Chapter 2: Mysteries about the Soul

Yan looked at me in surprise.

"What's wrong?" He didn't seem to realize the soul he held was a friend of mine.

I gave up on trying to discredit Yan’s claims. If this was Zhou Yuan’s soul, a good friend of mine was no longer in this world. I didn’t dare press Yan for too many details.

“You took this man’s soul?” I confirmed

Yan looked at me and laughed.

"That's right. Didn’t I just explain it? When someone dies, I come to take his soul."

"When did you take it?" I asked, still holding out hope that I was misunderstanding something.

"Let me see. In the morning, I ate some sliced white chicken and double-skin milk pudding on North Ninth Street. I drank a cup of Miso Tea, then played King Strike on my phone for a couple of hours.” After quite a bit of mumbling, he announced, "That's around 3 PM. So the man died around 2 PM."

"Oh, alright. That's good." I patted my chest in relief. Zhou Yuan had shown us his design around 5 PM, and we’d had dinner at 6 PM. It couldn't be him.

Despite that, the man in the bottle looked like he was yelling to me, but I couldn’t hear what he was trying to say through the glass.

"This man… hmm, this ghost…? This soul seems to want to say something?" I pointed to the bottle. "Could I hear him?"

Yan looked at me, then looked at the bottle and scratched his head.

"Yes, but there’ll be problems if we leave the soul out too long. Hold on." As he spoke, he used his finger to draw patterns on the ground, then carefully opened the bottle. The soul came out, stood on the ground, and looking up at me, still crying. "Hao Ning, it's Zhou Yuan. Please save me! They want to kill me! "

"What?! You’re lying!" I shouted at the tiny soul, jumping to my feet in shock. I thought through every possibility I could, but none of them made sense. "Zhou Yuan showed me his design for a map this afternoon. We had dinner together! "

"That's not me! No, that's me too, but…" Zhou Yuan faltered anxiously. "How can I explain it to you?"

"Oh, I understand what’s happening," Yan said thoughtfully. "Did you make some sort of deal with someone? An agreement to improve yourself somehow, maybe to become a better person? "

The soul in front of me stood silent for a moment, looking at the floor. I looked at him anxiously.

“I did,” he said quietly, “but not to be a better person. To improve a skill.”

"Ha! You deserve it!" Yan said, leaning back on the sofa in laughter. Maybe he really was a demon. How could he laugh so heartlessly? “What were you expecting? Nothing comes for free.”

"Shut up." I wasn't afraid of offending Yan anymore. I looked at my friend’s soul. "Tell me exactly what happened this afternoon. Why were you so desperate to improve yourself? Explain every detail.”

"Alright …" Zhou Yuan lowered his head. "I went to see that horrible woman, Miss Lan. There was a pattern like this one in her room."

He gestured to what Yan had drawn on the floor.

"This is definitely not the same thing. This is a Spirit Convergence Array. Your Miss Lan most likely used a Fallen Soul Array. They have some similarities, but there’s several obvious differences. You really have horrible insight,” Yan told him. He stopped talking when he saw my glare and gestured back to Zhou Yuan. “You go ahead and tell your story. "

"I don't know what they did, but they gave me a glass of water. I lost consciousness after I drank it. When I woke up, I was in a cage surrounded by large rabbits. After a while, the cage opened, and I saw myself walk towards me."

"Wait! You saw yourself walk over? What do you mean?" I frowned. "You are yourself. How could you see yourself walk over? "

"I don't know. I was so scared. I wanted to yell for help, but no sound came out. My body walked over, grabbed my ear, lifted me up, and slit my throat with a kitchen knife. Then I lost consciousness again. When I came to my senses again, I was in this man's, this…”

"Just call me Yan."

"In Yan's bottle, and then I saw you," Zhou Yuan said, pointing at the glass bottle. "Which brings us to the present moment."

Zhou Yuan had explained it clearly, but I only felt more confused. Zhou Yuan's soul had seen a bunch of huge rabbits, and then saw himself come over. What kind of story was this? It sounded more like Alice in Wonderland than something that could have happened to a friend. I pinched my leg to wake up until the pain made me grimace.

"I get it. What a perfect scheme, and so well executed!" Yan jumped up in excitement, then saw our puzzled expressions. "What Zhou Yuan saw wasn't an extremely big wild rabbit. If I'm right, your friend’s soul had been stuffed into the body of a wild rabbit. So, at that time, you were not an average sized human in a cage of rabbits. You were another rabbit.”

I looked at Yan in horror, but he kept talking.

"If you try to take a living human’s soul, the nether world will investigate the case. If you kill yourself, however, you’ve given up your right to live. If anybody else had walked over, it would have drawn attention, but it was your body that killed the rabbit containing your soul. In addition, killing a human is a crime, but killing an animal is not, especially if you do it with your own hands. If this was handled properly, in most cases, nobody would investigate your death. You leave an empty living body, and no one investigates why. What a delightful plan!”

"Did you piss somebody off?" I asked Zhou Yuan, ignoring Yan’s muttering. "Could you have upset Miss Lan?"

