I Lay Down the Rules for Ghosts

The old folks in our village all say that if you’re walking at night and hear someone behind you call your name, never look back.

I never believed them, until I became a psychologist in the city and took on a patient.

He said someone called his full name in his dreams every night, and he had already looked back three times.

At our fourth session, his neck was twisted into a knot, and he died on the sofa in my office.

The police called it suicide, but using the method my grandfather taught me, I found four black finger marks on the back of his neck.

It was a “Name-Calling Ghost” described in the Records of a Hundred Ghosts. Every time you look back, it comes one foot closer. On the fourth time, it snaps your neck.

My name is Chen Ye, a psychologist who ought to believe in science.

But now I believe this:

Even the ghosts in the city have to follow the rules passed down by the old folks.

Cases I’ve dealt with:

Putting yellow talismans on a staircase that gains an extra step every night, telling it to “put the steps back in place”

Playing matchmaker with red-string coins for a female ghost who hanged herself in a red wedding dress, sending her off to reincarnate

Burying a “warding object” in the courtyard of an old house where people keep dying, to suppress the evil underground

Until I discovered that every one of these strange events was connected to a battered book my grandfather left behind:

The Complete Guide to Folk Forbidden Arts.

The last page of the book says:

“Once you’ve mastered the ninety-nine methods above, you must deal with the hundredth: the sky has cracked, and it must be mended.”