In the darkness, Cheng Chang heard someone calling out anxiously, “Young Prince! Young Prince!”
It was Sun Haiping and Zhang Dahu’s voices.
He wanted to answer them, but he couldn’t move.
Gradually, those voices grew distant, as if sinking beneath water, slowly replaced by another kind of sound—one that was familiar, and noisy.
“Behave yourself!”
It sounded like someone scolding.
“Officer, I really don’t know anything. He just came up the mountain to my temple to have his fortune told. You’re telling me a guy like that—white-collar, making millions a year, all sleek and successful—and he’s into this superstitious stuff?”
This was… the old monk from the outskirts of Hangzhou?
Nearby, two young nurses were laughing—this old monk, well into his sixties, was calling the officer “Officer, sir” like a child.
“And besides, look, I reported it myself, didn’t I? Went down the mountain myself to find him, didn’t I?”
The officer was jotting something down in his notebook as he spoke. “Reporting a crime is a citizen’s basic duty. Chasing someone off the mountain in a typhoon—if his girlfriend hadn’t come looking for him, you’d have regretted it for the rest of your life.”
“Yes, yes. Next time something like this happens, I’ll be sure to tell the officers right away.” The old monk nodded, then muttered under his breath, “Who would’ve thought he’d be so bent on getting himself killed…”
The officer pointed at a brightly colored woven sack by the old monk’s feet and asked, “What’s in this big bag?”
The old monk played it cagey, putting on an act. “I’m just a mountain man, officer. Rare trip into the city, thought I’d go see West Lake, Lingyin Temple, Hangzhou Intime City, spend a few days. This is just a change of clothes.”
As he spoke, he bent down and unzipped the bag with a rustling sound, pulling out t-shirts and jackets, offering them up for the officer to inspect.
He hadn’t broken any laws, so the officer didn’t really need to check what he was carrying. He said, “All right, all right,” told the old monk to zip his bag back up, and turned to look at Liao Zhuo and Duan Mingcheng standing nearby.
He recognized Liao Zhuo—the injured man’s girlfriend, the one who had called it in.
And this other person…
Liao Zhuo introduced him. “This is Cheng Chang’s college roommate. He heard something happened and just rushed over from Shanghai.”
“My surname’s Duan,” Duan Mingcheng said. “Thank you, officer, sorry for the trouble.”
The officer nodded. He’d received the call about a car accident in the mountains, gone in to help bring the injured man to the hospital, and now that someone was here to look after him and the cause of the accident had been established—driving in a typhoon—there was nothing more for him to do here.
He looked at the old monk and reminded him, “Remember, wait until the orange alert lifts before getting on the highway.” Then he closed his notebook, tucked it away, and left.
Once the officer had gone, a nurse came over and glanced at Liao Zhuo. “Patient’s family member, please come settle the bill.”
Liao Zhuo nodded and was about to follow her when Duan Mingcheng stopped her and asked, “That thing with your family—did you get it sorted out?”
Liao Zhuo froze for a moment, finding it hard to bring herself to answer.
Ten years ago, her uncle had gone to prison over a gambling-related brawl. Recently released, he’d gotten mixed up in gambling again, taken out a high-interest loan, and when he couldn’t pay it back, had gone into hiding. The loan sharks had come looking for him and cornered Liao Zhuo’s mother right outside her own front door.
Liao Zhuo had helped pay off part of the debt, but there was still three hundred thousand yuan outstanding.
A couple of days ago, when she’d gone to Cheng Chang’s home, he’d asked her about it too.
Liao Zhuo looked somewhat embarrassed. “He told you?”
“He didn’t mention it,” Duan Mingcheng said. “I just know.”
With any connections in society at all, it wasn’t hard to find these things out with a little asking around.
Seeing how Liao Zhuo looked, Duan Mingcheng said, “That ICU he’s in runs six thousand to twenty thousand a day—burns through money fast. Let me handle the payment.” He pulled a card out of his wallet. “He left a card with his brother. When I came from Shanghai, his brother gave it to me to bring along.”
Liao Zhuo nodded. “Thank you, then.”
“It’s nothing,” Duan Mingcheng said.
Once Duan Mingcheng had left, the old monk glanced around, then walked over carrying his woven sack, grinning. “Miss, could I take a look at your boyfriend?”
Liao Zhuo frowned. “He’s in the ICU. You can’t just visit whenever you want.”
“I came all the way down the mountain for this, just let me take a look,” the old monk said. “Besides, he doesn’t have any family here—today it’s just me coming to see him. After this, probably no one else will come at all.”
Liao Zhuo asked, “How do you know he has no family?”
“He came to me to have his fortune told, didn’t he? Born under an inauspicious star, no father, no mother, thin ties of kinship. And you—you’re not really his girlfriend, are you? You seem to like him well enough, but I don’t think he feels the same way about you.”
The old monk added, “There’s someone else on his mind.”
“Who?”
The old monk turned shameless. “Just go tell the nurse to let me take a peek at him, just through the window, is that so much to ask? I’ll tell you once I’ve seen him.”
Liao Zhuo hesitated a moment, then went to speak to the nursing station.
After a while, a nurse came back with her and said to the old monk, “The patient’s still not out of danger. Visiting time is only five minutes, and you can only look through the glass window—no entering.”
With that, she took the two of them to wash their hands and put on sterile gowns and masks.
Looking through the glass window of the ICU, Cheng Chang lay quietly on the hospital bed, hooked up to all manner of machines, his face pale as paper, a faint bruised darkness visible at the center of his forehead—what was commonly called a “darkened brow,” though his vital signs had stabilized considerably.
“Seen enough?” the nurse beside them asked.
“Seen enough, seen enough,” the old monk answered. Through the window, he pressed his palms together and murmured, “Amitabha. May you recover soon.”
