Chapter 29

"Good evening, Elder Brother Cui. My name is Ning Shu."

"I know who you are. Hu Ying's granddaughter. I heard long ago that you'd taken up your grandmother's work, and I've been meaning to find a free hour and go and have a look at you. And here you are finding me instead."

"Elder Brother, I'm shut in on this side and can't get out. I'd like to ask you to show me the road."

"Easily done."

Lord Cui took the big red lantern from one of his attendants and handed it to Ning Shu. "With this to light the way, the fog will part and you'll find the road back."

Ning Shu took the red paper lantern. "Thank you, Elder Brother."

"Well, I'll walk you part of the way as well. An elder brother should do that much."

Lord Cui sent his two attendants ahead to clear the road, and Ning Shu and Wei Xiaotian came along behind.

Before long the building was right in front of them.

"I'll see you this far. Go on, quickly."

"Thank you, Elder Brother Cui."

"Ha, there's no need to stand on ceremony. Come down and see me when you've time, and bring a couple of bottles of the good stuff from your side for me to try. Wuliangye isn't bad at all."

So a favour was not a favour for nothing. Her elder brother was asking for a drink.

And a particular one at that. It had to be Wuliangye.

"Easily done. When I've a free hour I'll bring the Wuliangye down and drink with you, Elder Brother."

Lord Cui the Judge went off home, and Ning Shu ran flat out for the building.

She looked up. The new moon was out of the cloud and high in the sky.

"There's no time!"

The fog around the building was pulling back. The crack between the two worlds was closing.

Gouwa stood in front of the mirror holding the candle, watching his watch, with sweat standing out on his face in beads. "One minute left. Sis! Come back!"

And while Gouwa was muttering away at it, Ning Shu and Wei Xiaotian appeared in the mirror at a dead run.

"Sis! Sis! Over here!"

Ning Shu had hold of Wei Xiaotian, and she could see Gouwa not far off with the candle, standing in front of the mirror waiting for her, and the faint light coming off its face.

"Quick! Quick!"

Even the cat, who was never ruffled, could not help himself. "Hurry. The join is going."

Ning Shu ran for her life, and Wei Xiaotian picked up his feet beside her, and the two of them went at the world of the living like a pair of runners at a finish line.

Closer. Closer.

The face of the mirror began to change and the fog thinned out of it.

Ning Shu shut her eyes and threw herself head first at the mirror, pulling Wei Xiaotian through with her, and the two of them came out stumbling and went down on the floor together. Gouwa was quick enough to catch Ning Shu and keep her off it.

Everything turned over, and when Ning Shu looked back the world of the dead was gone out of the mirror.

Wei Xiaotian burst into tears. "It's good to be alive."

It was good to be alive. Ning Shu thought so too.

THEY'RE BACK.

Ningning I love you, cheering so hard.

Master Ning, that alone has made me a follower for life.

Grenade, rocket launcher, torpedo, depth charge, have them all, all of them.

The whole room was full of people getting their breath back.

The black cat let his own breath out. "I thought the pair of you weren't coming back."

"So did I." Ning Shu was nowhere near steady yet.

Gouwa had both arms round her, wiping his eyes. "Sis. My own sister, my own, own sister, you frightened the life out of me. If you hadn't come back, what was I going to tell Grandma? Or my mum and dad?"

Ning Shu said, "Oh. So it's having to explain yourself that worried you."

"Obviously what worried me most was your life and safety. If you hadn't come back, who'd take me out for a thrill?"

Ning Shu pulled her mouth into a smile with nothing warm in it. "I'll go back to being your cousin, I think. :)"

The black cat said to her, "Back out of the world of the dead with a judge to clear the road for you. After this, your name is going to go all round that side."

"Is it?" Ning Shu did not follow. "Is that such a great thing?"

"Great hardly covers it. Do you know who Judge Cui is? You got him to clear a road for you. If that isn't great, what is?"

Ning Shu said, "He's my elder brother in the school."

Gouwa said, "So in modern terms it's got a problem, ask your senior, and your senior sorts you out?"

"Ha. You could put it that way."

The black cat looked at Wei Xiaotian. "Once you go down there you're a ghost, and no ghost gets to be a person again. Meeting her was the luck you laid up in another life."

Wei Xiaotian looked at Ning Shu, went straight down on his knees in front of her and shouted, from the chest, "Thank you!"

Ning Shu said, with no sweetness in it, "You nearly got us both killed with that look over your shoulder."

