Chapter 34#
Those Who Listen to Stories (Part One)#
This was Ye Sheng’s first encounter with the thoroughly modern phenomenon of livestreaming.
Fortunately, his employer was only a hobbyist — one phone and one selfie stick was his entire setup. The operation was simple enough. Under Xia Wenshi’s guidance, Ye Sheng navigated to the backend of Xingyun Live and started a broadcast in the outdoor “Paranormal Adventure” category.
The stream name had been Huang Qiqi’s idea: “Meeting Your Love at Lover’s Lake, Testing Your Heart at Zhenzhen Bridge.”
Ye Sheng held up the phone.
Xia Wenshi stood in front of the camera, the dead black expanse of Lover’s Lake yawning silently behind him.
The yellow-haired young man greeted the viewers with infectious energy, flashing a wide white grin. “Good evening everyone, welcome to room 484848! The lake behind me is the one and only legendary Lover’s Lake at Huai’an University. If you’re a Huai City local, you’ve definitely heard the story. If you’re not from here — search up Zhenzhen Bridge and you’ll understand why it’s considered sacred ground for romance. Walking across Zhenzhen Bridge together at midnight has been the number-one most romantic thing for couples at Huai’an University for years.”
He’d written himself an opening script for this stream, and when he blanked on his lines, he snuck a look at the cheat sheet inked on his palm and kept right on smiling.
“I know everyone here came over from those two posts I made. Don’t worry — our female lead and our male lead are still on their way. Tonight is really about getting revenge on a scumbag. If the ghost of Lover’s Lake doesn’t show up herself, then I’ll personally stand up for love and make sure this guy gets what’s coming to him.”
He held up the radio in his hand. “Alright, I’m going to go set up the scene! I’m leaving the stream in the capable hands of my assistant, Little Ye. Feel free to leave any messages — I’ll check them when I’m back!”
Before leaving, Xia Wenshi caught Ye Sheng’s eye and flashed a covert hand signal: ten. Ye Sheng understood immediately — Xia Wenshi wanted him to crank the beauty filter up to level ten.
Ye Sheng pulled the corner of his mouth. Having only just crawled out of Yinshan and into this dazzling world, he genuinely could not comprehend the logic. You’re a paranormal adventure streamer — shouldn’t authenticity be the whole point? Why would you use a beauty filter?
But he went ahead and did it anyway, for the sake of his employer’s dignity.
Ye Sheng’s physiology had always been mosquito-repellent. Wearing a short-sleeved shirt in the middle of summer, sitting on the wooden bench sheltered by tall trees beside Lover’s Lake, he barely got a single bite. While he adjusted the angle of the selfie stick camera, the comment stream began to roll in.
[Searched up Zhenzhen Bridge and came back, I can’t. This sounds like something dumb couples made up to show off their relationship.]
[Touch grass, mate — every university has legends like this. Mine does too.]
[Universities are usually built on old burial grounds. Heavy yin energy, and after a hundred years of operation, people have definitely died on campus. Stories spread, and then they become ghost stories.]
[Right, when I was in uni, after lights out every night, my roommates and I loved comparing notes on where on campus people had died.]
A few new viewers filtered in.
[No sound??]
[Where’s the streamer?]
Ye Sheng noticed the questions and said, “He’s gone to set something up. I’ll be running the stream until he gets back.”
His voice was cool and pleasant — like a clear stream moving beneath thin winter ice.
The comment section went quiet for a moment.
Then the chat absolutely erupted in question marks.
[???]
[????]
[Oh my god oh my god that VOICE]
[My instincts are telling me this is a very handsome man.]
[Are you there? Can we see your face?]
[I was about to leave but I’m staying for that voice, cutie, do you chat? 🐶🌹]
[Baby, why are you in the outdoor category?? You should be in the voice actor section!!]
[??? You’re already calling him baby?? Are you serious??]
[Every good-looking guy I know has a grating voice — this kind of voice usually belongs to a chubby guy 🙄]
[Probably a voice changer…]
[Wow, male jealousy is truly terrifying.]
