My name is Lin Bei, the 108th-generation successor to a feng shui family.
Don't be fooled by the word "family." My family gave up the trade long ago. Grandpa says people these days don't believe in ghosts, they believe in science. We switched to selling funeral wreaths, but business is bad because people nowadays even buy those online.
Still, I learned a whole set of skills from Grandpa as a child. Feng shui, balancing yin and yang, driving away evil spirits and warding off misfortune: I'm good at it all. I just never had a chance to use them.
Then one day, a woman in a red dress came to see me.
She said her house was haunted.
I said, "Ma'am, what era are we living in? Where would ghosts come from?"
She cried and said they were real, and that they appeared every night. She showed me a video on her phone. In the video, her living room was empty, but a cushion on the sofa floated up by itself, spun around three times in midair, then dropped to the floor.
I stared at the video, my palms sweating.
Because I saw something else in it. A black shadow, crouched in the corner, perfectly still, as if it were watching me.
I looked up at the woman.
"Ma'am, where do you live?"
"Emerald Bay, in the south of the city."
I froze for a moment. Emerald Bay was the most expensive development in the city. Apartments there cost tens of thousands per square meter.
"Well... I won't be cheap."
The woman took a wad of cash from her bag and set it on the table.
"Fifty thousand as a deposit. Another fifty thousand when the job's done."
I looked at the wad of cash and swallowed.
"All right. I'll catch this ghost."
