Qi Gu had a contract with Green Ghost, so he sensed the ghost the moment he entered the room.
Green Ghost had spent years helping himself to Qi Gu's incense offerings and had gained some cultivation. Even if he appeared in front of a camera, it would not capture his form.
"What's the situation?" Qi Gu asked.
"There are lots of Yin Corpses here, stuffed inside plastic people... but they're different from other Yin Corpses. I twied talking to them, but they kept ignoring me. There's a ghost too, but it wouldn't talk to me and even twied to hit me," Green Ghost said, feeling somewhat wronged. He thought his own kind here were really rather unfriendly.
A Yin Corpse was a corpse that had been nurtured, most often one that failed to decay because it had been buried improperly. It was said that after remaining undecayed for a hundred years, a Yin Corpse would turn into a jiangshi.
"Yin Corpses?" Qi Gu sounded surprised for once.
Green Ghost nodded, confirming it again.
Qi Gu naturally knew what Yin Corpses were and had guessed that there were bodies hidden inside the mannequins, but... a Yin Corpse's body and soul should have been inseparable. Yet aside from the yin energy picked up from the air in the clinic, these mannequins had no other yin energy on them.
That was also why he had initially thought the mannequins posed no danger.
Qi Gu did not doubt Green Ghost's judgment. Green Ghost and Yin Corpses both belonged to the ghostly kind, so his perception in such matters was surely more acute than that of Qi Gu, a human.
Yin Corpses without souls? This was the first time Qi Gu had heard of such a thing.
While considering what could have caused such a thing, Qi Gu motioned for Green Ghost to return to the gourd and clean up the sunflower seed shells while he was at it.
Green Ghost obediently agreed, his large eyes gleaming like grapes against his green skin.
He must have been born with a defect, with one fewer finger than other children. So his family had drowned him alive in a pond.
Really, it was only a missing finger, not some major problem that would cost a fortune... Had he been luckier and born into a good family, they would surely have showered him with love and affection.
After drowning, he had become a ghost with green skin.
Qi Gu had found him during a university summer break. He had gone to the mountains to handle a supernatural matter for someone and discovered him beside the pond where he had drowned.
Ghosts retained the intelligence they had at the time of death, so although Green Ghost had been dead for over a decade, his mind was still that of a three-year-old child.
At first, Qi Gu had thought he was sitting beside the pond waiting to drag someone in as his replacement. But it was the summer heat, and many people came and went, floating and swimming in the pond to cool off. Green Ghost showed no intention of making a move, merely sitting cross-legged with his head propped on his hands, watching them.
A little black dog ran to the edge of the pond, and Green Ghost finally moved, reaching out a little green hand.
Was he finally going to strike? Qi Gu thought.
But Green Ghost only curiously touched the black dog's fluffy tail before immediately withdrawing his hand.
Then he watched the puppy paddle around in the water on its four short legs, his big eyes never blinking.
If a drowned ghost had no merit and did not seize a replacement, it would never be able to leave the waters where it had drowned, nor could it reincarnate.
His heart aching with sympathy, Qi Gu had used a method to give Green Ghost some merit, allowing him to leave.
Afterward, Green Ghost had kept following him. Qi Gu could not bear to turn him away, so he had signed a contract with him. That way, as long as Green Ghost followed him and accumulated enough spiritual merit, he could reincarnate instead of spending eternity as an ignorant little ghost whose mind had never developed.
Green Ghost dutifully dealt with the sunflower seed shells inside the gourd, then lay at the bottom, snoring softly as he slept, his chest slowly rising and falling.
Qi Gu put the lid back on the gourd and stopped tossing rubbish inside.
Beside him, the cameraman was once again slumped on the floor, limp as a puddle, looking as though he was about to wet himself in fright.
Only then did Qi Gu realize that, from the cameraman's perspective, he had just been talking to himself and saying strange things. He hurriedly said, "Don't be scared. I'm not possessed. I was just talking to a friend, the kind you can't see."
At those words, the cameraman trembled even harder.
"..."
[Holy shit, what the hell? Qi Gu scared me to death when he suddenly started talking. I thought he was possessed, aaaaaah!]
[Just putting on a supernatural act. I could do that too.]
[Comments, protect me!]
[So Qi Gu keeps a little ghost? Then could keeping a ghost be the reason he's gotten popular again?]
[...Didn't he say they were friends?]
[How can you still eat sunflower seeds in a situation like this, huh?!]
[He's been managing just fine. He's been eating the whole way.]
The live comments were a chaotic mess.
Qi Gu knew nothing of these nasty comments, and even if he had, he would only have found them tedious.
He sped up his search and finally found the clue card the production team had hidden in a drawer.
The card was part of a jigsaw puzzle. The piece he had found happened to show half a man's head, along with one eye beneath it.
It was an eye that looked sinister at a glance, harboring considerable malice. Above it was an eyebrow made fierce by years of frowning, with a black mole of middling size at its outer end.
From this part of the man's face alone, Qi Gu could roughly deduce that the person in the picture had definitely committed murder and caused trouble.
He left the room, and the four other guests and their cameramen outside crowded around him like ducklings that had found their mother, asking worriedly what things had been like inside.
"Nothing much happened. This is the clue card I found. You should go too." Qi Gu casually handed the card to Mu Xingchen, who looked the most curious.
Mu Xingchen stared at the picture for a few moments and asked, "This guy looks so fierce. Why would the production team give us a photo of a strange man as a clue?"
"Could he be an extra the production team hired to flesh out the plot?" Vivian said.
None of the guests suspected that the picture had been swapped out by something else. After staring at it for a while, they each entered their assigned consultation rooms.
[If he really is an extra, he's a pretty good actor.]
[He looks like a murderer at first glance.]
[Not just any murderer, either. He'd have to be one of those vicious serial killers.]
[I don't know whether this extra can act, but he's definitely better than Qi Gu was in those two crappy movies.]
Off-site, Old Ke had already gone numb. As Song An turned toward him, he said reflexively, "It wasn't me. I didn't do it."
Xiao Li said, "What we originally prepared was a straight-on photo of the clinic, not this man at all."
Song An stared at the black mole at the end of the eyebrow on the screen. The feature felt familiar, as though he had seen it somewhere before.
But when he tried to remember, he could not place it right away.
Before you continue