In the middle of the night I grew thirsty, and on a whim I posted to my Moments feed that I wished I had some watermelon to eat.

My phone buzzed at once. A private message had come from my ex-boyfriend — the one who died last month. It read: “Already bought.”

My whole body went rigid. Exactly then, a knock came at the door.

“Delivery. Your watermelon.”

Through the peephole, I could see only a plastic bag hanging on the outside of the door — and inside it rested a huge, perfectly round human head.

I jerked back from the peephole, and my shoulder blades slammed against the cold steel security door with a dull thud.

On instinct, I threw the deadbolt.

“Click.”

The sound was crisp, shockingly clear in the dead silence of the night.

Almost at the very instant the lock turned —

“Heh.”

A man’s soft, low chuckle slipped in through the crack beneath the door.

Every hair on my body stood on end.

When I had looked through the peephole a moment before, there had been nothing outside but that head in its plastic bag — no person, no shadow, nothing at all.

Yet that laugh had come from right outside the door. Whoever was out there had not left.

I drew a deep breath and, first of all, quickly texted the police.

Then, slowly, one step at a time, I crept back to the door and forced myself up to the peephole again.

The hallway was dim; only the EXIT sign cast its faint green glow.

In that weak light I could just make out the head in its plastic bag.

Seeing it a second time, my terror had ebbed enough that I pressed closer to the peephole without thinking, trying to get a better look.

The next second, without any warning, it moved.

Then it slammed itself against the door — “THUD!”

A muffled impact.

The force was not great, but it was enough to jolt my heart.

“THUD!”

Again.

Rhythmically, again and again, it butted against the door.

But the hallway floor was flat tile — no slope, no draft. With nothing pushing it, how could it possibly be moving on its own?

My pupils contracted as I stared at the horrid thing rolling by itself —

“Ahem.”

A deliberate, pointedly clear little cough came from the shadowed corner off to the side.

“Click —”

The sound-activated light in the entryway ceiling flared on in answer, pouring down a sheet of harsh, blinding white.

Nothing could hide now.

Beneath the head I saw it: a thread so fine it was nearly invisible, like fishing line, catching the cold light of the bulb.

The thread ran taut. Its other end —

Its other end led to the deepest corner to the right of the entrance, where neighbors stacked cardboard boxes and odds and ends for temporary storage.

A figure slowly straightened out of the shadows.

He had been crouching there the whole time.

The light caught the cuff of his pale gray shirt; his long fingers were idly winding the end of the fishing line around themselves.

Then, inch by inch, his face lifted out of the shadow and turned toward the peephole.

Time stretched to breaking.

It was my boyfriend, a month dead — Chen Mo.

He looked at me. His one good eye curved faintly, and the muscles at the corner of his mouth tugged upward into something unspeakably strange, unspeakably horrifying —

A tender smile.

His voice came through the door, hoarse, thick, leaking air around the words — yet it carried the same sticky, coaxing, spoiled-boy tone he used to coddle me with when he was alive:

“Baby.”

“I missed you so much. I’ve come for you. Aren’t you happy?”

I was too terrified to speak. My heart hammered against my ribs as if it would shatter them.

It really was Chen Mo. But hadn’t he… died last month? The car crash, the funeral, the gravestone — it all flashed before my eyes. A chill climbed from the soles of my feet, and gooseflesh broke across my whole body.

Truth be told, Chen Mo and I had known each other less than a month and had officially been together for only a week, so our feelings were nowhere near deep enough to make me overlook this appalling wrongness.

Right then, this back-from-the-dead version of him outside the door did nothing but make my skin crawl.

I did not dare say another word, let alone answer him.

I spun around and all but stumbled back to the bedroom.

From a drawer I dug out the consecrated cinnabar bracelet Grandma had given me and hung it around my neck. More than ever, I needed it to be true what she claimed — that it warded off evil.

I wrenched open the wardrobe, burrowed into its deepest corner, and buried myself under layer upon layer of hanging clothes.

All the while, Chen Mo kept knocking at the door.

“Thud, thud, thud…”

“Thud, thud, thud…”

“Baby, why won’t you open the door? Open up.”

“I’m back. Aren’t you glad? Why won’t you see me?”

“Thud, thud, thud…”

I clamped my hands over my ears. My teeth chattered beyond my control, and I held my breath.

The thing outside the door was definitely not Chen Mo — at least, not the Chen Mo who had been alive.

Striking as Chen Mo’s looks were, he was shy and reserved by nature, the kind of boy who blushed just from meeting my eyes. He could never, ever have called me “Baby.”

And he would never have put a head in a plastic bag to play a joke like this on me.

At the same time, my phone screen lit up frantically. A message from Chen Mo:

“Baby, why won’t you open the door? Are you scared of me?”

