Chapter 23

The sun went down slowly into the gap in the hills. Ning Shu walked Gouwa home along the path through the hills. The air was cooling off around them, with autumn in the wind, and the cold of it went straight down their collars.

Gouwa looked at her uneasily. "Sis."

"Don't call me that. You've taken a big brother, so you can let your big brother look after you from now on."

Ning Shu walked faster.

Gouwa hurried after her. "Sis, don't be like that. I was wrong. I'm admitting it. I really was wrong."

"Wrong about what?"

Gouwa put his head down and said quietly, "I shouldn't have gone to the internet café to play games."

Ning Shu made a sound and still did not answer him, and Gouwa kept after her. "You won't tell my mum, will you?"

Ning Shu did not answer. Gouwa dug her with his elbow. "Between brothers. No, between a sister and a brother. You keep your own business to yourself. Telling the grown-ups takes all the fun out of it. Right?"

"Ha. You're trying that on me."

"Sis." Gouwa started wheedling. "Sis, I was wrong."

"You still haven't said what you were wrong about."

Gouwa thought, and then asked, not sure of himself, "I shouldn't go round taking people for big brothers?"

Ning Shu looked at him and slapped him hard across the back. "Straighten your back. Remember every hour of the day that you're Aunt Hu Ying's grandson and Ning Shu's cousin. Stop bowing and scraping to people. We may be poor, but we're poor with a backbone, and we won't be poor for ever."

Gouwa thought about that and said, "Still calling me your cousin. I call you my own sister. My very own."

Ning Shu laughed and rubbed his head the rest of the way home. "Your very own won't help you. I'm still telling your mother."

"Oh come on."

Once the sun was down the dark came over everything at once, and it got very dark very fast.

The country is not the city. There are no lights along the road, and when night comes you cannot see your hand.

Ning Shu was still at him. "Remember it. From now on you do something with yourself and you study. Your mother's still hoping you'll be a great lawyer."

"Sis."

"I'm talking to you. Did you hear me? What are you pulling my clothes for?"

"Sis." Gouwa's voice had started to shake, and he pointed at the middle of the road ahead with his hand going up and down.

Ning Shu looked where he was pointing. There was a black shape standing in the middle of the road. It was already dark enough that she could not see far, though it was not pitch black yet.

There were a few lights from houses in the fold of the hills a long way off. A black shape like that appearing on a hill road was a frightening thing.

It was black all over and stood with its head down, and she could just make out long hair hanging loose to its waist. A woman, by the look of it.

Gouwa took hold of the hem of Ning Shu's coat with his teeth chattering. "Sis, what is that? Is it a person or not?"

Anything out here in the middle of nowhere was either a villager going home, and no villager would plant himself in the road like that and not move. Was it collecting a toll?

Then it came to Ning Shu that if it was not a person and it was standing in the road as bold as that, it probably was after a toll, money for the road down to the underworld.

Ning Shu remembered her grandmother saying that some of the dead have nobody at home to burn paper money for them, so they get down there with nothing to pay the officers with and the gates along that road are hard to get through. Those ones come up to the roads of the living and stop people and ask for the fare.

The ones with nobody to burn for them usually have no family at all, and were beggars or had no home when they were alive.

Pitiful enough. All the same, coming out here to frighten people was not on.

You go your way and I'll go mine. Come and frighten me and that's your own fault.

Ning Shu said to Gouwa, "Don't be frightened. You're the grandson of the famous Aunt Hu Ying. One road-blocking ghost is nothing."

Gouwa said shakily, "I never learned any of Grandma's tricks."

Ning Shu said, "Ghosts are frightened of bad people. Spit at it a couple of times and swear at it and that'll see it off."

Gouwa was out of his wits. "What if I miss?"

"Then swear at it. Really swear at it. The filthier the better."

"I'll try." Gouwa took a deep breath and called out at the ghost, shaking. "You road-blocking ghost, you don't know what's good for you. Look at you. You've got a face like you've buried both your parents. You could put a dog's skin on and you still wouldn't be a person."

Ning Shu thought, God, the boy can swear.

"You rotten article, your face looks like somebody's sat on it. You're a waste of food just being alive. You're scum at the nano scale, and it's a failure of socialism that nobody filtered you out. If they could run a generator off how ugly you are, every nuclear plant in the world could shut down."

Gouwa was getting into it, and the whole fold of the hills could hear him going at it with his lungs full. "I really don't want to have to look down on you with my toes. But mate, you've made me do it."

Ning Shu was laughing so hard it hurt, and Gouwa showed no sign of stopping. The more he swore the braver he got, and if Ning Shu had not held on to him he would have gone over and taken the thing by the collar to swear at it properly.

