That night, Xia Chuan met someone in a fluorescent green cycling outfit by the river.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't catch up.
The next day, he learned that the girl had jumped to her death two months earlier.
From then on, his world began to leak. Water stains on the ceiling turned into faces, the feng shui mirror cracked on its own, and someone pounded on his door at three in the morning, but there was no one outside the peephole.
Old Wu, the security guard, drowned in a water stain barely two millimeters deep.
The neighbor's dog barked all night at a puddle.
He moved into Dongyue Temple and started learning how to draw talismans from a Taoist priest.
A graduate student named Zhao Yukun lived downstairs in the apartment complex.
Zhao Yukun didn't believe in any of it. He said there wasn't enough data to conclude that "ghosts exist."
But whenever Xia Chuan was scared, Zhao Yukun came to him.
At last, a secret buried for decades came to light: the story of three generations of protection and sacrifice.
It started raining again in Rongcheng. Xia Chuan stood in the mist, his legs trembling.
It didn't matter what was in the river anymore.
As long as that person was there.
A superstitious, overworked bottom × a data-above-all top
In the end, we'll all believe.
Theme: The little things we overlook may be the very source of our terror.
