Chen Shouyi was an orthodox exorcist, but these days nobody believed in the supernatural, so he had to make ends meet telling fortunes at the night market.
“I can tell your fortune about love or work. If I’m wrong, you don’t pay!”
When a glamorous woman reeking of perfume came over, he didn’t even raise his eyes.
A thousand-year-old fox spirit, the kind that possessed the living and sucked out their yang energy.
“Hey, handsome, tell my fortune, will you?”
Chen Shouyi leisurely counted on his fingers, then curled his lip. “Have you been dreaming about chewing raw meat lately?”
The woman shuddered.
Before he could say another word, a gale swept down the street, and the streetlights crackled and burst.
The woman’s face twisted out of shape. Her features melted into a white fox mask, and a hoarse, grotesque laugh rolled out of her throat. “Damn fortune-teller… are you tired of living?”
Black smoke poured from her seven orifices, turning into six enormous, furry tails that lashed down to crush him.
Chen Shouyi stood perfectly still.
He lowered his eyes and formed a seal with both hands before his chest. His thin lips parted, as if reciting a bedtime rhyme:
“Flames to the south, cold to the north, east and west winds split three thousand folds.”
“Flesh and blood become locks, bone becomes a fence; no evil spirit may cross this shore.”
When the six fox tails were three feet above his head, they suddenly snapped apart, as if they had crashed into an invisible glass wall.
“Thunder in the veins, fire in the organs, burn away delusions and restore the face.”
“Tonight, I set a boundary here: ‘Begone.’”
At the final syllable, the fox spirit let out a shriek that pierced the eardrums. Black smoke was forcibly torn from the woman’s seven orifices, twisting and struggling in the air for three seconds…
Then it scattered into a skyful of sparks and vanished in the night wind.
The woman crumpled, and Chen Shouyi reached out to catch her.
The streetlights came back on, as if nothing had happened.
He looked down at the unconscious woman in his arms and sighed.
“This job… is going to cost extra.”
