The antique market smelled like roasted chestnuts, incense, and possibly regret. Lin Yanyu squinted through the haze of red lanterns swaying overhead as she navigated the crowded alley. The ground was uneven, the signs were mostly handwritten (and misspelled), and every other stall claimed to sell “100% Real Ancient Artifacts!!!” with an offensively modern price tag.

She didn’t come here for history. She came for haunted junk.

“Come, come! Lucky girl, you look like someone with spiritual affinity!” shouted a man from behind a cluttered table full of trinkets. His eyes were squinty and suspiciously sparkly.

Yanyu paused. Her ghost-sensing instincts—which she usually ignored in favor of denial—began to buzz. Something on the table glowed faintly. Not in a pretty, LED way. More like a this-might-curse-your-descendants sort of glow.

Nestled among the cracked porcelain and old coins was a jade hairpin. Smooth, pale green, and carved with the delicate shape of a lotus flower, it looked way too elegant to be rotting in a discount bin.

“How much for the hairpin?” she asked, pointing at it with one hesitant finger.

The vendor grinned. “For you, student discount! Only 30 yuan! And maybe a drop of blood, depending on the hour—kidding!”

She stared at him.

He stared back.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

---

Back in her dorm room, the atmosphere was less mysterious and more tragic. Crumpled laundry threatened to evolve into a second roommate, and a row of failed midterm results mocked her from the bulletin board.

“Welcome home,” she muttered to the hairpin, setting it reverently on her cluttered desk between a half-used ghost-repelling incense stick and a Hello Kitty lighter.

Her cat, Chairman Meow, blinked from the windowsill with the eternal disapproval only cats and disapproving ancestors could muster.

“Don’t give me that look. You know I collect haunted crap. It’s a hobby. Like knitting. But with more risk of demonic possession.”

Chairman Meow sneezed pointedly and curled back into his loaf form.

Yanyu went about her nightly routine: shower, cursed scroll recitation, light sobbing about her GPA. She brushed her hair absently, humming off-key to a pop song about unrequited love and overpriced bubble tea.

Then the mirror flickered.

At first, she thought it was a trick of the light. But then the temperature in the room dropped like a bad exam grade, and the mirror shimmered again—this time clearly, unmistakably.

A man stood behind her.

Elegant. Tall. Wearing robes that belonged in a historical drama. His eyes glowed faintly blue, and his expression was one of extreme displeasure—like someone just told him his favorite dynasty had been canceled.

Yanyu shrieked. Loudly.

The man didn’t flinch.

“I am Shen Weizhi,” he said, his voice deep and oddly soothing. “You have disturbed my eternal rest.”

Yanyu hurled her hairbrush at him. It passed through harmlessly and thudded against the wall.

Chairman Meow casually walked out of the room.

“Why are you in my mirror?!” she screamed.

“You touched the hairpin,” he replied with ghostly calm. “That item is cursed, and now… so are you.”

“Oh great,” she groaned, sliding down the wall. “Not again.”

Lin Yanyu did what any rational, educated young woman would do when confronted with a ghost in her mirror.

She threw a talisman at him.

It was hand-drawn (badly) with a permanent marker, folded unevenly, and smelled like hotpot grease. She’d copied it off a blog titled Ghost-Be-Gone: Taoist DIY for Broke Students. The blog had three stars on Bilibili, but it was all she had.

The paper slapped through the air and flopped to the ground. Shen Weizhi didn’t even blink.

“That… usually works,” she mumbled.

“It does not,” he replied coolly. “And your ‘ink’ smells like expired beef.”

Yanyu scrambled backward on all fours until she hit her laundry pile. “Okay, okay. Let’s start over. Who are you, why are you in my mirror, and can I please not be cursed until after finals?”

Shen Weizhi stepped out of the mirror.

Literally stepped.

His robes flowed like water as he glided onto her tacky IKEA rug. The air around him shimmered with a strange glow, ancient and cold. It made her ramen cup tremble.

“I am Shen Weizhi,” he repeated. “Royal Exorcist of the Late Han Court. Sealed within that jade hairpin for over two thousand years.”

Yanyu blinked. “Okay but… why?”

His expression twitched, just for a second. “I was betrayed. Poisoned. Cursed by the very spirits I was sworn to control. I have slumbered until someone foolish enough… touched the hairpin.”

He glared at her.

She pointed at herself. “Me? Foolish?”

His gaze dropped to her hoodie, which said in large pink letters: GHOSTS HATE ME (AND I HATE THEM BACK).

“…Fair,” she admitted.

A loud bang echoed from the kitchen.

Yanyu jumped three feet in the air, knocking over a pile of cursed tea mugs. “What now?!”

Shen turned sharply toward the door. “That sound was—”

Before he could finish, a black blur launched into the room, hissed like an ancient demon, and leapt onto her desk.