“Baby, why aren’t you saying anything?”

I flung the phone aside, curled into a ball with my eyes shut, and forced myself neither to look nor to listen.

I do not know how long passed before, my throat parched and aching, I realized with a start that the sounds outside seemed to have stopped.

But right after, a man’s voice came from directly in front of me:

“Baby, since you wouldn’t open the door, I came in myself.”

So close. The voice was almost right in front of my face.

My neck locked up. My heart gave a violent jolt.

Then I felt the faintest stir of air across my ankle.

The wardrobe door… seemed to be open a crack.

My heart leaped into my throat. Bit by bit, I lifted my head and opened my eyes —

The wardrobe door was flung wide.

A flashlight beam stabbed straight in, and I slammed my eyes shut.

“Ma’am? Ma’am, are you all right?” a strange, stern voice said. “Did you call the police?”

The beam moved away. I forced my eyes open, and through blurred vision saw two police officers in navy uniforms crouching in front of the wardrobe, watching me with furrowed brows.

Behind them was my familiar bedroom.

The police…

But before I could even let out the breath I was holding, my gaze locked onto the figure leaning in the doorframe behind the officers.

Chen Mo.

He stood there perfectly fine, in that familiar pale gray shirt, tall and upright, whole and unharmed.

His handsome face wore an expression of helplessness mixed with helpless amusement, one corner of his mouth hooked up, his eyes full of the mischievous glee of a prank carried off.

In his arms he held… a plump, perfectly real green watermelon.

And by his feet lay the “head” that had nearly scared me to death in its plastic bag. In the bright bedroom light it had reverted to its true form — a plastic mannequin head with a realistic hairstyle and a vacant expression, the kind used in every clothing store in the mall.

“Officers, you see how it is,” Chen Mo spoke first, sounding apologetic while fighting back laughter. “This one’s on me. I only meant to give her a little scare. I never thought she’d take it seriously, much less drag you two out here.”

As he spoke, he nudged the mannequin head with his toe, and it went rolling off to the side.

One officer looked at me, then at Chen Mo. His face softened into something between a smile and a grimace. “Boyfriend?”

My mouth opened and closed. My throat was too dry for a single word. I could only gape at Chen Mo.

Hadn’t he… died? I had gone to his funeral. The gravestone…

Yet standing there like this, he looked anything but dead.

The other officer, writing something down, shook his head. “Even young people’s fooling around has its limits. Look how frightened your girlfriend is. Well — as long as no one’s hurt.”

They said a few more perfunctory words, confirmed it was all a false alarm, and left.

The front door clicked softly shut behind them.

In an instant the apartment held only him and me.

I was still slumped inside the wardrobe, staring up at the living, breathing Chen Mo. My brain felt stuffed full of cotton, utterly unable to process the surreal scene in front of me.

Chen Mo saw the officers off, turned around, and ambled unhurriedly back to the bedroom.

He knelt down until our eyes were level and reached out a hand as if to help me up.

“All right, Baby. My fault — I scared you.” The laughter had not quite left his voice; it sounded tender and infuriating at once. “Last week was just a huge mix-up. I really didn’t die.”

“The car that got totaled in the crash really was mine. But the person behind the wheel wasn’t me — it was a coworker who’d borrowed the car.”

“And his face was damaged beyond recognition in the impact, so my parents genuinely believed it was me. They thought I was dead.”

I stared at his outstretched hand, the knuckles clean and distinct, and reached out to touch it without thinking.

It was warm. It had heat.

He really was a living person.

The face, the hair, the clothes — even the mole at the outer corner of his eye — matched the Chen Mo in my memory exactly.

And still, every instinct I had insisted that the man in front of me was not Chen Mo.

Seeing me still huddled motionless in the wardrobe, Chen Mo smiled helplessly.

He sighed, pulled out his phone, swiped a few times, and turned the screen toward me.

“Look at this. It’s footage from the security camera outside my office.” His voice was gentle, patient — the voice of someone trying to soothe. “That day I lent the car to a coworker who had an emergency. See — this man walking over to take the keys is him. And the one standing beside him is me.”

The footage was not especially clear, shot from a high, downward surveillance angle.

The timestamp read the afternoon of the crash.

In the frame, a man with Chen Mo’s build and the same gray shirt walked over with his head down and took the car keys from the person standing at the edge of the frame.

The standing man was blurry, but his face was recognizable as Chen Mo’s.

Then the man with the keys turned toward the parking lot, while Chen Mo walked into the office building.

“That afternoon I left on short notice for a business trip — a remote project site with almost no signal, practically cut off from the world.” He took back the phone, his tone apologetic. “When I got back a week later, I found out about this enormous mix-up. My parents had nearly cried themselves unconscious. It took everything I had — pulling the company security footage — to convince them I was really alive.”

