The Little Mystic Ancestor Comes Down the Mountain

[Urban Mysticism + Mythical Beasts from the Classic of Mountains and Seas + Ghost-Hunting Livestreams + Adored Little One + Feel-Good Face-Slapping] Yunyin Temple was on the verge of going under. The roof leaked, the paint was peeling off the statues, and the senior disciple couldn’t even scrape together enough money for incense offerings. Four-and-a-half-year-old Yuyu strapped a purple-gold gourd bigger than herself to her back, tucked away the old mobile phone her master had left her, and went down the mountain alone. She set up a stall beneath an overpass and scrawled four crooked characters on a sign: “Ghost hunting. Cheap.” Nobody believed her. That was until she started a livestream and, inside the most notorious haunted house on the internet, poured a plump Taotie out of her gourd. The vengeful ghost that had haunted the house for thirty years had barely appeared before the Taotie swallowed it whole, without leaving so much as a scrap. Yuyu clenched her tiny fist and told the camera, “There are no ghosts in this world, uncles and aunties. It’s just a magnetic field disturbance. Uncle Baize said so.” Behind the camera, the legendary auspicious beast Baize, famed for his vast knowledge of past and present, was helping her draw a kindergarten poster with watercolor pencils clenched in his mouth. The whole internet erupted. Experts of all stripes banded together to crash her show, only to be face-slapped by the four-and-a-half-year-old little tyrant in the sweetest little voice. The national paranormal affairs bureau came to recruit her in the middle of the night. Yuyu tilted her head. “Sure, but… you have to pay my senior brothers first.”