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After the constant hounding from their grandpa and grandma, Shen Bai and Shen Yuan were sent over to stay in their village to appease the family elders. It took an airplane then a train ride and then a taxi for them to arrive.
But it only took 2 days for grandma and grandpa Shen to get desensitized to their present and start complaining that neither the eldest nor the second eldest grandson had come.
Ah… such is the life of filial piety, Shen Yuan had thought. While there were some activities that his grandparents had planned for them, they still had a lot of time in their hands and being that they were supposed to stay for a week.
It was in the middle of this week that a new popular haunted spot was trending on social media with influencers and content creators exploring and making easy videos on it. One of the reasons that it was trending was just due to how secluded the place was, making it hard for anyone to ‘visit’ it.
Nobody wanted to take a whole airplane ride, get on a train then book a taxi driver just to potentially get cursed.
So why was Shen Yuan here?
-
Shen Bai had somehow managed to drag him all the way to the supposedly extreme, with a hundred percent chance of getting cursed, haunted building that coincidentally south of their village. Shen Yuan can only blame his own rotten luck for having and loving such a sister.
He didn’t even know about this place before getting roped into this, the least his unfilial sister could do is let him do some research first. He’s got to know what god he could pray to that would do the most damage to the ghost.
“So what is this building supposed to be?” He asked the overly excited girl. You can always count on his meimei to be the adrenaline seeker that she is.
“Suppposinglyyyy” the girl started as they reached a broken down gate. “This used to be where a demon would keep human captives for sacrifice” she answered before slowly placing one foot across the gate, as if a ghost was just gonna spring up and jumpscared her.
Feeling nothing out of the ordinary, the girl continued on and walked past the gate to start scoping out the area. “It doesn't look like it could hold more than 5 people..” Shen Yuan commented.
There were various broken down buildings surrounding them with only one decently sized building that seemed capable of withstanding a human entering. And of course his darling meimei would just kick down the door to such a place causing the big brother in this situation to let out a high pitch yelp.
“Well that’s because it actually has a basement”
Immediately, Shen Yuan draws the line. “NO, Shen Bai, my sister, my beloved meimei please for the sake of everything good, DO NOT go in there!”
“Why! We only live once!!” the girl protested her feet looking like it wanted to stomp on the ground in anger. Like a child, Shen Yuan could feel his vein pop.
“Whether this place is haunted or not, that building is clearly unstable. If you get haunted then at least we could go home and pay for a cleansing ritual” Shen Yuan took a deep breath thinking about the other possibility, “But if that building collapse with you inside, I don’t think help could reach us in time”
The girl whines some more but Shen Yuan can see some acceptance in her eyes.
“Fine!” Shen Yuan sighs in relief. “Just let me look on the ground floor” she quickly said before booking it into the house.
“XIAO-BAI” he yells out uselessly. He waited for a moment or two contemplating whether to go in or not but he just couldn’t muster up the courage. So he stands there anxiety rising for every second.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
And he’s going inside.
-
“XIAO-BAI! WHERE ARE YOU?!?!”
He ran through the building, his hand gripping his phone as about to swing it towards someone. He ran aimlessly until he heard the sound of a door opening and rushed towards the noise.
But the room he came into was shrouded in darkness, despite the fact that both the Shens had arrived when it was still bright out.
Thus just as quickly as he came, Shen Yuan was about to bolt out of the room but the door slammed shut and the darkness consumed the whole room. He could feel his heart beat and already foresaw himself in their family’s hospital again.
Distantly, he could hear.. no, he wasn’t hearing it but he felt he was reading a sentence.
“Take the red enveloped”
Deep down, he could feel the commenters complaining about his lack of survival skill but with no other ways to get out of the phantom of a room, he silently agreed and took it, the paper’s texture grounding him for a moment before lights return.
Not wanting to experience it again, he sped out of the house. Sorry meimei but that’s all I could handle, Shen Yuan panickedly thought. Yet when he reached closer to the front door, he could hear the sound of his sister's voice.
“YUAN-GE”
“Xiao-Bai….?” Shen Yuan answered, heaving a bit due to his lack of athleticism. The girl jumped at the sudden answer, seeming to have called him multiple times already.
“Where were you?! When I got out, you weren’t here!” the girl exclaimed, her face read, eyes watery as if she was about to cry.
“I went in because I heard you scream”, he explained as he started inspecting his sister of any wounds.
“What scream?” Shen Yuan stopped in his movement at the question. “I didn't hear any scream, I got out since most of the rooms are just empty”
Shen Yuan’s world paused for a moment before plainly said, “Lets just go home, it’s getting dark”
“Okay…. Yuan-ge”
As the two started walking out of the gate, Shen Yuan couldn't help but notice how much darker the sky had gotten in such a short time.