He held his hand out to me again. His palm was warm and dry; I could even feel the pulse in it.

He closed his fingers firmly around my cold ones, pulled me out of the wardrobe, and held me tight.

His arms were solid and warm, his heartbeat strong and steady against my cheek, his breath moving over the top of my hair. Everything declared him a living, flesh-and-blood human being.

But the doubt in my heart did not dissolve. It coiled tighter, like a climbing vine.

I pulled out of his arms, looked him straight in the eye, and asked the question that mattered most: “Even with terrible signal, for an entire week you could have found some way to let your family know you were alive. Why didn’t you send a single message or make a single call — not to me, and not to your parents?”

The smile on Chen Mo’s face froze. His eyes flickered for an instant, then steadied again.

He sighed and rubbed the space between his brows, looking tired and cornered.

“That matter… involves certain company trade secrets. I really cannot go into it now.” He avoided my eyes, his voice sincere but plainly evasive. “Baby, I know this is a lot to accept all at once. If you really don’t believe me, tomorrow — tomorrow itself — I’ll go with you to the hospital for the most thorough examination there is. You can watch them draw my blood yourself, watch them run the DNA comparison, and see whether I’m a living man and whether I’m Chen Mo.”

I accepted his offer.

That night he slept in the guest room.

But I could not fall asleep. My heart kept pounding, and in the haze between waking and sleep I felt the bedroom door open and sensed a figure standing over the bed, watching me.

I could not make out its face, and my body would not move no matter how I tried.

Thankfully, the figure vanished almost at once. Strangely, the moment it disappeared, I — who had been wide awake — fell fast asleep.

When I woke the next day, I deliberately checked the room’s overnight camera. There was no figure in the footage at all — only me, asleep in bed.

I could only tell myself that yesterday’s fright had given me hallucinations.

After Chen Mo woke, he really did take me to the most authoritative forensic identification center in the city.

I stayed right beside him the whole time, watching his blood drawn and the sample sent in, even using a few emergency channels to rush part of the results.

A few hours later the report lay before me in black and white: every marker in the blood panel was normal, and the DNA comparison confirmed that the man in front of me matched Chen Mo’s archived records exactly.

The doctor held the report and told me with certainty: “Ma’am, medically and legally, this gentleman is unquestionably alive, and he is Mr. Chen Mo himself.”

The scientific evidence was a mountain; I seemed to have no choice but to believe it. Yet looking at Chen Mo, I still felt an unease I could not put into words.

That evening Chen Mo walked me home.

He bought me my favorite chilled watermelon and, just like before, cut it into neat pieces, speared each one with a toothpick, and arranged them on a plate.

But right in that tender moment, one icy detail slammed into my mind.

I had attended Chen Mo’s funeral. Paying my respects, I had seen with my own eyes, on the hand that protruded from the white shroud, the mole on the web between his thumb and forefinger.

And on his feet — those little-pig socks.

I had bought those socks.

If the misidentified coworker coincidentally shared Chen Mo’s build and even the mole on his hand, how were the little-pig socks supposed to be explained?

Could a coincidence really run that far?

At the thought, gooseflesh rose on me again, and with a stiff, unnatural expression I pushed Chen Mo away.

“I don’t feel well today. I don’t want watermelon. You should go.”

Chen Mo went still. He propped himself up and studied me in the dim moonlight, his eyes unreadable, as if he wanted to say something. In the end it came out only as a soft sigh.

He did not press me. In silence he got up, dressed, and left my apartment.

An inexplicable ache settled in my chest — an ache for Chen Mo, but not for the Chen Mo standing in front of me now.

Chen Mo and I had known each other such a short time. I had even agreed to go out with him for no deeper reason than that he was gorgeous.

Yet the degree to which he treated me well made me wonder if I had saved his life in a past incarnation.

In our mere five days together, he came to my apartment every day and did every chore with meticulous care. He even seeded the watermelon he cut for me with perfect concentration, and not a single thread of white pith ever remained on the pomelo he peeled.

Even the money he earned tutoring in his spare time, he handed over to me without keeping back a cent.

And this same boy had been too shy even to hold my hand.

Whereas this Chen Mo now — the way he looked at me made me feel he could devour me whole on the spot.

After that night, the unease in my heart did not fade. It grew.

A few days later, Chen Mo’s parents specially asked to meet me.

At the dinner table the two old people fussed over Chen Mo, piling food onto his plate, their every word steeped in the relief and joy of something lost and found.

