Xiaolei - Chapter 5

Some things have already begun long before you notice them.

I asked Chen Wei to bring me the shoes he had worn when he encountered the gentlemen.

They were a brand-new pair of Adidas, a present for his seventeenth birthday. When he first got them, he had shown them off to me at length.

He had gone to the studio with a purpose that day, so he had deliberately worn that pair.

I turned the shoes over in my hands. They really were nice.

“Sorry about this,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

Chen Wei sensed trouble. Those shoes were his treasure.

“Trade this pair for some peace and quiet.”

I first removed the lace from the left shoe. I wrote Chen Wei’s birth date and hour on a strip of paper, slipped it beneath the insole, then drew Fourth Great-Uncle’s protective amulet from inside my collar.

It was a finger bone from a white tiger. A secret talisman written in blood was hidden inside it. After being worn for more than a century, it had come to resemble a smooth piece of red jade.

I held the amulet in my mouth and began reciting an incantation. It trembled faintly along with my words. At the same time, I threaded the lace back through the shoe using a red cord and tied a dead knot.

When the incantation was finished, I carried the shoe outside and found an open patch of ground. I pointed its toe west and burned it with cypress branches.

This was the Shoe-Escape Method Fourth Great-Uncle had taught me. It could send away ordinary gentlemen.

As the shoe burned, both Chen Wei and I heard squealing in the smoke and smelled wave after wave of bloody stench.

“All right. Nothing else will bother you now.”

But I gave Chen Wei two further instructions.

First, he was not to sneak peeks at those kinds of VCDs for a while. His current body could not take it.

Chen Wei swore he absolutely would not.

Second, everything I had given him before—really just a few comic books—had to be returned to me and burned as well.

“Why that too?”

I did not tell him. In any case, it would be better for both of us if we did not meet for a while.

After returning home, Chen Wei immediately felt that the room was much fresher. Uncle Chen was also delighted by the improvement in his son.

Chen Wei said to me with feeling, “Who would’ve guessed? You usually look like such a coward, but when you do this sort of thing, you really have an air that even ghosts and gods wouldn’t dare offend.”

For the first time in my life, I felt a profound sense of achievement.

I had heard that Chen Wei’s family had connections at the police academy. If possible, I advised him to enroll there. It suited him.

Before I left, he suddenly said, “Jinjiao, don’t go back to Dafeng Art Studio. I just have this feeling that something’s wrong with that place.”

“All right. I’ll look into other studios.”

But I had already paid two months’ tuition, and getting it back would be troublesome. Besides, Dafeng had an excellent admission rate, so I decided to continue for the time being.

It was a huge studio with several hundred students. Surely gentlemen could not wander around there in broad daylight.

And they were the thing I cared about least.

After leaving Chen Wei’s house, I felt lighter all at once, as though emotions suppressed for years had finally been released.

I returned to my ancestral home every school holiday and learned a few of these arts from Fourth Great-Uncle. Each time, however, he warned me that I could not use them until I came of age.

I was almost an adult now. Surely one little experiment would be fine.

I swung onto my bicycle, ready to leave. A crisp snapping sound suddenly came from my neck.

I removed Fourth Great-Uncle’s amulet and found a thin red crack across its surface. From somewhere inside came the faint hiss of escaping air.