—This was the very first time Nan Zhi had witnessed a supernatural event in reality with her own eyes.
Feigning stretching her body, she rolled her neck to get a clearer look.
It was the somewhat rough, chubby hand of a middle-aged man.
The palm was bent at a grotesque angle, and through the fracture at the wrist, ghastly white bone was faintly visible.
The stubby fingers fumbled around and covered the lampshade in a mischievous manner, causing the light to flicker immediately.
Amid the complaints of her coworkers, it slowly dissipated into thin air.
From appearance to disappearance, barely a moment had passed.
It was so fast that it almost felt like a mere hallucination.
Shaking herself back to reality, her mouse cursor was still hovering over the article reporting on the suicide:
【It is reported that Chen was suspected of taking extreme measures due to excessive life stress...
Previously, the person in charge of the company, Mr. Wang, stated that Chen had often complained during work with extreme remarks such as “so tired,” “I just want to die,” and “it's too hard”...
Chen's coworkers also testified that Chen bore great pressure, and it is likely this pressure was the chief culprit behind his decision to end his life...
Here, the author urges everyone... to maintain a positive mindset in life...
If you encounter similar situations, please seek help from family and friends around you... you can also consult professional psychological counselors to relieve stress...
Municipal Care Psychological Counseling Hotline: 51872***
National China Psychological Crisis Intervention Center Rescue Hotline: 010-625******】
Although all crucial details were disguised under pseudonyms, anyone with enough interest could easily dig up the truth.
“Chen Ping... Let me think. What kind of wish would a ghost who has been dead for a year have?”
Nan Zhi leaned back, resting against the back of her chair as her fingers lightly tapped the desktop.
She wasn't in a hurry to jump into the mission.
For one thing, this was a mission from reality.
In the game, death only meant reloading and resurrecting, but dying in reality was permanent.
For another, she knew next to nothing about the ghost named Chen Ping. Leaving aside fulfilling his wish, she didn't even know what he looked like.
The mission was to fulfill his wish.
But how broad was this “wish”?
What if his wish was something absurd like “ruling the Earth” or “coming back from the dead”?
And what counted as completion?
To what extent did she need to fulfill it?
All of this had to be thought through in advance.
If this were in the game, Nan Zhi might have just charged in recklessly brandishing her slaughtering knife.
Beat him up first. If she won, she'd ask what his wish was.
If the wish was out of line, she'd beat him up again until he changed it.
If it wasn't unreasonable, Nan Zhi would do her best to fulfill it within her abilities.
And if she couldn't beat him, she'd just slit her own throat to respawn, grind her levels and cultivation, and come back to slay him.
After all, she could reload and resurrect.
But this was reality, so she had to plan ahead and scheme meticulously.
Nan Zhi's gaze refocused; she already had a plan in mind.
...
The best part of any holiday was simply the days off.
Once people broke away from the laziness and bliss of the holidays, they would realize that waiting for them wasn't just a pile of accumulated work, but also a mountain of leftover zongzi.
Nan Zhi was no exception.
On the first day back, she was reduced to having zongzi for lunch.
Little did she expect that almost everyone else in the office was in the exact same boat.
Come noon, there was a long line of people waiting to microwave their zongzi.
Fatty pork with salted egg yolk and meat floss, chestnut pork, lotus seed paste, durian cheese molten taro paste, rose white kidney bean and pine nut, sticky rice candied date with honey, spicy crayfish cheese...
All sorts of aromas mingled in the tiny pantry, smelling like a massive pot of stewed odds and ends.
“Holy crap! That smell is way too pungent.”
A male coworker who couldn't stand the smell pinched his nose and opened the window to air it out:
“Zongzi, again with the zongzi! My head hurts just looking at these things now. Weirdly enough, just like tangyuan and dumplings, they only taste good on the actual day of the holiday. The second the holiday ends, I lose all appetite for them. What's up with that?”
“So true. I don't usually like eating zongzi either—they're sticky and get all over your hands—but during the holidays, I love them. I don't get it either.”
Holding her lunchbox, Zhang Qiuyu noticed Nan Zhi munching on a zongzi at her desk and asked curiously:
“Nan Zhi, don't you live alone? You have leftover zongzi at home too?”
“The company gift box had six, and my family back home sent twelve...”
Nan Zhi took a bite of her plain rice zongzi and mumbled:
“Yesterday, my neighbor gave me three, and my landlord brought over two more. It's hot now, so they won't last long in the fridge, and I can't give them away to anyone, so I can only rush to finish them off.”
“Makes sense.”
Zhang Qiuyu nodded in agreement.
“I told my mother-in-law not to wrap so many zongzi this year, and she actually listened, making just one per person. But my parents made way too many—over twenty of them. It'll take days just to finish them all. It's driving me crazy.”
“My kid gets a headache just seeing zongzi now and refuses to eat them no matter what.”
“Normal! Kids have so many snacks nowadays, and zongzi are so filling that eating half makes them too full for anything else. My kid is the exact same...”
Other colleagues chimed in one after another, and the conversation grew lively.
It was the lunch break, so nobody was working.
With the air conditioning blasting and everyone eating zongzi together in good company, the food didn't seem so hard to swallow anymore.
“Holy crap! Huge news! Huge news!!”
A person from the neighboring office ran in drenched in sweat, their loud shout startling the drowsy crowd awake:
“The advertising company downstairs hired a master to perform an exorcism and catch a ghost! Hurry up and go see!!”
“What?!”
“For real?!”
“Didn't they already hire someone to check the feng shui?”
“Damn! They can do that? Is the seventeenth floor really haunted?!”
“It's fake. Property management would never allow it.”
The office erupted over this explosive news. The work chat that had been quiet just moments ago suddenly came alive with a barrage of notification chimes.
“Of course it's real! I just went downstairs to deliver some documents and saw it with my own eyes. How could it be fake?”
The informant swore up and down:
“They said something about using the Yang energy from the Dragon Boat Festival to suppress the ghost, and taking advantage of the large crowd to disperse resentful energy with human vitality, blah blah blah... Ah, anyway, I don't understand it, but there are tons of people on the seventeenth floor right now! You can barely squeeze into the stairwell!”
Working life was dull to begin with.
Now that there was such great entertainment to watch, nobody was going to miss out.
The whole office swarmed into the stairwell as if going on a school field trip.
Because their office was so close to the floor below, Nan Zhi and the others didn't even take the elevator and walked straight down the stairs. Sure enough, they smelled a strong odor in the stairwell.
—It smelled a lot like burning incense in a temple.
The emergency exit door in the stairwell was wide open, making it easy to see what was happening on the seventeenth floor.
Mugwort and red ropes were tied to the emergency handrails, while dried willow branches hung at the entrance of the passage with a red cloth strip tied to them, along with a Bagua mirror that was too cloudy to reflect a clear silhouette.
The manager of the advertising company stood at the door, frowning as he burned things in an iron basin.
What he was burning were paper money, gold and silver ingots, and various funeral items like paper villas, paper cars, and paper horses.
The ink smell of the office, the chill of the air conditioning, the sweat of the packed crowd, and the burnt smell of burning offerings all mixed together...
It was utterly bizarre.
Rate on N.U.
