The Kunlun Files

Chapter 13: What Runs in the Family

When I woke, there were messages from Lu Feng, sent in the middle of the night.

*Dajie, ever since I got back from the hospital I feel off somehow. Life really is fragile. It was only a relationship — how can it make a person want to die?*

*Dajie, I hear every person who dies by suicide has a soul-claiming ghost at their back. That black thing I keep dreaming about — could it be my soul-claiming ghost?*

*Dajie, can you tell me what ghosts look like, the ones you've seen?*

*Jie, what bond did we have in our past lives?*

I didn't reply. I understood: an obsession had taken root in him — an obsession with his past and present lives, and with me. When a person truly doesn't care about something, they don't ask about it three times and five times. I had already given him an answer. He simply refused to believe it.

He had a guess in his heart now, I thought. It was too blurry to say out loud.

At noon he called, and his voice was hurried — with something like excitement underneath the hurry.

"Dajie, my classmate in the hospital — last night it was like something possessed him. Can you come drive the ghost out of him?"

"I'm no exorcist."

"But Wu told me you catch ghosts. Catch one and let me watch — I've never seen a ghost in my life!"

"Don't listen to Wu's nonsense."

"Dajie, Jie, please, just catch one for me. If ghosts are real, then aliens are real too, and alien technology has to be super advanced. If we could catch an alien and study it, we might break through the human genetic barrier and live forever—"

"Go play by yourself."

I was about to hang up when he shouted down the line: "JieJieJie, don't hang up! Help my classmate, please — if you don't, they're sending him to a psychiatric hospital!"

I truly had no intention of getting involved. But the moment I heard the words *psychiatric hospital*, the beast in my chest seemed to stretch, as if it had opened one eye to look at me.

Then the voice said: *If you don't go, with that kid's temperament, he'll find someone else to help his classmate.*

"What's that to me?"

*If the one he finds mishandles it, some of that karma will rebound onto him.*

I said to Lu Feng, "Send me the location."

"Whoa, Jie, you're beautiful *and* kind. Love it, love it."

By the time I reached the hospital, Lu Feng was already waiting at the entrance with a few classmates.

"There she is — this is my Dajie," he announced.

I gave him a look that said *judge that for yourself*. He apparently judged it, because he hurried the others off: "Go check on Xiao Hao — and this stays secret, all of you. We get it done before his discharge paperwork finishes."

Once they'd scattered, he said, "Don't worry, Dajie. They won't talk."

"Aren't you afraid that if I drive the ghost off him, it'll come after you for revenge?"

"You'll have caught it, so it can't come for me."

I looked at him, eyes shining with excitement, and gave up. "Take me to your classmate."

"This way, Dajie. It's all arranged — they'll draw Xiao Hao's family away in a minute."

In the ward, the boy called Xiao Hao sat quietly on the edge of the bed. Lu Feng sent the classmates to watch the door, then shut it and said, "Dajie, look at him. There's a ghost on him, right?"

"Feng-ge," Xiao Hao said, "what are you talking about?"

*Ge* — the tag classmates give an older one. He'd been promoted too.

He didn't look like a patient at all. But in his eyes I could see a cold, yin stillness — and that stillness was not friendly toward Lu Feng. On top of that, something faceless was lying draped across his shoulders.

The thing on Xiao Hao's back had already conceived a deep hostility toward Lu Feng.

"It's fine," Lu Feng was saying. "My Dajie will help you."

Xiao Hao turned on him. "You think I'm insane too, don't you?"

Then he lunged. Lu Feng was too slow — Xiao Hao slammed him to the floor, and the sound of it was painful to hear.

Before the boy could do worse, I reached out and seized the thing lying on his back.

When I tore it off his shoulders, Xiao Hao came back to himself in an instant. He stared at Lu Feng pinned beneath him. "Feng-ge — what just happened?"

Lu Feng looked like he couldn't believe he'd been tackled. He climbed up cradling his arm. "Dajie — was that a vengeful ghost? Did you see it? Did you catch it?"

I didn't answer. I was watching the thing I'd flung into the corner, and I spoke to it with a wisp of my awareness: *If you don't want me meddling in your affairs, let this Xiao Hao walk out of here unharmed. Otherwise I won't let you go.*

It watched me from the corner, cold and dark, and gave no reply.

*Leave this city,* I said. *After that, whatever you do, I won't intervene.*

The thing understood it was no match for me. It turned and was gone from the ward.

I left the room. Lu Feng followed, still cradling his arm, all the way to the parking garage.

"Get that arm looked at in orthopedics," I said. "Remember this lesson. I'm going."

"Dajie, you're leaving? What about the ghost?"

"The ghost is gone. Otherwise today you'd be nursing more than an arm."

"Dajie, you—you—you—" He actually stammered. "How did you even catch it? Where was your talisman? Your spell? Your peachwood sword? Or at least — shouldn't the ghost have had to speak through Xiao Hao and confess why it possessed him? That's it? It's over? I thought you came to the garage to fetch your ghost-catching instruments!"

I have rarely felt so speechless.

"From now on, keep your distance from Xiao Hao."

"Why?"

"Go get your arm looked at first."

"I'll call my classmates, they'll queue up and register for me — but Dajie, you have to tell me why I should stay away from him."

"The less you know of another person's privacy, the better."

"I swear, if you tell me, I won't tell a single soul."

"I can only tell you this much: there is a very bad karma running in his ancestry. If my guess is right, his family line has seen suicides again and again. Don't involve yourself in any of his affairs — because none of us can help him. I can tear the thing off him today. I can't tear out what grew it."

"What kind of thing makes a person want to die? If we beat the ghost to death, doesn't that fix it?"

"Mind your own affairs."

For a long stretch of my life, I used to watch people's past-life karma the way other people watch the weather. But the more I looked, the less clearly I saw. Good deeds don't always bear good fruit. Evil ones don't always bear evil.

The maddening thing about karmic cause and effect is that you can never find the moment the first seed sprouted. Even I can only see the one past life that presses hardest on this one.

Sometimes a villain of this world was a good person in the last life — wronged by villains, and carrying that one thought of vengeance down into rebirth. So he comes back a villain, yet still holds the worldly fortune his past goodness earned.

By karma, no one who suffers is innocent.

I never told Lu Feng the rest: that the thing on Xiao Hao's shoulder had hated *him* on sight, before it even looked at me.

Whatever that old debt was, it wasn't Xiao Hao's. And it had left this city owing Lu Feng a grudge.