Ch42 - Southwest Grim Reaper Bureau

Outside the apartment building, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, the rain heavy.

The wild winds carried the rainwater, where it pounded heavily against the glass, making the corridor even quiet.

Ji Xiunian was looking at the stains of water on Lu Xu, and couldn’t help but be curious as to where he had gone.

Lightning flashed and thunder roared behind Lu Xu, it may have been because he had just come back in from outside that there was still a coldness surrounding him. The lightning cut across the sky, bursting through the glass window behind him. It was a bit hard to see the subtle expression on his face through the poor lighting, but it only added to the mystery.

During the recording of the show and up until now, Ji Xiunian had basically only ever seen Lu Xu in the light-coloured sportswear uniform, yet today he had suddenly changed into a large, black coat. His aura was completely different.

Just as Ji Xiunian felt that there was something off with Lu Xu today, the front of Lu Xu’s clothes suddenly started to squirm, and a fluffy little head poked out through the middle.

“Meow…” Ba Mei was happy when it saw Ji Xiunian, its round eyes shining, pupils large as though it was wearing cosmetic lenses.

The cute little meows and whatnot really made it hard for people to resist.

Ji Xiunian very naturally placed his finger on Ba Mei’s nose. Ba Mei first went up and sniffed Ji Xiunian’s finger, then used its head to rub against it.

Seeing that its claws were also muddy, he didn’t wait for Lu Xu to explain before Ji Xiunian realised. “So Ba Mei slipped out?”

“That’s right.”

Ba Mei had indeed gone out, it was just that he had been the one to bring it out.

Lu Xu watched Ba Mei with a smile, his mood clearly pretty good.

In the face of Ji Xiunian’s questions, he didn’t explain too much. He just made vague remarks. He caught sight of the bag that Ji Xiunian was holding out of the corner of his eye, so Lu Xu casually asked, “Nian ge, what’s that?”

Through the cracks, it could clearly be seen that it was the clothes for the competition, but he didn’t know what Ji Xiunian would be carrying those clothes for so late at night.

Noticing his gaze, Ji Xiunian felt rather guilty, as though he was a little kid who had been caught in the act of doing something bad.

But seeing that Lu Xu was calm, he unconsciously relaxed. “I wanted to burn it for them…”

What Ji Xiunian was talking about was naturally, without a doubt, the F4.

Thinking about the untimely clothes that the F4 were wearing, Lu Xu immediately understood what Ji Xiunian meant. He was aware of Ji Xiunian helping the F4 with their evaluations, he just didn’t think that his heart was so soft that he would even consider what they were wearing.

“You’re kind.” Lu Xu looked at Ji Xiunian, and his gaze softened quite a bit. “Can I come with you?”

Ji Xiunian originally wanted to say that there was no need, but seeing Lu Xu’s serious expression, he suddenly felt that having someone with him wouldn’t be so bad.

“Let’s go.”

He held the clothes, Lu Xu held Ba Mei. The two of them walked down the stairs, one in front and one behind, heading out of the west door on the first floor.

Fan Zeng had especially left that door open for Ji Xiunian. He had chosen to keep one eye closed in regards to Ji Xiunian’s decision to burn the clothes.

The two of them squeezed out of the west door and followed the corridor to the pavilion not far away.

The rain fell harder and harder. The water on the ground around the pavilion didn’t have time to seep away, so it had now gathered into a little flowing stream.

Ji Xiunian had procured a burning paper bucket from who knows where, he took the clothes out and put them inside the bucket, ready to light it on fire.

It was just that Fan Zeng had asked someone in the office to find a lighter, so the wind proofness of a dollar-store lighter wouldn’t be any good. Ji Xiunian tried several times to click the lighter on, but the wind outside was so strong that the smallest spark would be extinguished immediately.

“…”

It was at this point in time that he realised this wasn’t going to work.

Indoor burning was a safety hazard, and Ji Xiunian couldn’t do such a thing.

After trying to light the fire with no results, Ji Xiunian was a bit embarrassed. “We might have to change locations…”

“Nian ge, help me hold Ba Mei.” Lu Xu stuffed Ba Mei into Ji Xiunian’s arms, and casually took the lighter over and squatted in front of the bucket. The wind was so strong that the lighter was basically just for display. Lu Xu used his own body to block it from Ji Xiunian’s vision and gently rubbed his fingers to create a flame.

