Back in the room, looking at the flour scattered on the floor, the stained red thread loops, the entire space felt empty and desolate.
Before knowing Duoduo's story, Xu Shuangning had been terrified; now that she had been sent away, her feelings were complicated.
It seemed she shouldn't have been so afraid back then. What she had witnessed today gave her a completely new perspective on ghosts.
Li Daonian squatted on the floor, tearing away the clear tape. "Your landlord is something else. The place has been haunted for over a decade, and he never thought to have anyone look at the feng shui or exorcise it."
"If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I never would've believed ghosts actually exist in this world," Xu Shuangning said.
"Yeah, true. By the way, don't mention this to the landlord. Rent is cheap right now, and he's probably terrified you'll move out."
Xu Shuangning picked up a broom. "Do you have class this morning?"
"Yeah, audiovisual language," Li Daonian said. "Planning to skip it and go back to the dorm to sleep."
"I have class too. After we eat, let's head back to school together."
"Alright."
After sweeping the floor, Li Daonian told her not to rush into cooking just yet. Together, they tore down the award certificates completely, then checked to see if any other items had been left behind. It was best to throw everything out and make a clean break.
This wasn't out of fear that Duoduo would come back.
It was just that as a ghost who had lingered here for so many years, she was bound to affect the feng shui to some degree. Besides, seeing old belongings only brought back memories, making it impossible not to think about the whole affair.
Let the past be the past.
The two of them finished tearing up the certificates together, and then found a rusty iron hairpin in the window gap. When they lifted the mattress, they discovered a photograph.
It was a picture of Deng Dan and Duoduo standing together in a park with a Ferris wheel in the background. Because of the passage of time, it was covered in stains, and their clothes had faded to a greenish tint.
"Should we give this to Duoduo's mom?" Xu Shuangning asked.
"No need, give it to me. I'll just find some intersection on the way back and burn it," Li Daonian said.
After searching the rest of the room and finding no other leftover items, Xu Shuangning went to cook.
Once the egg drop soup was ready, the two of them sat down to eat. Li Daonian smiled and said, "You don't need to pay me this time. It wasn't your fault, the apartment isn't yours, and I genuinely wanted to help the girl anyway. Consider it a good deed."
Xu Shuangning lowered her head to drink her soup, her expression unreadable, and said nothing.
She was tacitly agreeing, presumably.
Li Daonian figured he had gotten a free meal out of it anyway, so he wasn't losing out. Plus, he'd have someone around who owed him a favor, which meant he was building up some social capital.
Case in point: when that bathhouse was haunted last time, Li Daonian had to deal with a stark-naked middle-aged woman. The kicker was that she was so mortified she wouldn't cooperate at all, leaving him completely at his wits' end.
The electric scooter puttered all the way to campus. After parting ways, Li Daonian walked straight back to his dorm.
Sure enough, Qiuyang and Xiaobang were asleep. Dammit, it would be a miracle if those two didn't skip their morning classes.
He glanced at Guoyang's bed. The bed curtains were wide open, and it was completely empty.
Li Daonian was already used to it. Guoyang's whereabouts were always untraceable. When he was in a good mood, he wouldn't return to campus for a week or two, claiming he went traveling, only to come back with a huge bag of local specialties. Other times, he would suddenly barge into the dorm in the middle of the night and crash hard.
He really knew how to live life—having the time of his life playing around every day, then diving headfirst into his final projects and pulling them off brilliantly.
As for attendance and stuff, heaven knew how he managed to dodge getting caught.
Actually, heaven didn't even know.
Rinsing his feet and splashing some water on his face, Li Daonian crawled comfortably into bed. Their dorm was on the ground floor, blocking out every scrap of light, making it pitch black all day long just like a goddamn cave.
Pulling the bed curtains shut plunged it into absolute darkness.
The moment he lay down, his phone lit up.
Xu Shuangning had transferred eight hundred yuan:
"Can't let you make the trip for nothing."
"Okay," Li Daonian replied, and then accepted the money.