"I'm sorry, Gouwa's sister. I'll remember what you did for me as long as I live. When I'm somebody, if there's ever anything you need from me, say the word. If I so much as frown about it, my name isn't Wei Xiaotian."

There was more blood and loyalty in the boy than she had expected.

"Right. I've finished my watch on this crossing, and I'll be going."

Gouwa said, "Where are you going? We've got a big yellow dog at the gate, but we're short a cat that can catch mice."

Before he could finish, Ning Shu slapped him across the back and stopped his mouth.

Ning Shu said, "The Warden has kept this crossing for three years. It's time for him to rise and reach the Way."

Gouwa nodded. "Oh, so he's off to be an immortal."

---

Three days later at dusk, Ning Shu was waiting outside Gouwa's classroom when a couple she did not know came over to her.

"You're Ye Yingjun's cousin. You're the one who brought our Xiaotian back."

Wei Xiaotian's mother and father.

"Good evening," Ning Shu said politely.

The woman said, very moved, "Xiaotian told us everything. If it hadn't been for you he wouldn't have come back alive. You saved his life."

The man said, "We came specially to thank you. This is a small token, and we would like you to take it." He got a cheque out of his bag and held it out. "It's nothing like enough."

Ning Shu did not refuse it. She took the cheque.

"Do you know my grandmother?"

The man said, "We do. We had Aunt Hu Ying out to look at a house for us a few years ago."

"We had our eye on a place and she said not to buy it, so we didn't, and we heard later that a businessman bought it. He moved in and went bankrupt not long after. That was all down to Aunt Hu Ying, and the whole family thinks the world of her. Though we hear she doesn't go out on jobs any more, which is a shame."

Ning Shu nodded. "I'm learning the work from her now. If you'd trust me with it, and you know anyone in business who needs something looked at, you could send them to me."

Wei Xiaotian's mother said, "So Master Hu has taught Ningning everything she knows. No wonder she's as good as that."

"Of course she's good. How else would she have got Xiaotian back?" The man clapped a hand to his chest. "No trouble at all. Any client who needs something looked at, I'll put them your way."

Gouwa came out of the classroom, and Ning Shu said goodbye to the Weis, hung her school bag on him and walked home with an arm round his shoulders.

Since starting middle school Gouwa had shot up. He was nearly one metre seventy-five now, a head taller than Ning Shu, and he had filled out. There was no sign left of the split in his lip, and he had turned out handsome.

By his own account, a good many girls in his class were sweet on him.

Ning Shu would grant that he was good-looking. He was also a bit of an idiot, and underneath it all still a daft small boy.

On the way home Gouwa asked her, "How much did Wei Xiaotian's parents give you?"

Ning Shu got the cheque out and counted the figures from the end. Six of them. A hundred thousand.

"That much?"

The Weis were in business, but this was not a big city and it was a small business, and putting that much into thanking Ning Shu was handsome of them. She had saved their son's life.

Since Ning Shu had begun to get through the gate, her grandmother had cut down on going out to jobs. For one thing, holding her mother's life back from the underworld officers that day had cost her a great deal and her health was not what it had been. For another, her grandmother wanted Ning Shu to get the practice, so whenever anyone in the village needed something, she sent Ning Shu out in her place.

Ning Shu used the money to buy clothes and appliances for her uncle and aunt, and a massage chair for her grandparents, and put the rest, along with the fifty thousand from the streaming, into the bank.

She was not going to be in the country for ever. Sooner or later she would go to the city, and to stand on her own feet in a city where land costs what it costs, she would need money behind her.

Nor had Ning Shu forgotten the road-blocking ghost. Late one evening she went up to the hill road, said the name Li Ping aloud and burned paper money for her, and said quietly, "When you walk the road to the Yellow Springs, take this for the fare. And if anybody gives you trouble, use my name. Ning Shu."

Ning Shu's name had already gone round that road. A girl of thirteen with the heavenly eye open, who had gone down into the underworld and come back out of it with a judge clearing the way, and whose future had no limit on it. Who would not give her her due?

---

That evening Ning Shu pricked her finger as usual and fed the black teardrop with the blood from the tip of it.

Ning Tuanzi was still badly hurt and had not appeared in a long time. Ning Yuanzi, though, still came out often to play.

Ning Shu bent over the desk doing her homework, and Yuanzi sat on the bed playing a game on the phone.