Just as the comment section was gearing up for a fight, Ye Sheng adjusted the height of the selfie stick so Lover’s Lake was clearly framed in the shot, and said evenly: “It’s almost midnight. Newcomers — I’d recommend turning off the comments and just watching the stream.”
His complete and utter indifference to the chat only made the viewers more interested. They threw out every clever line and trending meme they had — none of it made a dent, because Ye Sheng was, fundamentally, a part-time worker holding a phone and finding a good angle, and he had exactly zero interest in any of this.
Amid the flood of comments, Ye Sheng spotted a single line posted from a blank account with no profile.
[I honestly don’t understand why Lover’s Lake hasn’t been filled in by now. So many people have died there and somehow it’s still being sold as a romantic destination by people who apparently choose love over self-preservation.]
The comment was quickly buried, but Ye Sheng read it out loud, voice calm.
“A lot of people have died at Lover’s Lake?”
The blank account’s username was [I Am A Little Kidney Bean].
[I Am A Little Kidney Bean: Yes, died. Two people I personally knew died after crossing Zhenzhen Bridge. When they described what they’d seen, their accounts were identical. They both said they’d seen a woman on the bridge. White dress. No feet. Hair dripping wet, hanging down like water weeds. The strangest part — the ghost’s eyes were reversed. White where the pupils should be, black where the whites should be. One of my friends was a man, the other a woman. One died a week after crossing the bridge. The other died two months after. I refuse to believe that’s not the lake ghost.]
Kidney Bean’s post immediately sparked a heated debate in the comment section.
[Is that actually real??]
[That’s genuinely terrifying.]
[Come on, that sounds made up. Ghost stories like this persist for so long precisely because there’s always some coincidence that makes them seem real. Same logic as horoscopes.]
Then some current Huai’an University students weighed in.
[I know who you are, Kidney Bean — you’ve posted on the campus BBS about this before. Someone already dug into it. One of your friends died in a car accident, the other jumped from a building due to graduation pressure. Please stop spreading misinformation.]
[I Am A Little Kidney Bean: Believe what you want. It’s not me who’s dead.]
Ye Sheng watched the argument unfold, his gaze drifting to the screen — to the pitch-black surface of the lake and the abandoned, crumbling bridge. He thought of the first time he’d ever heard the words “Lover’s Lake” — in a taxi, on a radio segment called Xiao Zui Tells Stories.
The female host, in a warm and unhurried voice, had told the legend of Zhenzhen Bridge.
— There is a campus legend at Huai’an University. If a couple stands in the middle of Zhenzhen Bridge at midnight and confesses their true feelings to each other — if every word is honest, and if they truly love one another — they will cross the rest of the bridge safely. But if one of them lies, that person will hear their name being called from somewhere behind them, and be dragged down into the lake by the water ghost.
Ye Sheng turned off the comment feed. He sat in the dark, eyes fixed unblinkingly on the screen.
Xia Wenshi had placed the radio in the lake and crouched on the far side of the bridge.
At the same moment, Huang Qiqi and her boyfriend arrived — fashionably late.
Even from a distance, the boyfriend’s indignant excuses were audible: “Qiqi, what do you want from me to believe that I love you? I even came with you to cross Zhenzhen Bridge — doesn’t that prove my sincerity? I told you ages ago that your best friend was a snake and you didn’t believe me. Now look what happened. I saw right through her — she was obviously the one throwing herself at me. Instead of going after her, why are you taking it out on me? Qiqi, come on, let’s just go back.”
Huang Qiqi was rolling her eyes internally at every word, but for the sake of the plan, she kept up the performance — looking hurt and furious, eyes reddening. “Li Guangyun, do you think I’m stupid? Someone sent me photos from the bar, of you leaving with your arm around her.”
She’d never suspected them before someone pointed it out — but once she started looking, it took all of thirty seconds to find a mountain of evidence.
