Chapter 25

Aaah, don't go in!

That's terrifying. Get out of there. I can't watch.

No, go in! Ningning, go in and look. Have a depth charge.

Some of the room were frightened, and some of them were the sort who want to look all the more for being frightened, and others kept throwing her gifts. A mine was one yuan, a grenade five, a depth charge a hundred.

Ning Shu's screen filled up with them. She thanked people as she went, and walked into the flat.

She's going in!

Ningning, I want to see what's in there.

Ning Shu swung the phone round the room. There was nothing in it but abandoned furniture under a thick coat of dust, and some rotting food giving off a smell that turned your stomach.

This really feels like a haunted house.

Brilliant.

Ningning, your nerve is unbelievable. Have a depth charge.

Ning Shu handed the phone to Gouwa so that she could go round the flat herself.

Gouwa followed close at her heels and looked at the screen. "Sis! There are over a thousand people in the room!"

Ning Shu took the gold compass out of her bag and looked at it by the torchlight. The strange part was that the needle would not settle. It had started swinging about and pointing anywhere.

Was it broken?

It could not be. The compass had come down from the Heavenly Master through one generation after another and had never once gone wrong.

Which left one possibility. The field in this flat was so unsteady that the needle could not hold.

Gouwa had taken to the streaming completely, and there was a thrilled look on his face. He cleared his throat. "Hello, everyone. My name's Ye Yingjun. You can call me Gouwa."

We want Ningning.

Turn the camera round.

Cheering for Ningning!

Gouwa gave in and turned the camera to film Ning Shu.

Ning Shu moved about with the compass, and Gouwa said, "Ningning is checking whether there are any ghosts in this flat."

Ning Shu was genuinely puzzled. If the stories were true, how did people in perfectly good health simply vanish? She wanted to know what was behind it.

The compass took her into the kitchen. There still seemed to be food left in the pots, and the smell of it was foul, with flies going round. Ning Shu covered her nose and shut the kitchen door.

Gouwa said, "Sis, another fifteen minutes and we can go. There are twenty thousand people watching now."

Ning Shu made a vague sound. And just then the needle on the compass turned, and stopped, and stayed where it was.

"I reckon most of those stories are made up," Gouwa went on, chattering.

He was frightened, and he felt that if nobody talked the whole thing would get strange, so he kept talking to keep his own courage up.

"I've got a bold theory. It'll be the property developers wanting to pull the old blocks round here down, and the holdouts wouldn't shift, so they made the haunting up. Sis, do you think that makes sense?"

Before Ning Shu could answer, the comments were off.

That's very possible.

Everyone moves out and the developer can't lose. Clever.

The kid's quick.

Ning Shu was not sure either. People vanishing was only a story and she had never checked it.

Gouwa pulled a face. "I'm not a bit frightened now."

"This place is a bit odd, but I don't think there's anything unclean in…"

Ning Shu stopped halfway. Gouwa looked up at her, not following, and found her staring at the compass with her eyes wide.

Gouwa was uneasy now. He came closer and looked at it.

The needle swung round twice in a muddle, and then settled hard, pointing northeast.

Ning Shu looked northeast. There was a door there, shut.

"Sis, what does that mean?" Gouwa did not understand.

"Grandma said that wherever the needle points, that's where the…"

Ghost.

Gouwa went two steps back, frightened out of his skin. "Aaah!"

The screen went quiet for two seconds as well, and then one comment drifted across on its own.

Brilliant.

And then the flood came.

BRILLIANT.

Are there really ghosts?

Don't go in, please don't, this is awful.

I've got my hands over my eyes and I still want to look.

Ning Shu took a long breath, got a paper charm out of her bag and closed her hand round it. "I'm going in to look."

Ningning, you have far too much nerve.

Cheering as hard as I can!

Up in the middle of the night watching this. What is wrong with me.

Hit me with the full strength of this stream. Have a depth charge.

Ning Shu went to the door, took a breath, put her hand on the handle and turned it gently.

It creaked, and it opened.

Gouwa's heart was up in his throat. He had a fistful of Ning Shu's coat and stayed right behind her.

"Whoever's in there, get out here now, you. You're the sort who wouldn't wear mourning for his own father. You're a toad with feathers stuck in it. Are you a bird or a beast?"