"It's gone."

Sure enough the road was empty with nothing on it at all.

Gouwa laughed out loud. "Coward! Big enough to block the road for my sister and me, not big enough to stand there!"

Ning Shu felt the cold come down her back, and she looked round and the shape had drifted to within five metres behind them. Seeing it that close brought the gooseflesh up all over her.

It had no features. The hair came straight down over the whole of it, in front and behind, and there was no telling which side was the face.

What in God's name was that thing?

"Aaah!" Gouwa looked round and screamed. "Mother of God!"

Ning Shu pulled Gouwa behind her and got her hand into her bag and closed it round a few paper charms.

Her grandmother had been teaching her to draw them lately, and these were ones she had done out of boredom in class.

She cleared her throat and put on the voice her grandmother used for this sort of thing, and called out from deep in her chest, "I am a disciple of the Heavenly Master Huang. What little ghost dares work its mischief in front of me? Do you want your soul scattered?"

When Ning Shu's temper went up, the small red mark between her brows threw out a hard light.

The shape seemed to see something it could not deal with, and it let out a shriek and fled.

"Still want to show off in front of my sister? Still want to frighten me? She'll frighten you to death," Gouwa shouted after it, full of himself.

Ning Shu pulled at him. "Come on. Home."

---

They got home as her grandmother and her aunt were putting the hot food on the table. At dinner Gouwa told her grandmother all about the road-blocking ghost, and her grandmother said, without much interest, "A little ghost like that, daring to block Ningning's road. It must be blind."

"It tried to frighten us!"

"It's the one who should be frightened now. Ningning's heavenly eye is open. A thing like that can't touch her lightly."

"Grandma, is the heavenly eye really that strong?" Ning Shu asked.

"It is." Her grandmother said, "When I held those two officers off and kept your mother's life, with the King of Hell's own line drawn through her name, they still had to give me my due. What was that on? The heavenly eye. With this, when your hundred years are up you don't have to go and queue for another life as an ordinary person. You take a place among the immortals. What small god or small ghost would dare offend you?"

That was something.

"So next time one of these little ghosts comes looking for trouble, don't be polite about it. Take your shoe out and beat it with the insole."

Everybody at the table laughed, and her aunt said, "She's going to be an immortal and she's beating ghosts with a shoe?"

Her grandmother said, "You want to understand, an insole is the thing a person stands on. All the living warmth of the body gathers there. An insole is the thing a ghost fears most. Hit a ghost with an insole and you'll hit it every time. It's better than a paper charm."

---

That evening Gouwa came into Ning Shu's room and asked whether she was going to take Wang Yucheng up on it, the haunted house in town on Saturday night.

Ning Shu told him flatly that she was not going. Was she going to run about with a pack of small boys? Gouwa went away worried.

In fact Ning Shu had other plans. She was going.

She had also started thinking about what Fu Nansheng had suggested, the livestreaming. But what was she going to stream?

She had watched streamers before. Some sang or danced or played games, some ate, and some streamed themselves sleeping.

Ning Shu did not want to do any of that, and thought it was all rather dull. She had tried it, in fact. She opened an account on her aunt's identity card and streamed her grandmother reading feng shui for people, and it went quite well and the numbers climbed fast. Then the site took it down before long. Promoting superstition, apparently, and it failed their checks, and after that they banned her account as well.

Ning Shu had not given up on it. Livestreaming had been enormous in the last life, and a woman streamer who got it right made money hand over fist.

She rather wanted her share of that, especially now, with the whole business just getting started.

A night visit to a haunted house would do nicely as something to stream. People are curious by nature, and there might be a good many watching.

Ning Shu went looking for streaming apps on her phone again. She downloaded several and found they all had age limits and fairly strict checks.

Then Ning Shu saw an app called Future Live.

Future Live. What was that?

She tapped it and downloaded it without thinking, and opened it, and it wanted an account, under a real name, though there was no age limit at all. Once she had registered it wanted her details filled in, under her real name again.

A real name it was, then. Once she had her own room set up she did not start straight away. She watched other people's streams instead.

Feeling her way about, Ning Shu slowly worked out why the app was called Future Live.

Because every viewer in it was a person from the future.

The future has the technology to watch the lives of people in the past being streamed. Which was exactly why this kind of streaming had no limits on age or on content.

That made no sense at all.

Then again, Ning Shu thought, how many things had made sense since she came back?

Ning Shu decided she would go with Wang Yucheng and the others to the haunted house in town on Saturday night, have a proper look, and try this Future Live while she was at it.