Li Guangyun, a seasoned player, had his explanation ready in an instant. “She was drunk. I couldn’t just leave her alone on the street. She’s your best friend — I only looked out for her as a favour to you. If it weren’t for your sake, I wouldn’t have given her the time of day.”
Huang Qiqi: “Didn’t she have her roommates at the bar with her? Why did she need you to walk her out? And you walked her all the way to a hotel and checked in?”
Li Guangyun, very seriously: “You might not believe this, but I dropped her off at the hotel and left. I never even stepped through the door. Nothing happened that night.”
Huang Qiqi: “…”
She swallowed the urge to slap him, gripped her handbag strap, and walked briskly up onto Zhenzhen Bridge in her heels.
Li Guangyun hurried to defend himself from behind. “Qiqi, don’t be angry! You’re ten thousand times prettier and ten thousand times better than her — why would I give you up for her?!”
Huang Qiqi felt not a single flicker of pleasure at this. She was even angrier. She must have been blind to fall for someone like this.
It was past midnight — Huai’an University’s curfew hour. The lakeside was deserted. Only two lanterns lit the two ends of the bridge, and the summer insects were thick in the air, moths circling in the yellow glow. The pale light fell over the old, long-neglected bridge, its stones furred over with moss.
Huang Qiqi suppressed her fury and said, voice deliberately even: “Li Guangyun. I’m going to trust you one last time.”
Li Guangyun’s eyes lit up. He nodded rapidly. “Yes, yes, Qiqi — trust me, I really do love you.”
He had no intention of letting go of Huang Qiqi. She was a Huai City local — even just the household registration alone was enough to make him hold on.
Huang Qiqi glanced at her phone and said, “Let’s go up.”
Lover’s Lake was sizeable, and the bridge was long.
“OK, OK.”
Li Guangyun didn’t take any of Lover’s Lake’s supernatural reputation seriously. This kind of nonsense was only good for fooling gullible, horoscope-obsessed girls like Huang Qiqi.
Though, if he was being honest, the first time he’d walked across this bridge, the atmosphere had given him a genuine scare. Especially at midnight — the lake was an impenetrable black, and it had a way of making your skin crawl.
But that night he’d just spent the afternoon delivering roses to another girl, and he’d finished confessing his love to Huang Qiqi on Zhenzhen Bridge without incident. So this time, Li Guangyun was even less inclined to worry about water ghost legends.
As Huang Qiqi crossed the first half of the bridge, the anger in her chest gradually cooled in the night wind, leaving behind something heavier — a deep, spreading sadness. She’d met Li Guangyun in the student union in their first year. She’d spent her whole life being a good girl, a model student. She hadn’t expected her very first relationship to land her with someone like this.
“Qiqi, we’re at the middle of the bridge.”
Li Guangyun called out to her with a manufactured air of tenderness. He was a sports student — his features were ordinary, but he was tall and broad-shouldered, and had a certain popularity on campus.
Huang Qiqi stopped.
She’d dressed up tonight specifically to lure Li Guangyun out — she’d gone for a “date” aesthetic. Her black curls moved in the wind, and she stood on the bridge in her heels, face tilted up toward him, composed.
“Li Guangyun. Was everything you just said the truth?”
Zhenzhen Bridge.
Zhenzhen — testing for truth.
Li Guangyun’s dark-skinned face split into an oily smile. “Of course, Qiqi. Every single word. If I’m lying, may lightning strike me dead.”
At midnight, the temperature on the bridge seemed to have dropped by several degrees.
Li Guangyun suppressed a shiver.
Huang Qiqi said: “Li Guangyun. Do you love me?”
Li Guangyun didn’t miss a beat. “I do.”
Huang Qiqi laughed coldly on the inside — and raised her hand. It was the signal to Xia Wenshi. To make the gesture look natural, she pointed at Li Guangyun’s face and said offhandedly: “You have something on your nose.”
“Huh?”
Li Guangyun rubbed at his nose.
