Lively Skeleton - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Ever since I was little, I’ve had a habit of collecting things.

Big things, like the ten red hundred-yuan bills I’d set aside every payday, fold up nice and neat, tuck under my pillow, and count every night before bed.

Small things, like the paper bags my milk tea and coffee came in, which I sorted one by one by color and pattern.

As for why I liked hoarding all this stuff?

First, they were pretty. The process of saving them always put me in a good mood.

Second, I always felt like they might come in handy someday.

And so, the money under my pillow piled up higher and higher.

My pillow got taller and taller too.

It was such a problem.

My hoarding was getting worse, and I made up my mind to fix it.

So I applied for a job sorting recyclables at a scrap yard.

“Uncle, trust me.

“I know how to drive a forklift, and I’m really good at picking through scrap on my own!”

Wearing work clothes in the sweltering heat while sorting recyclables was brutal. The scrap was piled up like mountains.

I thought I’d be so uncomfortable that I’d force myself to break my hoarding habit.

But then…

That day, I found a diary packed full of writing in a scrap heap, and my eyes lit up.

Then I found an old CCD camera. It still worked. Keeping it!

Uh… yellowed textbooks from the nine-year compulsory education system, with a bit of blue peeking out from the edge.

Naturally suspicious, I pulled it out.

Ten yuan.

I keenly sniffed out an opportunity to get rich.

I flipped rapidly through every single one of those books, and in the end, I made a total haul of five hundred thirty-two yuan and fifty cents!

I plunged headfirst into the scrap station, getting more and more excited as I sorted.

When it was time to clock out, I was exhausted but satisfied as I dragged a pile of things I thought might be useful behind me and climbed down from the scrap heap.

Then my footing slipped, there was a sharp crack, and I fell flat on my face.

When I opened my eyes again, I had arrived in the cultivation world.

…

Spring turned to winter, and decades passed.

I am now the eldest senior sister of the Sword Sect.

At the same time, my hoarding problem has only gotten worse.

The sect leader of the Sword Sect has repeatedly ordered me not to bring every random piece of junk I find back to the sect.

“If there is a next time, I will throw you out of the sect!”

I looked at the sect leader calmly.

“Then give back the solid-gold three-legged lucky toad you took from me, the square piece of jade that perfectly fit the broken table leg, the little rock that glows at night…

“And,” I emphasized, “the perfectly straight tree branch I’ve polished until it’s smooth and glossy.

“All of it.”

I picked all of those up while trailing behind people during my training trips down the mountain.

Because of that, people often got the wrong idea and assumed I was carrying some incredible treasure in my robes.

“Stop right there. Hand over what’s in your pockets!”

Robbing each other when the opportunity arose was hardly rare among cultivators, and that was how I got stopped.

Me: “…”

Goddammit.