Ning Shu looked up at her. There was still some of the baby in her face, and she lay on her front on the bed, round all over, and the look of her was sweet and a little blank.

"Yuanzi, will you and your brother always be like this?"

"Mm?" Ning Yuanzi looked round blankly. "Like what?"

"Always this small. Never growing up."

Ning Shu had come up a good deal since she first saw Ning Yuanzi. Yuanzi looked exactly as she had the first time.

Like Peter Pan, never able to grow up.

Ning Yuanzi put her head down and thought about it, and said, "Because we're dead."

Ning Shu came over and lay down beside her and said, and meant it, "I'll find a way. There'll be a way to bring you both back."

Ning Yuanzi took her hand. "As long as I can stay near Mummy, I'm happy."

"Don't you want to be an ordinary child?"

Ning Shu propped her chin on her hand and lay there with her. "Do you know, in the city little girls go out shopping with their mothers and get dressed up, and they wear lovely flowered skirts. The city isn't like this poor corner of nowhere. There's all sorts of good things to eat. Pizza Hut, fried chicken, Häagen-Dazs."

Ning Yuanzi was almost drooling. "Mummy, what's Häagen-Dazs?"

"A very good kind of ice cream."

"What's ice cream?"

"It's."

Ning Shu did not know how to explain it, so she gave up. "Next time I go to the city I'll buy you some."

"Lovely."

Ning Yuanzi thought, and then asked, "Mummy, when do we get to meet Daddy?"

This time Ning Shu did not say no straight off. She asked instead, "Why are you so set on your father?"

"Mm. I want to know what sort of person he is."

"He's a."

Looking at how Ning Yuanzi was waiting for it, Ning Shu could not get the words sick in the head out of her mouth.

Ning Shu was quiet a moment, then stroked Ning Yuanzi's head and said, "Your father is a very impressive man. His family had money, but after he took over the group he worked, and he took it somewhere nobody else in the trade could get near."

"He's calm and he's steady, and he doesn't talk much, and he does big things quietly. Tuanzi is very like him that way."

Ning Yuanzi blinked up at her. "That's the first time I've heard Mummy say anything nice about Daddy."

Ning Shu sighed. She could not say one more bad word about their father in front of the children.

"Mummy, do you think Daddy will like me?"

Would Lu Zheng like Tuanzi and Yuanzi?

Ning Shu did not know. What she said was, "Yuanzi is so sweet, of course he will."

Ning Yuanzi sat up, delighted. "Will he buy me Häagen-Dazs?"

"He will," Ning Shu said. "He'll buy every Häagen-Dazs shop in the city and give you the lot."

"Wow." Ning Yuanzi was looking forward to it now. "Mummy, when are we going to find Daddy?"

Ah.

Ning Shu knew the day would come. With two children, she and Lu Zheng were tied together for this life as well.

"Not yet," Ning Shu said. "Your father is still a small boy. The pair of you turning up like this would frighten him."

"Mm, that's true." Ning Yuanzi was good about it. "We'll wait till Daddy's bigger, then."

Yuanzi was easy enough to talk round.

"Good girl." Ning Shu rubbed her head.

---

After Ning Yuanzi had gone, Ning Shu sat down under the lamp and started working out what she wanted next, stage by stage.

For now she still had to learn from her grandmother. She would have to stay in the village for three years at the least. And she had to do her schoolwork properly while she was learning.

In the last life she had never gone to high school. She had got into the business early, doing walk-on parts round the studios, and she had taken a lot of knocks, and she had come to understand how much a qualification matters. Once she was known, having left school early became the most useful weapon the people who hated her had. Her rivals were from famous universities or had studied abroad, and under all that gold leaf she looked very dim indeed.

She would do her middle school properly at the school in town. With the memory she had now, schoolwork was no trouble, so even though a country school could not teach what a city one could, she could still get good marks on her own.

After that she would go to the city for high school. Her aunt had raised it already, that Ning Shu and Gouwa should go into the city together for it, and that she and her husband would go in and find work and look after the two of them.

Ning Shu worked it out. Three years. Between the streaming and reading feng shui for businesspeople, she should make a good deal, and by then she would have enough put by for them all to live in the city, so her uncle and aunt would not be carrying too much. She might even be able to make their lives better than they were.

There would be far more opportunity in the city than in the village. With what she could do, she would get a footing there, and then she would bring her grandfather and grandmother in as well, and the whole family would live together and not be split up again.

As for Lu Zheng.

She would let that take its own course.