Just looking at his performance was enough to reignite her fury. “Li Guangyun,” she said, “do you truly love me?”
Li Guangyun rubbed his nose for a while, found nothing, but patiently kept his tone sweet. “I do, Qiqi. I really love you.”
When is this going to be over, he thought, suppressing his irritation.
But then he looked up — and went rigid.
Behind Huang Qiqi, he saw the faint outline of a woman in white.
He told himself his eyes were playing tricks and blinked hard.
…The outline was gone.
Li Guangyun let out a quiet, shaky breath. His heart was still hammering. He didn’t even bother asking whether Huang Qiqi loved him back — he just reached out to take her hand. “OK, come on, my dear, are you satisfied now?”
Huang Qiqi shook off his hand and kept walking. Li Guangyun assumed she was still sulking and, not wanting to linger any longer in this unsettling place, hurried to catch up. Before he did, he glanced back once more — unable to help himself, convinced what he’d seen wasn’t a hallucination.
He nearly inhaled his own breath in shock.
The woman was standing in the middle of the bridge. This time she was more solid than the pale outline before. He could see her clearly now.
No feet. Below her white dress — bloody, severed stumps. Hair soaking wet, plastered against her body. A face the colour of death, twisted with resentment. Those inverted eyes — black sclera, white pupils — fixed on him with a hatred that reached into the bone.
She had locked on to him.
Li Guangyun screamed.
Huang Qiqi jolted and spun around to find an empty bridge and her ex-boyfriend apparently losing his mind.
“What are you doing?” she said, annoyed.
Li Guangyun heard her voice and clawed back enough sanity to look again — the outline had vanished. The bridge held nothing at all.
He was too frightened to care whether it had been a hallucination or not.
Li Guangyun’s legs had gone to water. He grabbed Huang Qiqi’s arm and dragged her along, practically wailing. “Let’s go! We need to go NOW!”
Huang Qiqi was baffled. They’d barely even started, and Li Guangyun was already a wreck.
She walked as slowly as she could manage. Li Guangyun’s legs weren’t cooperating either — he couldn’t go fast. His mind was filled with nothing but the image of that footless ghost on the bridge, that look of absolute, bone-deep hatred directed at him.
His brain was short-circuiting with terror. And suddenly he remembered a post he’d seen on the university BBS — someone who’d been trying to make a point, using their two friends as evidence for whether the Lover’s Lake ghost was real. The post had been fact-checked: one friend had jumped from a building, the other had been in a car accident.
But the one unsettling detail that had nagged at him back then came back to him now: both friends had died with their legs broken at a bizarre angle.
She had no feet. Was she taking other people’s feet as compensation?
Li Guangyun was on the edge of a breakdown.
Then he heard it — behind him, from somewhere beneath the water. Drifting up through the still night air. A woman’s voice.
“Li Guangyun.”
Strange. Sharp. Full of festering malice — as if it were about to tip over into laughter.
Calling to him.
“Li Guangyun.”
“Li Guangyun, look back.”
“Look back.”
Li Guangyun’s mind went blank. He missed his footing and tumbled off the bridge into the lake with a tremendous splash.
The water erupted around him.
Up on the bridge, Huang Qiqi couldn’t hold it in anymore. She burst out laughing.
Still not satisfied, she scooped up a few pebbles from the ground and hurled them into the lake after him. “You absolute piece of trash! Go ahead and drown!”
Xia Wenshi was laughing too, doubled over on the far bank. The ghost of Lover’s Lake hadn’t technically shown up in person, but watching an employee get their revenge was satisfaction enough.
Lover’s Lake wasn’t deep enough to drown a man of one-eighty, especially not a sports student. Li Guangyun could swim.
But the live footage of him flailing and plunging in was deeply satisfying to Huang Qiqi. Tomorrow she’d upload the screen recording to the BBS and add a thorough social destruction to go along with the dunking. Hmph.
Ye Sheng had not been swept up in anyone’s elation.
He was watching the screen intently.
