Those Years I Employed Non-Humans as Actors - Chapter 3.2

The white cheongsam ghost moved forward, the candle in her grasp turning into a wine jug and a glass. She poured a glass of wine and offered it to Zhong Jiudao with a poignant expression, looking like a delicately blooming white lotus. “I don’t have any skills that could be of aid to my lord, the only thing I can offer is my company for a drink and a chat. I can also sing some old ditties, would my lord perhaps like to hear them?”

Zhong Jiudao: “…”

He seemed to have unwittingly uncovered just how lacking in entertainment the life of a ghost was. As ghosts, serving a celestial master was akin to mice offering themselves up to groom a cat’s fur, yet they were actually willing to go this far just for the sake of watching a few movies.

“Stop watching the movie for now,” Zhong Jiudao put out his script. “Take a look at this first.”

The white cheongsam ghost nearest to Zhong Jiudao leaned over to look at the script, but the moment she saw it, tears rolled down from her eyes. She mournfully wailed, “I, I’m illiterate… woohoo…”

The weeping of evil spirits was harmful to the living. Zhong Jiudao was fine because he had an absurdly high spiritual power, but an ordinary person would have lost their soul if they heard the cry of the white cheongsam ghost at such a close distance.

Dressed in a gray changshan, a ghost with a bookish air went over and said, “I used to be a scholar when I was alive. I can read out this book for my lord.”

“Okay,” Zhong Jiudao nodded in approval.

The script floated in mid-air. Upon seeing it, the scholar ghost was stunned for a moment, muttering, “There are so many simplified characters¹Simplified Chinese characters only started to be officially implemented nationwide in the 1950s. These ghosts were from the old era (pre-1949), so they were more familiar with traditional characters.” After a brief pause, he began to read it aloud.

When the other ghosts heard that a book was going to be read out to them, some of their expressions soured. They wanted to escape from the theater, but under Zhong Jiudao’s looming pressure, none of them dared to move away.

Unexpectedly, after listening to it, they found that this book was different from the ones they knew about. There were no pedantic terms and literary jargon, and the wording was simple and easy to understand. Even Aunt Yang, who had never received any education, could understand the storyline.

Moreover, the plot of his movie included many elements from the republican era. With such an immersive background, the ghosts were gradually fascinated by the story.

At this time, aside from the female ghost who was used as a power bank, all the ghosts in the villa gathered inside the theater to listen to the story. Altogether, there were actually more than thirty ghosts haunting this villa.

The scholar ghost didn’t need any illumination to read, so Zhong Jiudao turned off the lights in order to save electricity (the Yin energy of the female ghost).

Deep in the night, inside the dark villa, Zhong Jiudao sat alone in the theater room dyed in a faint green glow. From time to time, you could hear various sounds echoing in the villa—applause, cheering, sobbing, heads falling and rolling on the floor due to overexcitement, and even the feeble pleading of the female ghost begging for forgiveness downstairs.

If other people happened to see this, they would probably wind up in an ICU to get emergency treatment for heart attack.

The scholar ghost wouldn’t get thirsty, so he read the script for hours in a row without stopping. Sometime after three o’clock in the morning, he finally finished reading the whole script.

Upon hearing the last sentence of the story, the group of ghosts happily burst into discussions.

“Great!”

“I thought it was going to be another story where the main character gets defeated again, but turns out there’s another twist to it.”

“This method is much better than killing them all. After she follows the man out of the villa and absorbs his life force, she can possess his body and find more people! Not only will she get stronger, she can even escape from the place she was bound to, this is truly the right way!”

“This book is much better than the movie we just watched, it would be great if it could also be made into a movie.”

Zhong Jiudao: “…”

To say that his contrived script was better than the acclaimed classic movie from a famous director… These ghosts’ tastes were really different from normal people.

The besuited ghost took out his eyeballs and used a handkerchief to wipe away the tears around them. The eyeballs sitting on the palm of his hand were filled with a look of longing. “The villa in this story really sounds like our villa, and the characters are also very similar to us. How great would it be if we could do what they did.”

Zhong Jiudao said, “You guys all have a strong air of resentment. You must’ve harmed some humans before.”

The white cheongsam ghost replied, “Decades ago, a gang of gun-bearing foreigners occupied our house. We worked together to drive away those people and absorbed some of their life force, but after they left, nobody else came to live here. The house remained empty until a family tried to move in more than two years ago. We had only pulled a few pranks before they were scared off and decided to move away. After that, we didn’t get any more visitors until you came, celestial master.”

Zhong Jiudao knew the history of this haunted house. During the war, a troop of invading army occupied the villa. Later on, half of these people died and the other half fled, leaving behind a legend of a haunted house. No one dared to move in, and it became a property without an owner.

A few years ago, the descendants of the past owners who immigrated overseas returned to the country, inherited the villa, and resold it. The villa was then purchased by the current landlord.

These evil spirits were bred in troubled times and had survived for many years by lucky chance, allowing them opportunities to become powerful. If a celestial master other than Zhong Jiudao had come, they would have long been defeated by these ghosts.

It would be best to get rid of such a dangerous group of evil spirits, however, the Zhong family forbade Zhong Jiudao from using the celestial master’s exorcism technique. Since this was the case, then restraining them would suffice.

Zhong Jiudao said, “I’m a director, and I plan to turn this script into a movie like the one you’ve just watched tonight. I need…”

He wanted to ask these ghosts if he could use them as reference to flesh out the characters in his movie.

Unexpectedly, before he could even finish his sentence, the besuited ghost excitedly asked, “My lord, do you need to find an actor? I can do it!”

“I can do it as well!”

“Me too!”

The group of ghosts crowded in front of Zhong Jiudao, haphazardly talking at once. Everyone was scrambling to be chosen for the movie. The situation became so chaotic that tongues, eyeballs, limbs, and heads went flying around, worthy of the idiom ‘all hell breaks loose’.

Zhong Jiudao: “…”

Actually, this wasn’t impossible. As long as he drew an apparition talisman on the camera, it would be able to record the things that weren’t of this world. Letting real ghosts play the roles of ghosts—they simply had to act as themselves, and he could even save the special effects and makeup fees.

Moreover, he also didn’t need to use real money for their salary. He could just burn some joss paper and offer it up to them as remuneration. Let alone one or two million, he could even pay them by the billions if he wanted to.

***