Volume 2, Chapter 65 (Chapter 103): The Ordinary People who Invented the Charm of Spring Winds

Night, under the Huacheng Bridge across the river.

For the longest time, the bridge under the river has become a home for many homeless people, and many illegal lodgings have been crafted indiscriminately under the bridge.

Shacks built of iron sheets and wooden boards barely shelter anyone from the wind and rain.

After the Sun began to change and the number of urban legends increased sharply, the place was completely abandoned. The hastily crafted shacks were still there, but the residents had long since disappeared.

Which was wonderful for a vagrant like Gu Qianqian.

After hunting down the urban legend of an old man who haunts the bridge at night, she took over and called this place her nest.

The night was dark, and she extinguished the bonfire she had just made for herself.

The two iron sheets of the shack were supported by wooden beams that leaned against the wall. No doors, but a decent shed for a woman like her.

She sat cross-legged on the sofa she bought secondhand, carefully counting the wages she earned from the odd jobs she had done the past week.

She arranged the money according to its value and stuffed it into the piggy bank.

She calls it a piggy bank, but really, it was just a rusty paint bucket, and it didn’t contain much money.

But she treasured it as if it were her most prized possession. She carefully welded four legs and a pair of ears to the paint bucket, trying to craft a makeshift piggy bank.

After working odd jobs for a week, she had saved a total of 282.30 yuan, which was a small amount, but she was satisfied nonetheless.

Her system thought it was all useless.

“Gu Qianqian, are you not the protagonist of this story? How could you muddy your history by doing these… odd jobs, you call them?”

“Whatever, nobody has to know!” she beamed. “I’m bored, and I still need money to survive in this world!”

The system wanted to rebut and complain about how she spends all of her money on eating, spending upwards of 50 yuan per meal, but remained silent upon seeing the girl’s face.

“Speaking of tasks, the school celebration is upon us. Are you ready?”

“Yup! I have just about enough money to buy me a nice dress for the event.”

“What? No!” The system stopped. “I’m asking if you were able to complete the task of sneaking into Ma Zhen’s laboratory and stealing the bamboo scrolls!”

“Oh?”

“Damn it, I knew you would forget! If you don’t touch the scrolls before the full moon, you can’t enter that space!” the system said. “Fortunately, there is still time.”

“Why are you blaming me? I asked you to remind me!” She pouted, feeling wronged now that the system was ‘yelling’ at her.

“My apologies. I forgot too.”

“What kind of system are you?”

The system didn’t know how to refute it. The system avoided following Gu Qianqian onto campus since a terrifying existence seems to lurk there.

The trajectory of Gu Qianqian’s fate was deviating on a larger scale.

“System?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“The bamboo scrolls…” she paused. “What’s in it?”

“A hundred sacrifices. Ten people. A dead god. Forced their way into the gates of heaven for forbidden knowledge, only to be trapped in a perpetual cycle of death.”

“What?”

“There was a group of people,” the system explained. “Under the order of their king, they took a hundred virgins to the mountains to appease their god.”

“Did their god answer them?”

“It did. The people indulged themselves in the books given by the god, and they were engrossed in the books of forbidden knowledge. They soon found out that it was too late to leave, and they were stuck in perpetual death in an alien place.”

“And then?”

“You don’t have to know. All you have to do is get to the scrolls, write whatever is on them down on a piece of paper, and leave.”

“System? Why can’t I just steal the scrolls? What if I write it wrong?”

“You don’t have time. In that strange place, you can bring nothing. All you can bring with you is your memory, and you must memorise whatever you have written.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No,” the system replied monotonically. “I am a system with no emotions. I don’t know what lying is.”

Gu Qianqian let out a single “tsk” before searching for online stores that sold dresses.

She is still a teenage girl, and every girl fantasises about wearing a beautiful dress and attending a ball, and preferably, at midnight, they would meet their prince.

“What’s the point of meeting a prince?” the system interjected. “I know you think that only a prince’s level of wealth can support your reckless spending.”

“You wouldn’t get it, and hey! I thought you were an emotionless system!”

Taking advantage of the darkness, Lin Yiqi sneaked up to the roof of the library and found the girl staring at the moon in the library’s garden.

The girl could sense her presence, and through her mask, she smiled through her eyes.

“Haven’t seen you in days.”

Lin Yiqi hesitated to speak and paused for a few seconds before explaining, “The Night Division is too active under these moonless nights. I can’t go out that much. How’s your investigation going?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, “I couldn’t find anything about her. I thought you gave me the wrong information, so I planned to go to the High School to have a look.”

“No!” Lin Yiqi stopped. “No, I mean, there’s no need for you to do that. You can leave first, and I’ll let you know if I see her.”

Lin Yiqi had finally communed with such a great goddess, so there was no way she would give up so easily. However, the girl couldn’t leave her domain for long, and she couldn’t afford to support this glutinous goddess.

Like most urban legends, goddesses need to eat too—flesh, blood, or urban legend cores.

There was no need for that, however; she is usually enshrined by thousands of people and urban legends within her own domain.

Even if she were to feed as little as possible, the tribute she needs daily is unbearable for Lin Yiqi to support.

Therefore, Lin Yiqi could only suppress her resentment towards Lu Yibei for the time being.

She couldn’t bear feeding the goddess 5kg of grains, five live animals, and five whole fruits daily.

“Hah! You’re afraid of Zigu, aren’t you?” The girl pondered. “What can that little thing do to me?”

‘Tsk. Zigu wouldn’t even think to take action against you, but if you offend it in its own territory, I’ll be the one who’s in trouble.’

“Alright, since you have already made up your mind, I’ll head back first, but…”

“I found somebody interesting in your school yesterday,” the girl smiled. “Somebody is making the Charm of Spring Winds.”

“That charm?” Lin Yiqi was a little surprised. “An ordinary student making a charm that powerful… that’s…”

Thinking of the surge of urban legends appearing in the school, she ended her sentence with “understandable.”

“But isn’t it intriguing? I thought nobody knew how to make that charm anymore,” the girl smiled. “The last time somebody made the charm was in, let me think…”

“Ah!” The girl raised her finger. “The Warring States, wait, no, the Han Dynasty! Or longer before! Anyway, I want to meet this person.”

“Have you found them?”

“Check this out,” the girl smiled, producing a burnt charm from her bosom and shaking it in front of Lin Yiqi. “A little bit of divination does the trick. I’m not as good as Zigu in terms of divination, but I’m sure that it’ll be accurate.”

A burst of blue light shot out from the girl, and under the shroud of the dazzling light, the girl morphed into a magpie with shiny fur.

“What are you…?”

“The person who made this charm must be a little knowledgeable about psychic powers; otherwise, they wouldn’t be that dumb to use urban legend cores to power the charm,” the girl explained. “Since I have decided to look for him, of course, I have to use a form that is pleasing to the eye!”

Lin Yiqi’s mouth twitched.

Of the many forms of the girl that she has seen, she felt that her previous form was probably the most acceptable one among all of them.