On the bridge, Huang Qiqi and Xia Wenshi slapped hands in triumph.
In the water, Li Guangyun had gone pale. He could swim — but it seemed like something had grabbed hold of his feet. His head barely broke the surface of the dark lake, neck straining, arms thrashing wildly.
The comment section was a wall of laughing emojis.
But some viewers had already noticed something wrong.
[Can the scumbag actually swim? Because it kind of looks like he’s about to drown.]
[Girl! Don’t get yourself sent to prison over a scumbag!!]
Standing on the bridge, Huang Qiqi had the best view of anyone — and she too noticed Li Guangyun wasn’t looking right. A cramp, maybe? He’d nearly reached the bank, and then his body had gone completely rigid. She swore under her breath — this was not in the plan — and hurried down the bridge to the lakeside. “You idiot, give me your hand.” She only wanted revenge. She had no intention of ruining her own life along the way.
Xia Wenshi rushed over too.
But they quickly found that Li Guangyun was heavy — impossibly, inexplicably heavy. The two of them took one arm each and still couldn’t haul him onto the bank.
Ye Sheng closed the stream, set the phone down, and walked over.
The moment he drew near, he sensed something very familiar.
The unmistakable signature of an aberrant. It was beneath the lake.
But if he could sense it, it could sense him.
He walked toward it, one step at a time.
Below the surface of the water, a pair of inverted eyes slowly shifted — and became strange.
Then, all at once, Li Guangyun’s body became light again. Huang Qiqi and Xia Wenshi lurched backward and pulled him out onto the grass. Li Guangyun had passed out from sheer terror, snot and tears streaked across his face. Huang Qiqi checked that he was still breathing, took several highly satisfying photos, and punctuated the evening with a solid kick from her heel.
She turned her face upward, bright-eyed and grinning.
“Thank you, boss! Thank you, junior! Tonight has been absolutely perfect. I’ll handle the rest from here — I’ll go find the security office and have them deal with him.”
Ye Sheng glanced gently at Lover’s Lake, now calm again, and nodded at Huang Qiqi’s words.
Huang Qiqi was a local and was staying at home for the summer — she and Xia Wenshi left the campus together, and Ye Sheng was left alone, lost in thought, standing where he was.
He’d told the dorm manager earlier that he’d be back late, so the curfew wasn’t an urgent concern.
Ye Sheng crouched down, reached his hand into the lake, and stirred the water slowly. When he pulled it back out, several strands of hair came with it — drenched in the thick smell of rot, damp, and blood.
He pressed his lips together, took out his phone, and photographed the strands.
This time search responded quickly.
[Category: Story King]
[Entity Name: Lover’s Lake Lady Ghost (Incomplete)]
[Entity Level: Class C]
[Summary: On Zhenzhen Bridge they test the truth of hearts — only those who love truly and are truly loved may walk this crossing together. But smooth-tongued liars who break their vows are destined to leave their lives behind.]
Below this, Ye Sheng found a word he hadn’t seen in some time.
[Post Scriptum:
Those faithless ones who have been marked — do not console yourselves with wishful thinking.
For it is not that there will be no reckoning, only that the hour has not yet come.
Love is the one thing in this world that has the least need of lies.
— 14th February, 12:00 AM]
This post scriptum had been written at midnight on the fourteenth of February, with no year given. But Ye Sheng knew — it had to have been written a very long time ago. Decades at least. Perhaps it had come into being alongside the legend of Lover’s Lake itself.
The handwriting was identical to that of the person who had improvised and extended the womb-girl’s story on the train, trying to have him killed.
*
Ning Weichen hadn’t stayed long at the Qin residence.
When he got into the car.
Butler Li sat in the driver’s seat and said respectfully, “Young Master, I’ve arranged your enrolment. The president of Huai’an University would like to meet with you — shall I arrange that?”
Ning Weichen said, without interest, “No need. Please convey my thanks. Tell him I don’t have time at the moment.”