"No. We've known each other for a long time. In the past, her work was very bad. She was so miserable." Zhou Yuan’s soul frowned as he went through his memories. "Then, one day, she was different. Every time we had dinner, she was happy. She kept telling me how successful her work was. I was so envious, so I asked how she’d done it, but she didn’t answer my question. Instead, she asked me a question…”

Just as Zhou Yuan trailed off, a second voice cut in from the door.

“She asked what these words meant to you: If you walk fast enough, your soul can’t catch up.” The door opened and Zhou Yuan walked in. To be more accurate, Zhou Yuan’s body walked in.

Zhou Yuan’s human body sat on the sofa and stared at his soul for a while, then laughed.

"I really appreciate your answer, though it was a little self-deprecating. Until now, I agreed. I didn’t know it was my soul in the rabbit, but it doesn’t matter now. I don’t care. We are separate beings now. "

"I know what my body’s talking about," Zhou Yuan's soul said in a quiet voice. He sat on the ground and buried his head in his arms. I could still hear his voice. "When she asked, I told her that nowadays, those who can’t keep up will be left behind. If your soul can’t keep up, then you get even further from the crowd while you wait for your soul, so sometimes you have to leave it behind. Go forward, forget the soul.”

"What are they talking about?" I asked Yan, "Why can't I understand?"

"Hum, what they are talking about really exists," Yan didn't mock me at this time, but instead explained things sincerely, "Many people’s lives are constant struggles. It's not that he doesn't have the ability, but that he’s forced himself to spend every day doing something his soul doesn’t want. His family had expectations, his colleagues were watching, he kept comparing himself to the people around him. When the soul disagrees with the mind, most people have to compromise their ideals to function in reality. Your friend here, however, seems to live in extremes, and literally abandoned his soul and kept only his body.”

"At the start, I wasn’t sure if I should give up my soul," Zhou Yuan, the physical body, on the sofa, said with a smile, "but after Miss Lan explained things, I realized that I’m much better like this. I don't need to care about if what I’m doing is actually what I want to do. As long as I'm able to do something, I can give it my full concentration. I could never really focus on my designs enough, but now I can easily find all the mistakes and problems.”

Zhou Yuan turned to me.

“I only spent five minutes drawing that map, and you all praised me. The feeling is simply too wonderful, and this is only the beginning. I’m going to be a huge success.”

So that map, in some sense, really hadn’t been made by Zhou Yuan, at least not the Zhou Yuan I knew. His soul had already been missing.

The soul of Zhou Yuan raised his head.

"That's because I don't want to be a designer at all!" he roared. "I just want to write, to tell stories! It’s the only thing I ever want to do with my life."

"What kind of fucking nonsense are you going on about!? You can’t survive like that!" Zhou Yuan’s body roared. His expression was furious, and I edged away a bit. "You never wanted to do your work, so you never paid attention? You know what? Every time people criticized my work, it broke my heart! You just pretended nothing happened, but it was destroying me. Your lousy dreams dragged me back! I’m twenty-seven. I lay awake every night wondering if this will still be my life at thirty. I’m a failure. If I don’t change things, I can never provide for a wife, for children. A soul is a small price to pay. You won’t change, so I took care of it myself. You will be a ghost, and I will build a good life for myself.”

The body pointed to Yan.

"If you want to write stories so bad, follow him to the netherworld and write all you want, but you will not keep interfering with my life!”

Interference... That didn’t sit right. Since when did we think of our souls as an interference?

Zhou Yuan’s soul was silent, looking up at me in despair, hoping that I could say something. I’d never known how worried he was about the future or thought he’d been so drained by the gap between his work and his passions, but there was truth in the body’s words. Both of them were really Zhou Yuan. I didn’t even know which one to help.

"Did the person who arranged this happen to tell you," Yan said, "that you can only live seven days without a soul.”

"What?!" Zhou Yuan’s body and I asked at the same time.

"You are right, there is indeed the possibility that what your soul wants can’t match the demands of reality, but how many people do you think feel that way? Wouldn’t more people take the easy solution?" Yan shook his head, looking like an old teacher, though his face was youthful. "A few can leave their bodies freely, but most people can only leave for seven days before the body starts to have trouble. Souls often don’t listen to our minds, but they are one of the most important parts of our lives. Why do you think so many people die from overwork? They starve their souls, and when it’s almost used up, the body gives out. The only realize you’re still alive to yell at your soul is probably- “

“The talisman water protected your body.” The door opened, and Liu Shuai entered. I realized that he was staring at the ground, right where Zhou Yuran’s soul stood. Could a normal human see it now?

"You can see him?" Liu Shuai and I asked each other in unison, but he realized that he’d revealed something and didn’t ask further.

"In the past,” Liu Shuai explained, “Jiang Zi Ya, the immortal Taoist, gave Bi Gan something similar, but the effects were a bit different. One could protect human body, and the other could protect the soul, but they can’t protect a man for his entire life. They had flaws."

I was struck with the realization that I was the only person in this room with no concept of what was happening.

"Then why is Miss Lan safe?" Zhou Yuan asked, "Why she isn't dead?"