Spirit Tamer

"What?!"

"Where's the ghost?!"

Everyone looked around in panic, but found nothing.

"Fang Xiu, why are you spouting nonsense at a time like this? What ghost?"

A badly frightened coworker glared at Fang Xiu.

"Exactly! At a time like this, you're still deliberately trying to scare us."

Fang Xiu watched them calmly. His handsome, fair face looked even more finely sculpted in the darkness, and coupled with his utterly emotionless expression, it gave him the eerie air of a living doll.

Under the gaze of those eyes, as still as stagnant water, everyone felt deeply uneasy.

Even the voices berating him gradually faded.

Suddenly, Fang Xiu spoke.

"Wang Xiaoli is gone."

Wang Xiaoli?

"Nonsense! Wang Xiaoli is right beside me. Wang Xiaoli, say something." A coworker hurriedly called out to her.

But Wang Xiaoli did not answer.

His heart lurched. He quickly shone his phone's light beside him and discovered, to his horror, that Wang Xiaoli really had vanished.

"Wang Xiaoli! Wang Xiaoli!"

He called out twice, but no answer came.

The crowd erupted.

"Wang Xiaoli really disappeared!"

"Did a ghost really show up?"

"Fang Xiu, did you see what the ghost looked like?" Wang Ziteng suddenly asked.

Although Wang Ziteng had a grudge against Fang Xiu, he was not about to start a fight in a life-or-death crisis.

Fang Xiu replied calmly, "It was too dark to see clearly. I didn't see the ghost, only Wang Xiaoli disappearing."

He was so calm that it seemed what had just disappeared was not a person, but an ant.

An ordinary person witnessing something so eerie would at least look panicked, even if they did not scream.

Yet Fang Xiu described Wang Xiaoli's disappearance without haste or the slightest flicker of emotion.

No one present was a fool. After years in the workplace, they all knew something about reading people. Anyone could tell that Fang Xiu's composure was abnormal.

Suspicion suddenly crossed Wang Ziteng's face. "Fang Xiu, you don't seem afraid of ghosts at all. Are you a Spirit Tamer?"

Fang Xiu shook his head and asked, "What's a Spirit Tamer?"

The suspicion in Wang Ziteng's eyes deepened.

"A Spirit Tamer is someone who harnesses their own Spirituality. I don't really understand the details either. Spirituality seems to be the power of the mind. My cousin said that immense power lies hidden in the human mind, but everyone's mind is covered in dust, like a luminous pearl coated in grime.

"And Spirit Tamers are people who wipe away that dust and let their minds shine with the light of Spirituality."

Wang Ziteng wanted to explain further, but Wu Dahai interrupted him. "Young Master Wang! How do you still have time to give us a lecture? People have already started disappearing. Hurry up and find a way for us to escape!"

"Shut up!" Wang Ziteng snapped furiously. "Escape? How? Where would we go? Only three people have disappeared so far. If we wander around recklessly and violate the ghost's taboo, we might all die!

"Besides, the secrets I'm telling you now are a matter of life and death!

"How do you think Spirit Tamers come into being? They aren't born that way. They become one later.

"Right now, our best chance of getting out of this is for someone to become a Spirit Tamer!"

"So Spirit Tamers are created inside Ghost Domains?" Fang Xiu suddenly asked.

Wang Ziteng nodded, looking somewhat surprised that Fang Xiu could still make such sharp deductions.

"That's right. The only way to become a Spirit Tamer is to draw on a ghost's power!

"As I said, everyone's mind is covered in dust. To polish it, you have to meet two conditions.

"First, you have to experience the sheer terror of being caught between life and death. Only after that ordeal can the dust on your mind loosen. Some other major shock can work too, as long as it stimulates the mind.

"Second, you have to make contact with a ghost and allow its power to invade your mind.

"It acts like a cloth, wiping away the dust.

"But there's one thing you have to remember. Although a ghost's power can wipe the dust from your mind, that power carries a kind of corruption. As it polishes your mind, it also corrupts it.

"If the mind is a dust-covered luminous pearl, then a ghost's power is a bloodstained cloth. As it wipes away the dust, it inevitably stains the pearl red.

"The so-called light of Spirituality is actually the product of a ghost twisting the mind's original radiance."

After hearing this, Fang Xiu began piecing things together.

It seemed this was a world where the mind shaped reality. A Spirit Tamer's power came from the combination of their own mind and a ghost's power.

The state between life and death acted as a catalyst for the two. Like a chemical reaction that required heat, that brush with death was the heating process.

At this thought, Fang Xiu felt a little puzzled. Being caught between life and death, making contact with ghosts... I've already done both. Why haven't I awakened my Spirituality? Or have I awakened it without realizing?

At that moment, Wang Ziteng continued, "So everyone here has a chance to become a Spirit Tamer. Once someone does, we'll have a chance of escaping this Ghost Domain!"

"What are the signs of awakening your Spirituality?" Fang Xiu asked again.

"First, your physical abilities surpass those of ordinary people, and your senses become extremely sharp. Once your Spirituality awakens, you also gain a unique ability that reflects your mind. No two minds are exactly alike, so no two abilities are exactly alike either."

An ability? A reflection of the mind?

Fang Xiu immediately thought of Death Rollback. Could that be my ability?

No, that's not right. My physical abilities and senses are no different from an ordinary person's. They haven't improved at all.

Besides, he had a faint intuition that Death Rollback was an ability he had possessed ever since crossing into this world, not something gained by awakening his Spirituality.

Taking everything into account, it seemed he had not yet awakened his Spirituality.

Then here's the question. If Death Rollback isn't an ability gained from awakening Spirituality, why haven't I become a Spirit Tamer when I've clearly met both conditions?

Then Fang Xiu suddenly realized that he had not actually met all the conditions, because of Death Rollback.

He had experienced the state between life and death. That should not disappear with Death Rollback. It should be a state of mind that, like his memories, remained unchanged by the rollback.

After all, his mentality had already undergone a complete transformation after dying so many times.

But he had not fulfilled the condition of making contact with a ghost. Every time he made contact with his wife, he died. In this surviving run, that contact had effectively never happened.

As for the ghosts filling the streets, Fang Xiu suspected those did not count as contact at all. Without "seeing" them, ghosts did not exist as far as humans were concerned.

This time was entirely different. The ghost hidden in the darkness seemed to have broken out of illusion and into reality. It could kill without anyone needing to meet the condition of "seeing" it.

The psychiatric hospital's disappearance, a ghost that could kill without being "seen," and Spirit Tamers-all these pieces of information intertwined in Fang Xiu's mind.

There had to be some connection between them. He simply had not found it yet.

Although he was trapped in danger, Fang Xiu felt a rare flicker of satisfaction.

He had seen hope for revenge: becoming a Spirit Tamer.

Suddenly, something shifted at the edge of Fang Xiu's vision. "Someone else has disappeared."