It was strange to speak of. How come the clothes which wouldn’t catch on fire at all, were now burning as fiercely as though it were tinder.

The prepared combustion device hadn’t been of any use. Ji Xiunian watched Lu Xu’s back and couldn’t help but praise him. “You’re still the amazing one.”

Lu Xu stood up and shrugged his shoulders, not thinking that this was that big of a deal.

The flames engulfed the clothes bit by bit. The more fiercely the flames burned, the shorter its time of existence.

Watching the fire slowly die down, Ji Xiunian only now remembered something, and pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and put it inside the bucket.

Lu Xu saw it clearly. The black words on the white paper wrote Ji Xiunian’s name, and the words ‘to Dai Zijin”.

When he saw Lu Xu’s gaze fall on his signature, Ji Xiunian was inexplicably embarrassed, and he opened his mouth to explain. “He said he’s my fan…”

He vaguely remembered the first time they met, the four ghosts fighting to introduce themselves.

That fair and shy boy whose eyes shone when he looked at him. “Nian ge, can I have your autograph…”

Lu Xu hadn’t thought that Ji Xiunian would remember such small things at all. He looked again at Ba Mei who was sitting obediently in Ji Xiunian’s arms and felt that this person was really very gentle.

Despite the wind and rain, there wasn’t even a hint of impatience on Ji Xiunian’s face.

After the clothes had finished burning, the two of them cleaned up the area and went back to the apartment building together.

Lu Xu’s dormitory was just upstairs.

“It’s late. Nian ge, you should rest early too.” Lu Xu quietly bid goodbye to Ji Xiunian, but the hand on the door didn’t manage to push it open. Until he took out the key and it still didn’t open, only then did Lu Xu realise the door had been locked from the inside.

No one replied when Lu Xu took out his phone and sent a message in the dorm group chat. It seemed that the three of them had long since fallen asleep.

Ji Xiunian had already taken a couple of steps, but seeing the situation, he turned around. “What’s wrong?”

“I think I came back too late. The three of them went to sleep first.” It looked like they always had the habit of locking the door. It was also possible that in a daze, they had forgotten that Lu Xu wasn’t there.

“What are you doing to do now, call them?”

Lu Xu looked at the time and shook his head. “It’s too late. They were tired the whole day, I don’t want to disturb them. Anyway, there are only another five or six hours until breakfast. If I can’t then I’ll go to the dance studio and rest…”

Lu Xu himself didn’t feel like this was a big deal, but Ji Xiunian didn’t agree.

Seeing Lu Xu’s rain-drenched hair, Ji Xiunian hesitated for a moment, but still invited him in the end. “You can come to my place and sleep. It’s only right to ensure you rest enough for the competition.”

Ji Xiunian was used to living alone. This was the first time he had invited other people into his room.

It was just that he remembered the issue of his nightmares after he finished speaking, and couldn’t help but feel a bit hesitant. He kept such private and oppressive nightmares to himself, and it seemed as if he shouldn’t invite others to enter.

However, just as he was thinking about how to solve this situation, he saw the youth in front of him smile brightly and respond readily. “Then Ba Mei and I will be troubling Nian ge tonight!”

Seeing the boy carry his cat and walk ahead, it seemed as though what was done was done, and he could only bite the bullet and follow.

At the site of the car accident on the mountain road, a man in a black cloak was examining the scene.

As a member of the Southwest Grim Reaper Bureau, Peng Hanfei was in charge of this entire area. After knowing that there had been a car accident on the road, he nearly immediately rushed over.

There was nothing serious with the driver, he had just passed out, but the body of Lai Chengshan in the backseat had been cold for quite a while. His soul had long been kicked into the underworld by Lu Xu.

After being cut off in his own territory, Peng Hanfei naturally felt a bit displeased. He immediately sent a message to the Grim Reaper Dispatch and told them about Lu Xu trespassing to collect souls.

There was a commonly known rule in the Grim Reaper Bureau. Separate districts, separate people, no interference.