But he didn’t notice the pair of orange ribbons swaying behind him
-
When they got into the village, one of their older distant relatives had immediately called over Shen Yuan so the two parts were there as Shen Bai really wanted to ‘cleanse’ herself with a bath.
The moment she was out of sight, the relative had dragged Shen Yuan towards a desolate shrine at the edge of the village.
“You saw her didn’t you” the elder accusatory voice hit him once they were in front of the small shrine.
Shen Yuan gulped, “wh-who..?”
The old man’s eyes glared into his, “Did you take her enveloped?” The elder voice was still calm, resigned rage neatly hiding behind it.
Instinctively, Shen Yuan gripped the red enveloped in his palm before it was rudely snatched away by the elder. “Tch, to think kids these days still fall for the same foolish tricks” the man complained as he opened the envelope.
All Shen Yuan could see was a blank piece of paper with scribbles that look like a bunch of v’s and w’s together but it seems to worry the man even further as the pair of white eyebrows scrunch up together.
“This… will be difficult but this leaves me with no choice” the man sighed muttering something that Shen Yuan couldn’t quite hear, only catching a girl(?)’s name. ‘Ning Yingying..?”
“You would need to marry this ghost” Shen Yuan’s ears perk up, attention now fully on the man, wanting to protest before it all dies on his tongue as the man continues his sentence.
“Or your life and the lives around you will be tormented by the girl”
Shen Yuan nodded not wanting his family to be potentially disturbed by such an unclean thing. Not like he was planning - or able - to get married anyway.
-
The ceremony ended and started with just the two of them at Shen Yuan’s insistence on not letting anyone know about this. When it was all done and dusted, the old man warned him to not even think of getting married again or it will bring misfortune to the whole bloodline and left him with the picture of a random - handsome - man.
Shen Yuan returns home to his grandmother scolding him for being out so late and his sister’s worried eyes following him.
The rest of their time in the village went by peacefully and before they knew it, it was already time to leave. Though it took a long time to explain to his family on why he needed to bring a portrait the size of a laptop through custom and his mom and sister were looking at him with knowing eyes that really set him off the rails.
All things considered, it wasn’t that bad and Shen Yuan was ready to just tuck away the memory of his entire stay.
Or so he thought.
“Hey brat, how do you operate this thing, I want those pop-corn things again” the half transparent man yelled out as Shen Yuan was staring intently on the empty frame he brought from his home village.
Yeah, that’s right. Empty. As in nothing is there because the second he had arrived inside his apartment and started forgetting the ‘incident’ he started waking up to his stuff being moved around. The first few times it happened, Shen Yuan had considered himself crazy until he woke up to a man yelling at him about the ‘moving picture box’.
Only his neighbours know how loud he screamed that day. ‘Thankfully nobody cared enough to call the cops’, he had thought back then. Now it has been around a month since then and it shook him how quickly he adapted to his new ghost roommate
“Hey! Husband!” and that’s another thing he had found out about this whole haunting and probably the only thing that Shen Yuan could find himself outwardly complaining about.
You see, through the whole ritual, he had assumed he was marrying a ghost girl named Ning Yingying but according to the ghost in his house, he was married to him, a guy named Shen Jiu.
The old soul grumbled about having a mischievous disciple that had wronged him and decided to atone by finding him a spouse. And the reason the haunting started recently was due to her just having woken up and needed to ‘filter out all the bad suitors’, according to his now husband(Shen Yuan still can’t believe he has a husband).
“You just put the bag in and click on the popcorn setting” Shen Yuan yells out as he walks out of his- no, their room.
“Also close the microwave door before clicking the button” he added for extra measure but heard no reply except for the sound of the microwave heating up the popcorn bag.
Not long after, he felt a gaze over his shoulder. “You’re still reading those trashy novels?”
Shen Yuan grunt at the judgy ghost, “They make me happy unlike those magazine you make me buy”
“Aren’t you the one who begged me to, as you say it, ‘get with the times’?”
The microwave beeps before the two could start hurling insults at one another, an activity that Shen Yuan has found out to be the other’s way of bonding.
The transparent being walk (or is it float?) with a bowl of popcorn in hand and ‘laid’ next to the human in the room. Then, he snatches the book in Shen Yuan’s hand replacing it with the tv remote.
The young master yelped in surprise. “Play something like the one we watched yesterday,” Shen Jiu commanded.
Shen Yuan sighs in defeat as he begins browsing through the catalog for another fantasy action movie that looks the least generic. As he was sorting through the movies, Shen Jiu had decided to just let go of the meaning of personal space and slowly started to tangle himself around the other’s body.
That night ended in the two intertwining on the couch in what looks to be a sad excuse of a cuddle and a bowl of half eaten popcorn placed on the floor after the human of the two decided the ghost was getting too tired to hold on to them.
‘Hahhhh… What has life become’, he thought warily.