Chairman Meow.

His eyes glowed gold. Not in the normal, judgmental cat way. In a definitely-possessed-by-something-spiritually-unstable way.

“Yanyu,” the cat said, in perfect Mandarin. “This ghost is annoying.”

Yanyu screamed again. Her throat was going to need ointment by the end of the week.

“You… possessed my CAT?!”

Shen looked vaguely offended. “I needed a vessel. The feline was… unoccupied.”

“You couldn’t possess something inanimate? Like a chair? A dust bunny?!”

“The cat had fewer complications,” he said flatly, now speaking through the cat. The feline’s mouth moved awkwardly like a badly dubbed anime character. “Also, I enjoy the warm paws.”

“Get out of my cat, Shen!”

“I will return to spiritual form shortly,” the possessed Chairman Meow said. “But be warned—this binding is not temporary. You and I are linked now. Wherever you go, I follow.”

The light flickered. The temperature dropped again.

Then, suddenly—nothing. The glow faded. Chairman Meow blinked normally again and licked his paw like none of it had happened.

Yanyu stared in stunned silence.

Then she looked at the hairpin, now glowing faintly again on her desk.

Then at the mirror.

Then at the cat.

Then at her cursed, miserable life.

“I need new hobbies,” she muttered.

Chairman Meow meowed casually and batted a talisman off the desk.

Shen’s voice echoed faintly from the mirror once more.

“This is only the beginning.”

Yanyu buried her face in a pillow and screamed one more time for good measure.

Morning arrived with no regard for Yanyu’s traumatic night.

Sunlight filtered through the curtains like a lie. Birds chirped. Her alarm blared. Her possessed cat lay across her face like a furry demon weighing down her soul.

She sat up slowly, half expecting the ghost to be gone and her life to make sense again.

Nope.

There he was.

Shen Weizhi stood near her cluttered bookshelf, hands clasped behind his back like a palace guard. His translucent form floated slightly above the ground, casting no shadow, emitting a constant air of elegant judgment.

“You sleep like a dropped corpse,” he said casually.

Yanyu groaned. “Good morning to you, oh mighty fashion ghost.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You drooled on your pillow.”

“Get out.”

“I cannot.”

“Then shut up.”

---

She stumbled into the kitchen, determined to reclaim at least one normal moment from her cursed life. She stuffed instant noodles into the microwave and stared at it with the intensity of someone who had given up on everything but sodium.

Behind her, Shen drifted through the door—literally. His robes fluttered like clouds. “What is that strange device?”

“My microwave,” she grumbled. “It heats food.”

“It’s… humming.”

“Like a cursed frog. Don’t look directly at it or it might possess you next.”

He tilted his head as the microwave beeped, then lunged forward, placing his palm on it like a battlefield medic.

Yanyu choked. “WAIT NO—!”

Too late.

There was a loud zap of spiritual energy. The microwave shook. The lights flickered. Shen yanked his hand back with a startled scowl, eyes glowing briefly.

“You dared challenge me,” he muttered to the appliance.

“You just tried to exorcise my ramen!”

Shen sniffed. “It was clearly harboring malevolent energy.”

“That was my lunch!”

---

The moment she turned to retrieve her ghost-murdered noodles, her phone buzzed with a message from Zhao Ruru:

ZHAO RURU:

💖 bruh are u DEAD? u missed exorcism club again

😤 i swear to goddess i will hold a séance just to yell at u

Yanyu stared at the screen and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Shen asked, still side-eyeing the microwave like it might bite.

“I have a club meeting. And you can’t come.”

“You are spiritually bound to me,” he said simply.

“You’re not a clingy exorcist boyfriend from a C-drama.”

“I don’t know what that is, but I am definitely that.”

She blinked. “You want to come?”

“I must ensure you don’t make your curse worse through your usual… incompetence.”

“Rude.”

“Accurate.”

---

Fifteen minutes later, Yanyu had showered (with Shen politely floating outside the door muttering commentary about “modern water torture devices”) and was headed to campus, hair still damp, talismans stuffed into her backpack like snacks.

Shen hovered invisibly beside her, making snide remarks about traffic, signage, and fashion choices of literally everyone they passed.

“Is that man wearing… slippers with socks?”

“Focus, Shen.”

“That woman’s eyebrows are unnatural.”

“Focus!”

“You’re stepping into another cursed leyline.”

“…Wait, what?”

She stopped mid-step.

The wind shifted.

The street darkened.

And just ahead—hovering near the entrance of the Exorcism Club’s dingy little campus basement—a translucent, weeping child spirit turned and looked directly at her.

Yanyu took a slow step back. Shen narrowed his glowing eyes.

“Well,” he muttered. “I suppose the day won’t be boring.”