Young people probably found all that social etiquette exhausting—*here, take it, oh no I can't accept, please, no*—only to end up accepting it in the end anyway. It was much better to just be straightforward.
After collecting the money, he crashed and fell fast asleep.
When Li Daonian woke up again, it was because Qiuyang had shaken him awake. The bastard yanked his bed curtain wide open with a loud *swish*, stuck his head in, and yelled, "You awake? Let's go grab something to eat."
"What the hell!" Li Daonian mumbled groggily. "Where's my right to privacy? Aren't you worried that you'd pull my curtains open and find me doing an elephant dance in here?"
"Oh come on, let's go. Your bed wasn't even shaking. We've got afternoon classes, hurry up and eat so we can go."
And so, drifting through the haze, the afternoon passed.
By evening, Qiuyang and Xiaobang still vividly remembered their promise to treat him to hot pot. While playing League of Legends together in a duo queue, they kept urging Li Daonian to pick a restaurant.
He chose a place he thought was decent before, then replied on WeChat to an inquiry about feng shui from a previous client.
His answer was that he had no goddamn idea. Catching ghosts was simple—just like putting an elephant into a refrigerator in three steps:
Step one: Find the ghost.
Step two: Talk to it.
Step three: Use brute force or reason.
Super simple. As for feng shui? He actually needed to study that, and he just didn't have the patience.
At one in the morning, sleepiness arrived right on schedule. Qiuyang was staying up late as usual, Xiaobang was in bed scrolling through short videos and chuckling away, and Guoyang still hadn't shown up.
Seems like a pretty ordinary day, right?
Li Daonian had thought so before falling asleep, too.
Li Daonian was having a great time flying around on his broomstick, having just passed the Cape of Good Hope two seconds ago, when he heard a voice. It sounded like it was coming from far away in the sky:
"Big brother, big brother..."
What the hell was that?
Li Daonian lost his balance for a second and went hurtling downward with his broom.
"Duoduo? Why are you here? Can you fly on a broom too?"
When he finally steadied the broom, Li Daonian abruptly noticed a tiny figure flying right beside him.
She was also riding a broom, wearing a happy expression, looking just like a little witch straight out of an anime.
"Big brother, the dream you're having is so much fun!"
"What?" Li Daonian didn't register it at first. "Did you say I'm dreaming?"
The moment he realized he was dreaming, he felt he could no longer control the broom and plunged headfirst into the Atlantic Ocean below.
Damn it!
Li Daonian bolted awake with a start and checked his phone: 3:00 AM.
The room was dead silent, without a single sound—creepy quiet.
*Did I time-travel? Isn't this a suspense novel?* That was Li Daonian's first thought.
Because there was no way Qiuyang would go to sleep this early.
But after taking a moment to collect himself, he had to accept that pigs were flying—Qiuyang was actually asleep.
This felt different from waking up for a normal bathroom break. Normally, he could chat a bit with Qiuyang, who'd still be awake, but getting up tonight felt bleak and desolate.
Wearing only shorts and going shirtless, Li Daonian turned on the bathroom light and squinted as he began to pee.
"Big brother, big brother..."
*Shit!* Li Daonian jumped, nearly pissing on his own hands.
"Duoduo?" He scanned his surroundings, alarm bells ringing wildly in his head. "Didn't I send you away?"
"Big brother, I'm sorry. I didn't leave."
The girl's voice seemed to be whispering right into his ear, cutting off his stream mid-flow.
"What's going on? Is that you, Duoduo?" Li Daonian asked again to confirm.
"It's me. I'm so sorry."
He could hear Duoduo's voice, but couldn't see her body.
She really hadn't left? Was she still in her ghost form?
"Sigh~" Li Daonian sighed, covering his crotch. "Duoduo, stop looking around. Go outside first, we'll talk about what's going on in a minute."
"Oh, okay," Duoduo acknowledged twice.
*So mentally exhausting,* Li Daonian thought, covering his face.
Wait, he hadn't washed his hands yet!