This house wasn’t a private house, rather, it was a warehouse converted from an originally state-owned canteen. But because of its great location inside a large city in the central region, Qin Yiheng and I both felt that we could change it into a car wash center. So the potential was still relatively large. There had been no death in this house since its early days, but a staff of the canteen suddenly went missing from work after taking a small sum of money in the safe. Nothing was ever heard from him after that; whether he was dead or alive, no one knew.  It wasn’t until a month later…

It was a suffocating feeling. I wanted to speak but I must keep my voice down, and this made me swallow even harder. After a while, the shepherd dog who was sleeping soundly abruptly stood up, tilted his head and looked at something. All of a sudden, a knocking sound could be heard.  Even though I was mentally prepared, this still had me shaken. Qin Yiheng remained very calm and drew a ‘hush’ gesture with his hand. The knock on the door was not as loud as I expected. It knocked very gently, and the knocker oddly seemed very polite. I stared intensely at the shepherd dog but he didn’t…

Another house that we bought later was a new one. Everything was normal during the few months that the original residents lived there. The apartment I wanted to talk about lay on the 20th floor of a high-rise building consisting of 28 floors in total. Indeed it was quite a high position. It was a pretty bizarre tale. What happened at first was that a thief fell to his death from this building. The cause of his fall was purely coincidental. Somehow, he managed to reach the window of the 20th floor, probably wanting to climb into one of the houses to steal things. As bad luck would have it,…

This old friend of mine was a classmate back in junior high school. Although we had not talked for a while, we always kept up with each other’s updates. He heard from other people that as of late, I often accompanied a friend who knew ‘the supernatural arts’, so he thought about asking for my help. His relatives got into a big trouble. Even though the ordeal had nothing to do with a ‘haunted house’, this was also a remarkably bizarre case because the source of the trouble was a ‘haunted car’. How the car came to be haunted was pretty simple; it was the same way many other cars…

After I came back with the incense sticks, Qin Yiheng kept himself busy and refused to let me help. I stood to one side, watching him burning the paper money while murmuring something under his breath. He quickly completed the ritual, then turned to me and smiled, saying that he had read the tortoise shell wrongly just now because he wasn’t entirely sure of how to perform this divination. He mistakenly read the divinatory diagram¹ in the opposite way. There was in fact nothing in this house at the moment, but it had been left uninhabited for too long, causing a lack of human energy. That was why ‘unclean things’…

For more than half a month, we stayed put. It was not that we didn’t want to continue, but there were not many leads to get hold of. We searched desperately but never managed to locate any reliable source. This couldn’t be helped, as looking for haunted houses was nothing like that of normal houses. News about haunted houses could only go through words of mouth. After all, whoever inherited the haunted house wouldn’t bluntly announce that the place was haunted, for he was still hoping to sell it away at as good a price as possible. Moreover, it wasn’t like every city would have a haunted house, and even…

As it was getting dark, the two of us followed the familiar path to get to the villa. There were people in the neighbouring houses, but not much light was turned on. Besides, each house was separated from the next by quite some distance, so it was even more obvious how solitary and gloomy our villa looked. If I had known earlier that this place would give me so much trouble, even more so than the first house, I definitely would not have bought it.  Qin Yiheng took the lead to push the door in and I followed right behind. If he stopped, I stopped; if he moved, I moved.…

If you had lived in a house for a long time, it wouldn’t be difficult to walk to the toilet or the kitchen with your eyes closed, but the problem was that I had visited this villa only twice. It was too difficult to get downstairs, let alone reaching the main entrance. I moved forward step by step with my eyes closed, fearful that I might fall. At first, I could still hear the sound of Qin Yiheng walking, yet a few steps later, I suddenly realised that I could no longer hear any sound coming from him. I immediately panicked and wanted to open my eyes, but fortunately I…

The first place we looked at was a villa in another city of the same province. The villa was relatively old, likely built in the early 1990s. The owner of the villa was a wealthy showoff surnamed Wang. It was a coincidence that Qin Yiheng and I met him. One day, Qin Yiheng chanced upon a House for Sale post on an online real estate forum and gave the poster a call just to try his luck, but he totally didn’t expect that he’d receive a response right away. Qin Yiheng then immediately made an appointment. This tycoon still carried the aura of someone who just became rich last night…

I assume everyone knows that a house is called ‘haunted’ because someone suddenly dies there, of course not counting natural death. ‘Sudden death’ is a term relatively colloquial, generally referring to unnatural death such as accident, suicide, homicide and so on. People who die this way usually die with resentment because, as the legend says, their destined lifespan has yet to finish. Their soul couldn’t go to the resting place, hence in most haunted houses, strange things will happen. Even if nothing strange actually takes place, people’s words of mouth will make the place seem bizarre. The owners of such houses are pitiful. If they rent out their house and…

Novel introduction & Translation masterpostTranslator: Michelle _______ I turn off the lights, pull out a chair and sit down comfortably. I look up — Behind the lamp on the coffee table, nine people are waiting for me to speak. There are both men and women, all of them of similar age. In the dim light, they are looking at me with different expressions. I don’t know them. In fact, they also meet each other for the first time. The reason why they are sitting here is because of the house where we are in now. A month ago, I posted on a forum a promise that if anyone could, for…