Ning Shu looked back at him, lost for words. "What are you doing?"

"You said ghosts are afraid of bad people. If I swear at it a bit, whatever's in there might run off."

Ning Shu rolled her eyes and kicked the door open. The room was black, with a thread of light coming in at the window and the furniture showing as vague shapes.

There was a big sprung bed across the room, and in the middle of the bed lay something black and covered in hair.

The corner of Ning Shu's eye twitched.

She took the torch out of Gouwa's hand and threw the beam straight at the black shape.

"Mrow."

It was a cat, black all over, and the beam caught it full in the eyes, and they came back at her like two glass beads. It shot up and went past her feet in one streak.

It did not forget to look back at her as it went.

"Aaah! I nearly died." Gouwa had a hand over his chest and was getting his breath back. "It was only a cat."

God. I nearly died too.

That was horrible.

How am I ever going to enjoy cat videos again.

Ning Shu looked at the compass again. The needle had come off the black spot. She frowned. Was there something wrong with the compass after all?

She checked the time. Twenty past midnight. The half hour was up.

"Gouwa. Come on."

"Right!" Gouwa brightened up enormously. He could not get out of the place fast enough.

The two of them came out of the building, and just then a hooked moon came out from behind the black cloud.

Is the stream ending?

That was so good.

Saved this streamer. Do lots more.

Ningning, have a mine.

Gouwa said easily, "Nothing happened at all. Stories are stories."

Ning Shu was still turning over what had gone wrong with the compass. Gouwa had already run ahead to the tree.

"Sis, Wang Yucheng and the others aren't down yet." There was nobody at the crossing they had agreed on. No sign of Wang Yucheng or Wei Xiaotian.

"I don't suppose your big brothers have run off already."

Gouwa laughed. "Most likely. No nerve at all. They're the ones who got us out here and they've gone home with their tails down."

"Then we'd better hurry too. It'll be awful if Grandma finds out."

"Mm."

Ning Shu picked up the phone, said goodbye to the room and closed the app.

She looked back at the building one last time. It stood on its own in the deep of the night with every window shut.

Ning Shu frowned slightly and asked Gouwa, "Do you remember whether the windows were open when we came?"

Gouwa looked back and said, "Didn't notice."

"They're all shut now."

"You'll have seen it wrong. There's nobody in there. Windows can't shut themselves."

Ning Shu was not sure either, so she let it go, and the two of them went home under cover of the dark and got inside carefully. Her grandmother and her aunt were deep asleep and neither of them had noticed the pair of them going out.

---

Ning Shu got back to her room, climbed into bed quietly and opened the app to look at her account. Her followers had gone from nothing to a thousand, and alongside that she could see what she had earned that day.

4,523.

Not an hour of streaming, and she had made four thousand and more. The money came in fast.

Besides what people had given her in gifts, part of it was a traffic bonus. The more people watching, the more that part came to.

Ning Shu doubted whether she could actually get the money out. She crawled to the head of the bed and found a card in her school bag, one she had got on her aunt's identity card last time she was in the city.

She entered the card number, and it verified and linked straight away, and she tapped to withdraw.

A few minutes later a text came through. The money was in.

Now Ning Shu was properly excited. She had made the first real money of her life out of a livestream.

Ning Shu went into the Future Live community and posted: Thank you all for coming to watch Ningning tonight. Ningning is a feng shui master who hasn't got through the gate yet. Streams from now on will be much like tonight's, all ghosts and strange things. If you like it, please save Ningning! ^_^

The moment it went up people were liking it and replying.

First time I've ever seen anyone stream a ghost hunt. It's brilliant. Saved you, Ningning, love you, mwah.

Are you really a feng shui master? The sort who reads houses and catches ghosts?

Say what you like, Ningning's a sweet kid. Hope there are lots more streams. I like you.

Most of the comments said they liked her and were behind her. There were bad ones too, of course, saying she was far too young to be streaming and must be desperate to be famous. Ning Shu had never paid any attention to that sort of thing. In the last life she had been the queen of other people's talk and was in the trending lists every other day, praised and torn apart by turns. She was not a banknote. Not everybody was going to like her.

And the bad ones got buried by her own people soon enough.

She's only a little girl. Is that any way to talk to her?

Exactly. Nobody's making you watch.

Ningning, I'm behind you!