“Understood.” Butler Li: “Young Master, shall we go to the flat, or back to the Rose Empire Hotel?”
Ning Weichen said, “The hotel.”
He leaned back. The black Bentley slid through the city toward the centre, like a fish nosing into a neon sea of light and appetite. The sky pressed down dark and heavy. Ning Weichen rested his fingers against his face, gaze cool and distant, watching the towering buildings rear up like enormous creatures beyond the window.
Around midnight, the weather shifted from clear to cloudy.
Huai City was going to get rain.
The mist softened the city and made it stranger, more dangerous.
Ning Weichen curved his lips in a private, unreadable smile, and said quietly: “Butler Li — put something on. Some music.”
Butler Li was startled. “Music?”
Ning Weichen, unhurried: “Or just tune to a Huai City radio station.”
Butler Li: “Of course.”
Ning Weichen wasn’t someone who liked noise. In all the time Butler Li had driven for him, he’d never once made a request like this. But a good butler doesn’t ask the Young Master why he’s behaving out of character.
In the quiet interior of the car, after a moment of soft, barely-audible static —
The radio host’s warm voice drifted in.
[Hello everyone, and welcome back to Xiao Zui Tells Stories — I’m your friend Xiao Zui.
Tonight, Xiao Zui will continue bringing you strange, funny, peculiar, and fascinating stories of all kinds. Thank you so much for listening.]
[Following last week’s cold storage murder, a body with unusual circumstances was discovered just recently at the Wanjia Well Farmers’ Market in Jaohai District, Huai City.
The deceased was a thirty-seven-year-old man, found inside his own pork butcher’s stall. The physician’s initial diagnosis was sudden cardiac arrest — but this butcher had his tongue cut out while still alive. The entire tongue, severed from the root of the throat. The method was extremely brutal — clearly a homicide.]
[Police have preliminarily identified a suspect as his next-door neighbour. The victim was known for a violent temperament, and the two had been in a long-running feud. The case is under ongoing investigation. For further details, most listeners will have seen the coverage in the Huai’an Daily.]
[This time, however, what Xiao Zui wants to talk about is something adjacent to the case.]
[A young listener called in to tell me that they suspect our city has a serial killer. The person who died at the cold storage facility had their eyes put out with medical needles while still alive. The man at the farmers’ market had his entire tongue severed. The listener was frightened and asked me — could the next victim have their ears mutilated? I have to say, that is quite an imagination.]
[If that young listener is hearing this right now — Xiao Zui wants to reassure you. Don’t be afraid. Trust in the adults around you. The world you’re living in isn’t the scary ghost story your father told you before bed. The world you’re in is a fairy tale.]
Xiao Zui Tells Stories ran across more than ten hours of broadcast time each day, split into different slots. Some hosts enjoyed twisting real events into something bizarre and uncanny. This host, clearly, had a gentler approach.
After her warm sign-off, she read out a few listener submissions and cut to advertisements.
Then Ning Weichen heard the segment that closed out this, Huai City’s most-listened-to storytelling programme.
A boy’s narration.
A child’s voice had a way of making everything feel beautiful and distant — like yellowed pages turning at the end of a snow-white expanse of time.
“When I was very small, I asked my father why we tell stories.”
“My father said: there are three kinds of people in this world. The people who listen to stories, the people who tell stories, and the people who are in the stories.”
“Stories help us record the years we’ve lived, preserve the joy and the anger.”
The boy’s voice continued.
“And those who grow up listening to stories — one day, they will become part of the story themselves.”
Boom.
Outside the car, the rain came down all at once — a downpour. A crack of thunder lit up the steel-and-glass forest of the city.
Rain washed over the world, and the neon lights bled like thick, stubborn stains that wouldn’t come out.
Somewhere out there in the dark, it was as though a pair of eyes watched in silence — strange and motionless, looking down from above.
Everywhere in this city — in the light and in the shadow — the bizarre and the uncanny twisted through every corner of the urban dark.
And right now, everyone —
Was still just a person listening to stories.