I hesitated again and again, but in the end I could not help drawing his parents aside and venturing carefully: “Uncle, Auntie… do you feel that since he came back this time, something about Chen Mo is… different? Or — about the crash, about that coworker — does anything strike you as strange?”

The words were barely out of my mouth when the smile vanished from Mrs. Chen’s face.

Her face darkened. Her tone was more severe and displeased than I had ever heard it: “Xiao Lin, what are you suggesting? It is a heaven-sent blessing that our Mo came back safe and sound. He is our son — absolutely, unmistakably — and there is nothing wrong with him. Don’t you ever say such a thing again.”

Mr. Chen said nothing, but his face was equally displeased, his eyes carrying a clear warning.

Faced with their total acceptance and their refusal to entertain a single doubt, I felt a cold that went to the bone.

Every piece of evidence proved Chen Mo was alive, and yet whenever I stood beside him, that clinging, skin-crawling wrongness only intensified.

I could no longer bear the fear and the confusion.

The next day, making some excuse, I took a taxi and fled home to my grandmother in the old village.

Grandma was the village’s renowned spirit medium. When I was little she used to say my constitution was unusual. Perhaps she could see something.

The moment I walked through the door, too rushed for greetings, I told her the whole unbelievable story from start to finish, ending in a trembling voice: “Grandma, I cannot help feeling… the Chen Mo now is not human at all. Has his… his ghost come back for me? And this ghost seems different from how he was alive. Could it have picked up something unclean?”

Grandma had been turning her Buddhist prayer beads. At my words her head snapped up, her face astonished: “Nannan — my dear girl — what nonsense are you talking? If anyone in this world could run into a ghost, it would not be you. You were born under a pure-yang chart — yang year, yang month, yang day, yang hour. Fire runs through your fate, and your baleful aura is overwhelming. No ordinary lost soul or evil ghost could get near you. They would run from you first.”

Her words only deepened my confusion.

If no ghost could approach me, did that mean Chen Mo truly could not be dead? Then why had he become so utterly different?

Grandma thought for a moment and asked to see a photo of Chen Mo.

“Grandma, look — this is a photo of him from before.” I hurriedly found a selfie of Chen Mo and me on my phone and held it out to her.

Grandma took the phone and squinted at it carefully.

One look, and her face changed violently. Her fingers shook so sharply that the prayer beads nearly fell to the floor.

Her pupils contracted, every drop of color draining from her face, as if she had seen something beyond terror.

She seized my wrist with astonishing strength. Her voice came hoarse and urgent:

“How can this fate be half-alive, half-dead…”

“My foolish girl! You must not have anything more to do with him. If this goes on, you will surely die.”

Having spoken, Grandma pulled me anxiously closer and studied my face.

“Too late… Nannan, it is already too late,” she murmured, her voice as dry as autumn wind through fallen leaves. “He has already planted his yin root inside you. Even if you fled to the ends of the earth and never saw him again, you… would not have long to live.”

“If he seems different to you now from before, it means he is done pretending. He is ready to draw the net closed. Too late, too late…”

I felt as if struck by lightning, my whole body cold. “Grandma… is there — is there really no way?”

With trembling hands, Grandma drew from the inner pocket of her clothes a small triangular charm sachet, folded with care from yellow talisman paper. The cinnabar sigils on it glowed a glaring red.

She pressed the sachet into my palm.

“Listen, Nannan.” She held my eyes, her tone more grave and urgent than I had ever heard it. “This is your last thread of life. You must find a way to get one of his hairs — mind this, it must have the follicle, pulled straight from his head, the fresher the better. Then burn the hair together with this charm sachet to ash, mix the ash into water, and find a way… to make him drink it. Only once he himself drinks this Root-Severing Water will the yin root planted in you burn away together with him. It is the only chance you have.”

She squeezed my hand hard. “Remember — you may get only the one chance. Lose no time. I will come and help you myself.”

That very evening I arranged to meet Chen Mo at my apartment, and clutching the charm sachet, I headed back myself right after.

Even the sound-activated light in the stairwell seemed dimmer than usual, my shadow stretching and shrinking along the wall.

I turned the key. Inside it was pitch black and dead silent.

Chen Mo had a key to my apartment, and it took him less than ten minutes to get here from his place. Had he not arrived yet?

I exhaled in a flicker of relief, then grew inexplicably more tense.

I slipped off my shoes and, barefoot as a thief, crept silently toward the bedroom to see whether he was there.

The instant my fingers were about to touch the bedroom doorknob —

“Baby,” a voice said without warning, almost brushing my ear, “what made you suddenly want to come back? Weren’t you needed at home to look after your sick grandmother?”

I nearly screamed. I spun around, my heart all but leaping out of my throat.

Chen Mo stood right behind me in the shadow of the entryway, soundless, having stood there who knew how long.