The two of them left the ICU ward together. Liao Zhuo asked the old monk, “Can you tell me now?”
The old monk pulled out his phone, swiped up and down, and pulled up a QR code. “I need to calculate it first. Once I’ve figured it out, I’ll tell you. This is my WeChat—want to add each other?”
Liao Zhuo, seeing him for the con artist he clearly was, didn’t want to bother with him further, and seeing Duan Mingcheng step out of the elevator, walked over to him instead.
The old monk shrugged helplessly, picked up his woven sack, and headed toward the stairwell at the other end of the corridor.
It was already past midnight at the hospital; aside from the emergency department, everywhere else was quiet.
One of the lights in the stairwell was broken, flickering on and off overhead. The moment the old monk stepped into the stairwell, he dropped his playful, obsequious expression entirely. Holding onto the railing, he made his way down step by step, his face growing graver with each step, until a flicker of genuine dread crept across his wrinkled features, his pace quickening as he went, until finally he burst out through the door at the bottom of the stairs.
Following the signs, he hurried out through the emergency lobby and circled around to the hospital’s back courtyard.
The wind outside had died down by now. This courtyard, close to the hospital morgue, was normally empty except for the occasional smoker.
But at this hour, the few people crouched in the corner smoking, seeing the old monk, found something unsettling about him and grew uneasy, stubbing out their cigarettes on the ground and quickly leaving.
The old monk stepped over some dry branches, found a spot to sit down, then opened his woven sack and pulled out, from beneath the top layer of t-shirts and jackets, a small bell, an incense burner, several sticks of incense, and a very old, thread-bound book.
He lit the incense, set it in the burner, arranged everything just so, then looked up into the empty air, raised the back of his hand, wiped away a trembling bead of sweat, and suddenly spoke. “You can hear me, can’t you?”
“You’re not dead yet, so you must be able to hear me.”
If anyone had been there to see the old monk in that moment, they would surely have thought him mad—speaking to empty air as though some ghost stood before him.
“I asked my master. That dark patch between your brows—it’s a sign of the soul wandering loose from the body. You’ve been a good man across three lifetimes; you won’t die so easily.”
Even as he spoke these words, he was genuinely afraid. The sweat he’d just wiped from his forehead beaded up again, fine and dense. He let out a long breath.
“I didn’t mean to, didn’t mean to chase you away. In a typhoon like that, you should’ve just stayed in your car and waited for the rain to pass before coming down the mountain…”
“My master says all good and evil in this world bring their own consequences. You’re hanging between life and death right now, and I bear some responsibility for that. I… I’ll try to save you. If you wake up, we’ll call it even between us. If you don’t wake up, please, don’t come looking for me to settle the score.”
With that, he lifted the bell, opened the thread-bound book before him, and began chanting, following the first line—”Soul, return”—word by word, line by line.
The old monk had studied both Buddhist and Taoist practices. His voice, low and resonant, chanted the scripture, at first clear and distinct, then gradually merging into a strange, otherworldly cadence, mingling with the ringing of the bell, sinking into the depths of the night, hazy and indistinct.
As he chanted, he closed his eyes, and a wind unexpectedly rose around him, growing stronger, rustling the pages of the book before him.
The night suddenly grew restless, as though every line of scripture the old monk chanted, mingling with the night wind, held the power to call back the souls of the dead.
Not far off, a hearse pulled into the hospital, and a nurse wheeled a body out from the morgue. As the door closed behind her, a gust of wind slipped through the gap in the window into the morgue, stirring the white sheets draped over each body, setting them drifting gently.
The hearse drove off into the distance; somewhere, grieving family members wept.
In this vast hospital, every day brought both birth and death.
Soul, return—the words seemed to hang right at his ear.
Up on a higher floor, in Cheng Chang’s ICU room, two nurses in sterile gowns pushed open the door to record the readings on the heart monitor. One of them glanced at Cheng Chang and couldn’t help but remark, “He really is good-looking.”
“He is,” the other agreed. “When they first brought him in, I remember thinking, how can someone be this handsome?”
Having finished recording the data, the two of them were just about to leave the room when the floor suddenly trembled.
“What was that? An earthquake?”
“This isn’t Sichuan—earthquakes don’t just happen here that easily.”
But no sooner had she said this than the floor trembled again, and then began to shake gently, continuously.
The two nurses exchanged a glance, momentarily at a loss for what was happening. In the chaos, all one of them managed to say was, “Protect the patient!”
One of them hurried to steady Cheng Chang’s hospital bed.
At that very moment, the heart monitor suddenly began blaring an alarm. On the bed, Cheng Chang’s breathing grew rapid, his face pale, his striking features taking on an eerie, almost otherworldly beauty in that instant. His lips moved as though trying to speak, hot breath fogging up his oxygen mask, and combined with the machine’s low, alarmed beeping, the whole scene felt uncannily like something out of the underworld.
Soul, return.
The nurse holding onto the bed stared, frozen, still unable to process what was happening, when suddenly Cheng Chang’s chest heaved sharply upward, and his eyes flew open.
Eyes that were, without question, remarkably beautiful—black and white sharply defined.
And yet, looking straight into them now, the white was ghastly pale, and the black seemed to draw in all the darkness of the deep night, as though it could pull a person in entirely.
The nurse let out a terrified scream, stumbling backward and falling to the floor, staring in horror at the figure lying on the bed.
But all of this happened in the span of a single instant.
By the time she scrambled back up and looked around again, the tremor that had just shaken the room seemed to have been nothing more than an illusion.
The heart monitor read normally, the vitals steady as before, and on the bed, Cheng Chang had already closed his eyes again, sinking once more into endless darkness.
…