A Professional Avenger

The next time Lin Yuetian’s consciousness returned, he woke up lying in the living room of what seemed like a modern apartment. His face was smeared all over with blood, and the ground around him was also a mess, with a lot of blood stains.

“Is this body about to die?” Lin Yuetian sat up from the ground and carefully check himself up.

“There appears no problem. But why does this body feels a little weak, like it has been hollowed out^[1]a term when a person’s body was ruined due to over-indulge in carnal desire or drugs at such a young age…”

[“—Watch out!”] The System suddenly shouted out in a hurry.

Lin Yuetian lived up to the System’s expectation as he reacted to the sudden alarm swiftly. He flipped his body from the original spot and retreated away in a blink of an eye. In that split second, defying what his weak body should be capable of, he moved with astonishing speed and agility.

Right after he moved away, a kitchen knife landed directly on the spot where Lin Yuetian had just been, deeply embedded on the floor beneath!

“? What’s wrong with this kitchen knife’s sudden appearance?”

Lin Yuetian was not in panic. He looked up at the ceiling as he pulled out the kitchen knife from the floor with some doubts.

It was quite heavy.

Flipping the kitchen knife upside down, he felt that this size should be adequate to be used as a self-defense weapon. So he simply took the kitchen knife for his own use.

The System spoke with rather a nervous tone, seemingly worried about Lin Yuetian’s safety, something that’s quite rare in itself,

[“Don’t think about unnecessary things! First, quickly leave this room. Go to bask under the sun outside. It’s extremely dangerous here, we can’t dawdle here anymore. Let’s see the world’s plot once we’re outside! Hurry up!”]

Lin Yuetian heard the seriousness of the matter from the System’s tone. He didn’t seem to be joking around. So Lin Yuetian obeyed his advice and immediately went to the front door to go out.

However, another abnormal occurrence happened. No matter where you look at it, the door in front of him was just an ordinary security anti-theft door, however, the door seemed to be welded completely to the wall. It couldn’t be opened in any way, even the doorknob was motionless unable to be rotated at the slightest bit.

The strangeness kept increasing as Lin Yuetian could feel the doorknob he was holding in his palm was getting colder, to the point that he felt like holding a block of ice instead of ordinary metal.

As this happened, a more frightening change occurred. In front of Lin Yuetian, the door was gradually dyed in a deep red, human blood color, with the thick substance slowly oozing from it. The bloody substance continued to spill as if a human was bleeding heavily beyond.

The System inside Lin Yuetian’s head went soft and deflated like a sponge. He didn’t dare to let out a squeak, and only the sound of heavy breathing could be heard from Lin Yuetian’s head.

This phenomenon was not over yet as in another second, a thick clump of hair started to pour in, writhing like a living creature, trying to squeeze and come through the door, looking like it’d devour all living being present.

Lin Yuetian backed away quickly this time, keeping a distance from the ever-changing door. Still maintaining his calm, he picked up a chair next to him and slammed the window.

—Of course, that’s not going to proceed that easily, as every window in this apartment was unusually sealed with wooden boards.

He doubtfully wondered, ‘No matter how hard some woods are, with this much strength they should be at least shaken.’

But no. The wooden boards sealing the windows didn’t budge at all.

At this moment, the front door had completely been dyed in bloody red, and the pervasive coldness from earlier began to permeate the whole room. Lin Yuetian couldn’t help but shiver from the low temperature.

The hair seeping from the crack of the door squirmed even more wildly, shaking the door violently as it moved. Just like a fluttering candle in the wind, the door seemed to be blown open at any moment.

The current situation simply left no way out, and in the midst of this desperation, the System who had finally accumulated enough courage (He wondered if his courage also grew as Lin Yuetian kept challenging his bottom line all this while), finally shouted to him,

[“Go inside the house! Find a place to hide!”]

Before the System finished his words, however, Lin Yuetian had already walked straight…to the front door!