He wore loungewear, his face blank.

Remembering Grandma’s words, gooseflesh crawled over me.

If I had known all this, I would never have said yes when Chen Mo pursued me, just because he was handsome.

What kind of mess had I walked into!

I forced down the terror that threatened to burst out of me, produced a smile even I could feel was stiff, and took a step toward him. I slipped my arms around his waist and buried my face in his chest, which smelled cleanly of body wash.

At the angle he could not see, my trembling fingers moved with sudden precision — I swept them through the hair at the back of his head, plucked several strands, and clenched them tight in my fist.

Chen Mo’s body seemed to stiffen. He clearly had not expected me to throw myself at him.

He held me gently back a little and looked down into my face, his tone probing: “You’re not afraid of me anymore?”

I tilted my face up and tried to fill my eyes with sincerity and a touch of remorse: “What happened last week… really hit me too hard. I couldn’t take it in all at once. I overreacted.”

I took a breath and copied the coaxing, spoiled tone I used to use with him: “But I understand now. You’re you — you never changed. I scared myself.”

As I spoke, two patches of color rose in my cheeks right on cue. My voice dropped, shy: “Baby… tonight… can we?”

Chen Mo’s eyes lit up instantly — a blaze mixed of surprise, desire, and some burning I could not read.

The last of his suspicion dissolved. Laughing, he flicked the tip of my nose with his finger: “Of course. I could ask for nothing better.”

“Then… will you shower first?” I gave him a little push. “I’ll wait for you.”

Without the least hesitation — almost eagerly — he kissed me and turned into the bathroom.

The instant the shower rushed on, I dashed into the kitchen.

I quickly found a ceramic bowl, laid the hairs and the precious charm sachet in it together, and set them alight with a lighter.

Carefully I tipped the ash into a glass and poured in a small amount of warm water, stirring until the ash dissolved and the water turned faintly cloudy. By the time I finished, my palms were slick with cold sweat.

Just then, the shower stopped.

I hurried to set the glass on the coffee table in the living room, arranging it to look casually left there.

Chen Mo came out rubbing his hair, a towel knotted at his waist, water tracing down the hard planes of his chest.

I snatched up my phone and, pretending to take a selfie, snapped a photo of him and sent it to Grandma with the words: “Grandma, he’s out. I’m about to get him to drink it.”

I had barely pressed send and lowered the phone when Chen Mo walked over with a smile, swept me horizontally into his arms, and carried me toward the bedroom.

“Been waiting long?” He laid me on the bed and leaned down, his eyes burning.

My heartbeat was close to spinning out of control.

In the space between his kisses, I reached sideways for the glass on the nightstand, took a large mouthful myself, then looped my arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth, feeding the lukewarm charm-water across to him little by little.

He started slightly in surprise, but the game-like way of feeding him the water quickly pleased him. His Adam’s apple worked, and he swallowed obediently.

It had worked.

Exultant, I immediately looked for an excuse to push him away: “I… I need the bathroom…”

But his arms locked around me like iron bands. His breathing grew thick and hot, and his other hand had begun to wander. “Don’t go…” he mumbled, and his kisses fell again, more urgent, more possessive than before. The charm-water plainly was not producing any immediate effect. If anything, it seemed to have… aroused him.

I thought of Grandma’s words: the moment he drank it, he would scatter into ash.

So how could he look completely unaffected?

I strained hard, but he showed no sign of letting go.

At that moment, the phone I had flung toward the corner of the bed began to light up frantically.

I wrestled one arm out from under Chen Mo and grabbed the phone. Messages from Grandma:

“No! It’s wrong, it’s all wrong! Nannan! The photo you just sent — that isn’t the same man as the one you showed me before!”

“The one in front of you is a living man! The other one is already dead! That’s why… that’s why his fate read as half-alive, half-dead…”

“They’re yin-yang twins!”

“I don’t have time to explain the rest.”

“The charm-water does nothing to a living man! Get out of there however you can, and listen to me — you must not, must not couple with him. If that union is completed, your life is over for certain!”

I looked up sharply and met “Chen Mo’s” eyes.

Something close to madness burned in them — the thrill and impatience of a hunter whose prey is all but taken, almost burning through his tender disguise.

Pure fear snapped me sober in an instant.

I had to make him stop. I had to get out of there now.

Forcing myself calm, I clutched my stomach and twisted my face into agony: “Wait! No — I — I have terrible cramps! I need the toilet! It’s urgent!”

He paused, frowning in irritation.

In my desperation, dignity be damned, I strained and let one rip.

The crude, unmistakably real bodily response worked exactly as hoped.

Clear disgust crossed his face. His body flinched backward on instinct, and the arm locked around me loosened a fraction.

