and she had never worked in this trade before and had nothing solid under her. She had already decided that if she had got it wrong she would simply give the woman her money back.

It was the afternoon before the woman came hurrying in, and the moment she saw Ning Shu she came straight over, worked up about it. "Little master, you were exactly right! You told me not to part with any money for three days and not to go out. I was all set to sell the stock I was holding, and I listened to you and didn't, and these last few days it's gone straight up!"

Ning Shu let out a breath and smiled. "Has it?"

"And there's more! My driver had a crash yesterday. If I'd gone out I might be in hospital myself by now."

Ning Shu and Fu Nansheng looked at each other, and he put a thumb up to her, convinced.

The woman pushed another five thousand into Ning Shu's hands and asked how to reach her, saying she wanted to introduce her to her business partners. Feng shui masters were hard to come by these days, and masters with anything real in their hands were rarer still.

Ning Shu had no phone, and the woman said, "That's easily dealt with. I'll go and buy you one."

It was a good thing walking up to her door, so Ning Shu was not going to refuse it. The woman bought her a decent Samsung, got her a SIM card and took down the number, and then said goodbye.

Fu Nansheng waited until she had gone and then started in on her.

"Do you live in the countryside?"

"Yes."

"Then there'll be plenty of strange things happening out there."

"There will."

Going out on jobs with her grandmother had opened Ning Shu's eyes. This household had somebody got at. That household had somebody go missing and turn up in a gully with their wits gone, talking nonsense, their soul led off by some wandering ghost. There was no end of this sort of thing. Ten fingers would not count it.

Cities have too many people and too much gathered yang for a great deal of that to happen. The countryside is thinly settled, and walking at night out in the wild country is where things go wrong.

"You want to make money, don't you? Let me think of a way for you." Fu Nansheng said. "And if it does make money, you cut me in."

Ning Shu looked at him. "What is it about that little head of yours that there's nothing in it but how to make money?"

"A man will die for money the way a bird will die for food. You're out here reading fortunes and reading houses for money too." Fu Nansheng said it as though it settled the matter. "My own luck is bad. I was born on a losing run, which you can see for yourself. Everything I touch goes wrong. So all I can be is a creeping vine and live off somebody else's luck."

Ning Shu could see it. The boy's color was unnaturally pale, and he looked ill all through.

"All right. Let's hear it." She would give him his chance.

"You've got a phone now. Why not open a livestream? Live ghost-hunting. It might take off."

When Ning Shu was twelve, livestreaming had only just started. She had not understood any of it at the time. By the time she was twenty-six it was an ordinary thing that everybody did, and the wave of it was nearly past.

And in the time she had spent going out with her grandmother she had seen no shortage of strange things. Told to anybody, none of it would be believed. But put in front of people as it happened, it might really catch the eye.

Ning Shu could not say for certain that it would take off. But there was no reason not to try. Livestreaming was only beginning now and there was not much on the sites, nothing like a decade on, when everything under the sun was being streamed and the audience was tired of looking at it.

This idea of Fu Nansheng's might really make money.