He grabbed the doorknob, turning a blind eye toward its bloody substance or the wriggling hair, and slammed the door open. Afterward, he rushed out without looking back.

[“Ahhhhh! There must be a ghost outside!”] The System felt like his soul was about to fly out from fright, and the way he screeched sounded like a broken radio.

—But to his surprise, there were no ghosts outside. There’s no other horror phenomenon expected.

Beyond the door was just the corridor of a normal residential building. The place they were in right now seemed to be on the second floor. There was even sunshine shining brightly outside. There were no trace of either blood or the hairs from before, as if they had never existed in the first place.

The shock that the System felt had yet subsided, and he was instantly dumbfounded, unable to say a word, at this sudden change of scenery.

Lin Yuetian slowly walked along the hall, went down the stairs, and reached outside. Until the first ray of sunlight hit his body, nothing else happened.

“So, there are ghosts in this world?” Lin Yuetian asked, with no trace of surprise in his voice.

The System suspected that even when experiencing all of those terrifying phenomenons before, this guy’s heart rate might not break the number of 100 beats per minute.

[“Well…that’s right. Oh, let’s accept this world’s memory now…”] The System still couldn’t figure out why Lin Yuetian was able to walk out easily from the hellish apartment. He answered Lin Yuetian’s question subconsciously and mechanically threw the memory of the Original Owner into his mind.

Lin Yuetian himself continued to wander around the community. It’s still morning here. There were elderly who were gossiping in groups, office workers who were hurrying to work during the commuting hours, and parents who were pulling their children to send them to their school.

The place couldn’t be more normal and peaceful. Under such a picture-perfect environment, who would have thought that in another corner, there actually existed murderous ghosts who thirst for blood in this world?

Lin Yuetian finally stopped at a breakfast shop in the community. He took out the Original Owner’s mobile phone from his pant pocket^[2]In CN, daily transactions are mostly paid or solved with a payment App, AliPay, instead of cash. He had been in the modern world with the same technological development as this one before^[3]the Stand-In Lover World, so he knew how to live normally in a modern society that wasn’t as developed as his Cyberpunk world.

He ordered a bowl of porridge, and as he waited for his dish to be served, Lin Yuetian gently rubbed his temple and carefully sort out the large amount of new memories pouring into his mind.

***

The Original Owner in this world, named Lin Yuetian, lost both his parents when he was still very young. He had no other relatives, so he had been living alone from then on.

It had been like that, until the last year Qingming Festival^[4]CN Tomb-sweeping day. Usually on 4 or 5 April when he returned to his hometown, LinJia^[5]The adding of –Jia means a Village that most of the residents descended from the same lineage, surname Lin Village to pay homage to his parent’s grave. At that time, the Village Chief handed him a jade pendant. He instructed Lin Yuetian to bring the jade pendant to a certain address, to be buried and disposed of. 

Even if Lin Yuetian wasn’t that familiar with him, there’s still some respect toward the elder. Knowing that the Village Chief was already in his 70s or even 80s, he accepted the jade pendant and decided to fulfill the elder’s wish. 

However, on the very same night, when Lin Yuetian was taking a shower, he saw an unfamiliar handsome man in the bathroom mirror.  Lin Yuetian was terrified at first, but the handsome man was gentle and careful. He claimed himself to be the Jade Ghost. Allegedly, one hundred years ago, he was just an ordinary person who died in an unfortunate event. A passing Taoist Master, however, imprisoned his soul into this jade pendant. 

Jade Ghost stated that he had no particular purpose right now. He knew that Lin Yuetian was going to bury the pendant he was sealed in. It’s just that, he had been lonely for 100 years, so he wanted nothing but merely wished to have a little chat with Lin Yuetian. 

Even if this Jade Ghost was called a ghost, his appearance was nothing like that. He was good-looking, and all his features were gorgeous. Even if he could be said to be miserable and had suffered an unfair past, he still had a gentle and courteous temperament. 