“Honestly…” he clicked his tongue, and at last let go. “Hurry up and come back.”

Free, I leaped off the bed, tore out of the bedroom, and slammed the door shut behind me. I did not run for the bathroom — I made straight for the front door.

My trembling fingers found the lock — it would not budge. The door had been deadbolted from the inside, and the key was nowhere to be found.

Behind me, the bedroom doorknob turned. “Chen Mo’s” displeased voice came: “Baby? What did you shut the door for?”

No time left. Without hesitation I whirled and threw myself at the living-room window, flinging the sash open. Cold air flooded in. This was the third floor — not terribly high, but far from low. An old fire-service pipe ran down the wall below. It was my only chance.

I scrambled onto the windowsill and, the instant he burst out of the bedroom, leaped without hesitation.

“What are you doing!” his furious, startled shout came from behind.

I clamped myself around the cold fire pipe, the rough rust biting into my palms, and scrabbled sideways for all I was worth.

I had moved less than half a meter when a large hand shot out of the window and seized my ankle, its grip so fierce it seemed ready to crush the bone.

“Trying to run?!” More than half his body hung out the window, the gentle mask entirely gone, nothing left but savage ferocity. He hauled me upward.

I dangled in midair, held only by my arms around the pipe, tugged until my grip was slipping. In desperation I kicked with my free foot at the hand that held me.

“Let go!”

In the struggle my shoe came off and dropped straight down.

Deprived of the shoe’s purchase, he grabbed again the next second, harder, closing his fist around my cotton-socked foot.

But the instant his palm touched my sock —

“Ah!” A cry of pain tore out of him, as though he had touched white-hot iron. His hand sprang away from my ankle as if electrocuted, and his own momentum sent him staggering backward, nearly tumbling out of the window.

I froze and looked down at my foot without thinking. On it was the silly, sweet pair of matching little-pig socks I had once given Chen Mo.

The socks… burned him? Why?

No time to think. Seizing the chance, I scrambled sideways, climbed in through the stairwell window, and ran down the stairs for all I was worth.

But as I reached the ground-floor entrance, two dark figures blocked the way.

It was Chen Mo’s parents.

Each of them held a gleaming axe, their eyes cold and vacant, fixed unblinking on me.

“Go back,” Mrs. Chen said without a flicker of emotion. “Go back and consummate your marriage with our son.”

I stumbled back in terror until my shoulders hit the cold wall. There was nowhere left to retreat. “No! He isn’t Chen Mo! You know it — he isn’t!”

Mr. Chen stepped forward, the axe blade catching the pale light, his face terrifyingly stern: “This world only needs one Chen Mo. And in the end, the one who survives can only be Chen Mo.”

Just then “Chen Mo’s” furious shout came from upstairs: “Dad! Mom! Catch her! Get those socks off her! That one attached something to them — I cannot get near her right now!”

That one? Did he mean… the Chen Mo who had died?

At his words, Chen Mo’s parents closed in on me.

Mr. Chen pinned me in an iron grip, and Mrs. Chen knelt without hesitation and brutally tore the two little-pig socks off my feet.

Cold air closed around my bare feet at once.

With the socks’ protection gone, “Chen Mo” came charging downstairs. He took my struggling body from his parents, slung me over his shoulder like a sack of grain, and strode back up.

Back in the apartment he threw me roughly onto the bed and tore at my clothes, his face full of violence and a warped triumph: “It didn’t have to be like this! Why couldn’t you just take me for him and die happy?!”

“Now you can just wait to die. A yang-fated woman of this rarity — and he actually threw you away, chose death himself? What a fool. I won’t let you slip by. With you, I can live to at least a hundred.”

I fought and screamed and wept, but I could not move him an inch.

Just when I thought it was all over —

The temperature in the room plunged.

A translucent figure in familiar clothes appeared without warning beside the bed and, putting every ounce of strength it had into the blow, slammed the “Chen Mo” off me and across the room.

Still shaking, I looked up at the one who had saved me.

He had Chen Mo’s exact face, but his body was half transparent and his face was pale, while his eyes were clear and anxious.

My heart trembled. Without meaning to, I whispered: “Chen Mo… is that you?”

He turned to look at me, his eyes brimming with tenderness and sorrow: “I was never Chen Mo. My name is Chen Che. I couldn’t tell you before. But now… I want you to remember my real name.”

Then he turned furiously on “Chen Mo,” who was pulling himself up from the floor: “I already traded my life to you! Why won’t you be satisfied? To live longer — you won’t even spare her?!”

“Chen Mo” wiped at blood that wasn’t there at the corner of his mouth, his face hideous: “Your life was always mine. You were born to live for me. That’s what Mom and Dad told us from the time we were small. You were nothing but my long-term blood bank.”