Several branches would compete and supervise one another. The greatest limitation would maximise the stability of the mortality rate.

For example, Lu Xu was in the East Bureau and Peng Hanfei was in the Southwest Bureau. The two bureaus were each other’s biggest rivals, they had their boundaries and never intermingled.

However this time around, Lu Xu had run into their territory to collect souls. Peng Hanfei naturally couldn’t accept this.

Peng Hanfei had originally wanted to use malicious competition as a reason to report Lu Xu for trespassing, but he hadn’t thought that Headquarters would issue a penalty slip to them instead.

“The investigation shows that the stowaway Lai Chengshan lived in Xicheng for many years, and was under the jurisdiction of the Southwest Grim Reaper Bureau. However, your department was unclear in its research which caused the stowaway to linger for 20 years, resulting in two cases of lifespan borrowing and death. In view of these serious consequences, a special warning is given to the Southwest Grim Reaper Bureau…”

Once this penalty slip had been announced, everyone in the Grim Reaper Bureau now knew that the Southwest Bureau had messed up.

Some sighed, some took joy in the disaster. In short, their department had lost face due to this incident.

Peng Hanfei was beyond furious, and immediately thought to find Lu Xu to hash it out with him––

[SS-Peng Hanfei: Does this person only think about work? If he discovered a stowaway and told us about it immediately, this Lai Chengshan case would have been taken care of by us, and it wouldn’t have evolved into this fiasco today!]

Many in the Southwest Bureau group agreed with him

[That’s right, that’s right, he wanted to show off and in the end, he embarrassed us. I am really so angry.]

[Look at how he went and joined an idol show, you can tell how much this person cares about fame and fortune. As a grim reaper, he doesn’t give people funerals and is busy with his own debut, the entire world has become his show]

[Not only that, but didn’t he also mark a few assignments? They were clearly our orders, how come they were booked by him?]

…

Just as they were all feeling wronged, the Southwest Bureau Head bombed the WeChat group––

[SS-Southwest Grim Reaper Bureau Head: You all still have the gall to talk about Lu Xu here? Did you discover Lai Chengshan living in Xicheng for 20 years? When he went to look for other lives to borrow, where were you? If your normal work ethic was a little more serious, if you had taken care of this stowaway before Lu Xu came, then this wouldn’t have happened today! This time, we did lose face. Don’t tell me you all shouldn’t use this chance to reflect on yourselves?]

The Bureau Head was absolutely right.

If only they had taken care of Lai Chengshan before Lu Xu had, then that kid wouldn’t have had the chance.

Even so, Peng Hanfei still felt that what Lu Xu did was not proper.

Peng Hanfei had been criticised the worst, and so his hate for Lu Xu was naturally the deepest.

He looked at Lai Chengshan’s corpse, and turned away with a look of disgust––

The two departments had a rivalrous relationship. This time Lu Xu hadn’t saved them any face, which wasn’t anything unusual. So if he were to find something off in the East Bureau and then report it to Headquarters, this could also be considered quite a normal operation.

Not long after Peng Hanfei had left, the driver Xiao Liu suddenly woke up. His head was dizzy, and he took quite a while to make sense of where he was.

“Master Lai…” Xiao Liu struggled to move his body, but he also wanted to wake Lai Chengshan up.

However, when he saw the car part that was impaled into Lai Chengshan’s stomach, the blood immediately rushed to his brain as he unfastened his seatbelt and crawled out.

The ambulance and police sirens were near and far. A flash of lightning fell from the sky. The thunder shook the earth.

Xiao Liu saw the Benz get struck by lightning not long after he got out of the car. It immediately burst into a ball of flames.

Even though it was raining heavily, the fire didn’t fade in the least.

Lai Chengshan’s corpse was right inside. It was very quickly engulfed by the flames curled up into a ball, burning black…

When the rescuers arrived at the scene, Xiao Liu cried as though he had found his saviour, pulling on the police officer as he said, “Ghost, there’s really a ghost…”

That night, the Dongcheng Police Department released a new statement––

[Tonight at 2114 hours, a serious traffic accident occurred on the city’s mountain road in the western suburbs, resulting in one death. It is reported that the deceased Lai XX was 72 years old this year, and was a Dongcheng citizen…]