Needless to say, Lin Yuetian, who had been alone since childhood, lived in solitary and was lacking in affection, got immediately defeated by this kind of strategy^[6]

of someone pretending to be miserable but still retaining their good morality or perseverance.

Soon, he fell deeply in love with the Jade Ghost. And later, under the inducement of the Jade Ghost, he smashed the jade pendant that he had been entrusted with, and set the Jade Ghost free. 

Lin Yuetian was just that naive, believing every word that the Jade Ghost had said, thinking that the said ghost truly love him as well, and hoped that the two of them, one human and one ghost, could stay together for the rest of their lives. 

What he had never expected was that, after setting him free, he would be haunted and tormented by the Jade Ghost. The real purpose of the Jade Ghost was actually to seize control and snatch Lin Yuetian’s body for himself. To achieve this goal, he must reduce Lin Yuetian’s 3 Fires of Yang Qi^[7]Also known as 3 Hun. In CN YinYang belief, a human soul is constructed by 3 Hun and 7 Po. When the body lost all the 3 Hun or Yang Qi, a human will die and the 7 Po remain as Yin Qi in the corpse.. 

The way to eliminate 3 Yang Qi Fires of a human body was through haunting. The Jade Ghost used various tricks to frighten Lin Yuetian hundreds of times a day, driving his body to grow weaker and having his Yang essence continue to be depleted. Thus, the young man became more and more dazed and confused with each day, as he couldn’t even get out of the door.

His apartment became the noose that the Jade Ghost slowly tightened around him. 

Previously, since he was in love with the Jade Ghost, he was afraid that as a ghost the Jade Ghost would be hurt by the sunlight. So, Lin Yuetian took the initiative to nail the wooden board on top of every window. But now, those very wooden boards had become the barrier that trapped him inside.

Eventually, today, Lin Yuetian couldn’t bear the haunting any longer and was frightened to death. The blood on his face was left after his head smashed right on the floor due to his sudden collapse. 

Afterward, Assassin-Lin Yuetian came to this world.

***

[“Alright, now tell me, how were you able to come out unscathed from the room again?”] The System who had regained his calm started the Q&A session with Lin Yuetian.

The porridge Lin Yuetian had ordered was served without him waiting for too long. He took a spoon and stir the porridge, took a spoonful of it, and brought it to his mouth. He paused his hand movement for a while, letting the rice gruel on the spoon cool down a bit before sipping them. The hot porridge entered this body’s stomach, and soon a comfortable warmth spread in his entire system.

While sipping his porridge, Lin Yuetian took the time to reply to the System in his mind,

“In the beginning, I was inside a house and a kitchen knife almost impaled me to the floor. I think, this already explained that the Jade Ghost has always been inside the house, rather than being outside and trying to come in.”

“The first time I tried to open the door, it couldn’t be opened. When I was about to try for the second time, all kinds of horrible sets occurred. The timing was too much of a coincidence, seeming like it was a hurried attempt, convincing me to give up the idea of going out from the door.”

“If there’s something abnormal there must be demons behind it. And the few situations before are enough for me to guess there are some ghosts in this world. Then, generally speaking, ghosts are all afraid of the sun, aren’t they? Incidentally, all the windows were nailed shut with wooden boards, something that should be hellish for humans but in contrast, a paradise for ghosts.”

“Judging from the several clues around, I think whatever the ghost there is, they are more likely to stay in a safe paradise inside the house rather than beyond the door, on the outside. They took the trouble to create the illusion that the ghosts are outside to keep me away from the front door, which means, their power is not enough to keep the door closed for too long and prevent me from escaping outside…”

[“…”]

[“How are you able to adapt to the supernatural setting so quickly?”] The System couldn’t help but marvel.

“Naturally because I’m a professional~” Lin Yuetian answered modestly.

“You know, I’m well-rounded, each aspect is as strong as the others.”

***