Mr. and Mrs. Chen crowded in through the door and shouted at Chen Che: “Chen Che! Can’t you even rest in death? How can you be so selfish!”

“Can’t you think of the Chen family? You’re already dead. Why not let your brother live out a good hundred years?”

Chen Che smiled desolately: “Is that so? But as things stand, let alone a hundred years — it looks as if he’s about to die right now.”

His eyes swept to the glass on the nightstand with some charm-water still in it. His translucent form lunged, caught up the glass, and raised it to his lips.

“Chen Mo’s” face changed utterly. He shouted in terror: “Have you lost your mind?! That’s Utmost-Yang Water! If you drink it, your soul will scatter forever!”

Chen Che looked at him with utter resolve: “So what? You planted the yin root in her. If you don’t die, she can’t live. So you have to die.”

And with that, without the least hesitation, he drained what remained of the glass.

In the same instant a ghastly scream tore out of Chen Mo. His body was a punctured bladder: it shriveled and rotted at visible speed, the skin blackening as if charred.

Mr. and Mrs. Chen shrieked in horror.

“Chen Che, do you have any idea what you’ve done? We spent eighteen bitter years binding your fate to your brother’s. Now that you’ve destroyed your own soul, your brother can only fall back on his own fate — he’ll die! He’ll die!”

Mrs. Chen threw herself, wailing, in front of Chen Mo and watched in terror as he wasted away at terrible speed, nearly broken.

“It’s over. The Chen family is finished.”

I stood frozen, staring at the surreal scene, my mind blank: “What… what is actually happening…”

By then Grandma had reached the doorway, breathless. One look at the room and she understood everything.

Tears streamed down her aged face. In a hoarse voice she laid the cruel truth bare:

“A yin-yang twin birth… the yin twin ordinarily does not live past its first year, while the yang twin thrives for a century. But yin twins are often born brilliant, and yang twins fated to mediocrity. These parents… to keep their brilliant yin child alive, found a black-path Taoist and laid a vicious curse on the yang child — forcing him to live under the yin child’s identity until the age of eighteen, and feeding the true yin child every month with the yang child’s own heart’s-blood to keep him from dying…”

“Once the eighteenth year passed, the yang twin would inherit half the yin twin’s allotted span and live to fifty. And you, my girl… you are a born yang-fated woman, one in ten thousand. Union with either brother would bring him enormous benefit. Union with you would break the black-path Taoist’s curse completely and let the yang twin truly live. As for the yin twin, through your life he could stretch fifty years to a hundred… but no matter which of them did it, your own vital essence would be spent, and you would die…”

“What this old grandmother never expected was that the yin child… that this boy named Chen Che… would in the end let go of it all and choose his own death.”

At last I understood the whole impossible truth and looked, stunned, at Chen Che, whose body was growing more and more transparent.

Chen Che had lived in the outside world under Chen Mo’s identity all along — which was why the other Chen Mo had gone to the hospital DNA test so unflinchingly: he was the real Chen Mo.

One thing I could not understand. According to Grandma, my fate could have saved Chen Che, whose own family had drained his life for years — yet Chen Che and I had known each other for only a month. There was no reason for him to give up his chance to live for me.

He looked back at me gently, his smile clean and sorrowful, the same shy boy who had been my boyfriend: “The truth is… I found you four years ago. Back then I couldn’t accept my fate; I was full of resentment, and a yang-fated girl was my last hope of staying alive. So I started watching you in secret, looking for a chance to act against you…”

“But… little by little, I saw what a good, kind girl you were. And I found… that I had truly fallen for you.”

“What I remember most clearly is a day of torrential rain. You gave your own umbrella to a little girl by the roadside who didn’t have one and ran home laughing through the rain. I thought my chance had come and offered you my umbrella — but the moment you turned, you saw an old woman selling goods by the road getting soaked, and you gave that umbrella to her.”

“Then you turned around and apologized to me, and insisted on transferring me the money for the umbrella.”

“Your friends teased you for being a saint, but you didn’t mind a bit. You joked that you simply loved walking in the rain, and started imitating the soulful rain-soaked male leads of those old Taiwanese idol dramas.”

“Maybe it really was a small thing. But I’ll never forget how bright your eyes were that day. I just didn’t expect that by the next day you’d already forgotten me.”

“So I told myself I must never harm you. But I was about to turn eighteen. I was afraid that if I didn’t get to know you then, I would lose my chance forever. That’s why I gathered my courage and asked for your number. I never expected… that we would actually be together. Even if it was only for a week…”

“But the worst of it is — I was wrong. Because of that decision, Chen Mo found you too. I was afraid that after I died, he would still set his sights on you. So at the very end I spent my last ounce of strength splitting off a shred of my soul to protect you. But my soul was too weak. In the end that shred could only cling… to those little-pig socks you bought…”

A dull ache spread through my chest. I asked him only one thing: “A week after you died, the night Chen Mo came back — was that figure standing watch beside my bed you?”

His soul was fading fast. He nodded, and with a last smile spoke his final words to me: “I’m actually glad we didn’t know each other long. I don’t think you’ll grieve my leaving for too long. My life was awful from start to finish. But I hope you’ll be happy, always.”

His soul dispersed completely.

I stared blankly at the space where Chen Che had been, and a thread of sharp pain twisted through my heart.

The air around me seemed to have solidified; nothing remained but Mr. and Mrs. Chen’s hopeless wailing and the indescribable stench rising from the filth Chen Mo had become.

Mrs. Chen’s head snapped up, her face drowned in tears and snot, still threaded with an unwilling madness: “The Chen family is finished, there’s nothing left, nothing! What did we do wrong?! We only wanted the better one to live! We only wanted the Chen family to bring honor to its name! We sacrificed so much! Che… Che was always meant to be sacrificed for his brother. That was his fate!”

At that moment, without warning, an icy, bone-piercing gust whirled in through the window and tore into the room. It spiraled around Mr. and Mrs. Chen with a sound like sobbing, as though some formless rage were howling.

Mr. and Mrs. Chen clung to each other in terror, trembling.

Grandma watched, her expression heavy, and said quietly: “…It is the backlash. You moved against heaven, forced fate off its course, cursed your own flesh and blood. Now that the spell is broken, the evil you laid on another has come home to roost on you.”

As if to bear her words out, Mr. Chen suddenly let out a ghastly scream, both hands clamped over his heart. His face turned blue-purple at once, his fat body convulsing violently; he looked moments from death.

Almost at the same instant, Mrs. Chen screamed too, a terrible sound. Her eyes bulged, bloodshot, her hands raking wildly at the air as if she saw something beyond horror. Her mind had plainly shattered.

“Karmic justice… this is karmic justice…” Mrs. Chen giggled vacantly, tears and spittle running together. “Gone… it’s all gone… our son is gone… the Chen family… cut off… haha… hahaha…” She was completely mad.

The scene before me was horrifying and wretched, yet strangely I felt not the smallest flicker of satisfaction — only a deep, hollow loneliness and helplessness.

Grandma sighed, took out her phone, and called the police and an ambulance.

What followed was chaotic yet orderly.

Police and paramedics arrived and took away Mr. Chen, felled by a sudden heart attack, and Mrs. Chen, now wholly insane.

Once everything had settled, the summer vacation happened to begin, and Grandma and I returned to the old family home.

I could not explain it, but I ached — far more than I had when I first learned “Chen Mo” had died in the crash.

I clutched the little-pig sock that had saved my life, unable to shake the feeling that a faint, cold breath still lingered on it.

Grandma saw it, and it grieved her.

She brought out the old ritual implements she kept stored at the bottom of her chest, and on a night of full moon set up a small altar in the courtyard.

“Nannan,” she said, gently taking my hand, “that boy was pure of heart. At the last he dispersed with thoughts of protection and love, not as a vengeful spirit or a fierce ghost. A soul like that, even shattered, does not vanish entirely from the world. And above all… his last remnant of soul clung to this object. Its bond with you runs very deep.”

She pointed to the little-pig sock: “I cannot bring him back from the dead. But perhaps… I can try to gather and nurture the truest thread of his spirit, the part that scattered. It will take time, though, and it needs a vessel — and a constant stream of living vitality.”

I seemed to understand, and the light of hope rekindled in my eyes.

Grandma re-consecrated the cinnabar bracelet that had spent its power protecting me, washed the little-pig sock clean, and placed both at the center of the altar.

She had me gather dewy petals every dawn and meditate facing the moonlight every night, pouring my longing and gratitude into the bracelet and the sock little by little, like warm sunlight and rain.

Days passed. At first, nothing happened.

Then one morning, about three months later, I found that my favorite jasmine on the windowsill, which had been drooping, had pushed out dozens of tender new green shoots overnight, brimming with life.

Even more strangely, one of its thickest branches had naturally wound itself around the cinnabar bracelet lying beside it, as if drawn to it.

More time passed, and the jasmine flourished — green leaves, heavy with buds.

It seemed almost sentient. Whenever I drew near, or whenever my spirits were low, its leaves would stir without wind, swaying gently and releasing a scent quieter and more peaceful than usual, comforting me without a sound.

He had come back.

Or rather, he had never left — and he wanted me to go on living, happy and safe, forever.

（The End）