Don’t Be a Kept Man

Chapter 93: How Could He Be Willing (Out of His Heart)

The elderly aged woman had quite a loose mouth, and Yan Yu was not in the mood to give her the time of day.
He went to close the door when she stopped it with her leg, 

“Ack, Xiao-Su hasn’t come back for a few days now, and she won’t even pick up her phone.
I’m still waiting for her rent, so when you see her, make sure to tell her to respond back to me.”

Yan Yu: “No time.”

The landlady glared at him and unloaded on him, 

“No time then you make time.
You are the only unemployed out of this entire building.
If I don’t come find you, who will I go find? I’ve given you so much leeway on your rent from last month until now because I know how difficult it is to venture out into the city by yourself.
If it was someone else, I wouldn’t be so nice.
You aren’t even willing to help me out with such a small favor?”

Yan Yu half heartedly raised his hand, expressing that he would comply in fear of any more words coming out of her mouth.

Seeing this, the landlady became satisfied, 

“Ack, if you also clean up the hallway, and clean it up well, I’ll take off the water and electricity bill from your rent this month.
I’ll come by to check at night.”

In a month that has thirty days, the water and electricity wouldn’t be online for at least fifteen of those in this beaten down apartment building, so who really cared.
Yan Yu shut the door and went back to sleep instead.
Fortune telling and catching ghosts took quite a toll on the body, and besides resting, there was no other way to recover.

Yan Yu slept all the way until late afternoon.
When he woke up, the room was deathly quiet and the last drops of sunlight from the setting sun were just shining through the glass window.
It was getting dimmer, and it was so very quiet, so quiet one could hear the sound of their own breathing. 

Yan Yu patted his phone out from under his pillow and found that quite a few of his hooligan friends had given him a call.
Yan Yu didn’t plan on responding and instead flipped through his feed and group chats, before realizing that Dong Zi was dead.

Early yesterday morning, he had been drunk as he walked out of a nightclub, and then he fell asleep right in the middle of the road.
A truck speeding down the road ran over him, rolling over both of his hands and feet and mashing them into a bloody pile of flesh and bone.
He was found dead in the morning, and it was even on the news.

Messages were flying nonstop in the group chat and everyone was talking about this and lamenting at how he died so young.
But who knew if what they were saying truly came from the heart.
Yan Yu took a look through and then closed his phone. 

After a quick change of clothes, he went out to grab some food.
Close to the last hours of the day, there were many stalls open at night by the alleyway entrance, making it an extremely boisterous and lively place.
Yan Yu ordered a skewer at the open air barbeque store underneath his building and sat around to wait.

Yan Yu lived on the third floor and so the moment he tilted up his head, he could see the window of his own home.
But as the entire building had been out of power since this afternoon, no light came from the windows.
Only the window of the fourth floor tenant was still bright and shining, a sharp contrast to everything else around it.

Behind that window stood a lady whose body looked very graceful and elegant.
Wearing a red spaghetti strap nightdress and revealing snow white skin, all the no-lifers downstairs were whistling and catcalling.
This was evidently the woman the middle-aged landlady was referring to: the one who could not be contacted, Xiao-Su.

Yan Yu couldn’t help but narrow his eyes slightly as Xiao-Su seductively flipped her hair.
Through the glass window, she hooked her fingers up to signal one of the watching men, a middle-aged bald man whose wife had died.
Following her call with weightless feet in the midst of all the mocking laughter of everyone around, the man looked as if his soul had been hooked away.

Not long after, the light on the fourth floor turned off.

Seeing this, Yan Yu slightly raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t really have the mind to care.
After he polished off his dinner, he went back home.
At around 7pm, the building’s power went back online. 

Yan Yu was sitting at his table, cutting paper and then drawing talismans on the paper.
Cutting and drawing, cutting and drawing until about fifty or so were sitting on the table.
Yet only about eight could actually be used.

The light inside the room suddenly flashed and as Yan Yu wrapped up the talisman he just finished, an ice cold body suddenly appeared within his arms, freezing him up.

“Why are you drawing talismans? Thinking of killing me?”

Somehow, at some point, Xun Chuan had sat himself on Yan Yu’s legs.
He lovingly hooked his arms around Yan Yu’s neck, as if they were lovers and intimate once more, sweetly and lovingly whispering in his ear.
He then reached out a pale white, sickly looking hand and snatched the cigarette from his mouth.

The flame flickered out and a small column of smoke weakly floated up before it dissipated: an action so familiar that memories came rushing over to Yan Yu.

No one had dared to take cigarettes from Yan Yu’s mouth.

The first time Xun Chuan had met Yan Yu, he had been sitting at a bar, drinking his wine.
The second time he met Yan Yu, he was smoking in a booth by the wall.
Inhaling and exhaling out smoke, without a care in the world.
The only real similarity between the two situations was that nobody was around him.

Without a thought, almost instinctively, Xun Chuan had grabbed another glass of wine and headed over.
His face brought a youthful beauty that only young adults had, and it was very mesmerizing under the shining lights of the nightclub, 

“Ah, why are you alone by yourself again?”

Yan Yu recognized him and as he played with his lighter on the table, knocking it in a rhythm, he had the interest to ask back, 

“Are you willing to sit with a despicable shameless scumbag of a human?”

Xun Chuan: “Of course not.”

Yan Yu: “They don’t either.”

Xun Chuan paused in surprise, and then smiled after processing the words, 

“I saw you yesterday, and you were drinking wine.
Today I see you, you’re taking a smoke.
Next time I see you, are you going to be prostituting yourself?”

Yan Yu lit another cigarette and nodded his head, 

“Good idea.
Let’s go together next time.”

Xun Chuan had sat across from Yan Yu, and the secondhand smoke was wafting right at him, burning his eyes and throat, making his eyes red and making him cough nonstop.
Out of necessity, he switched to sit on the other side, right beside Yan Yu, and asked as he pinched his nose, 

“Ah, is smoking fun?”

Yan Yu pushed his box of cigarettes towards him, 

“Try it and you’ll know.”

Xun Chuan didn’t see his movements, or perhaps he did and purposefully pretended not to.
Instead, he had slightly raised his eyes, bringing his warm fingertips to inadvertently brush over Yan Yu’s lips, and took the cigarette right out from his mouth.

Yan Yu didn’t even look as he grabbed Xun Chuan’s wrist, fakely smiling as he asked, 

“Did you know, what happened to the last person who took the smoke from my mouth?”

If this action was done by a woman, it would be for seduction.
By a man, it was to challenge.
And quite obviously, Xun Chuan did not meet the first criteria.

Xun Chuan tilted his chin slightly up at that, bringing an arrogance about him, 

“What?”

Yan Yu said, 

“I broke half of his teeth.”

When Yan Yu’s cigarette was snatched away from him, quite a few of his hooligan friends had seen it.
They huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, smiling and giggling as they pointed over at them; all watching for Xun Chuan’s future downfall.

Xun Chuan didn’t mind, and as if to challenge him, he blew out a full mouthful of smoke right at Yan Yu.
He had even wanted to give it back to Yan Yu, but Yan Yu slightly turned his head, not letting him do as he wished.

Xun Chuan seemed to get a bit mad, and he coldly snorted, 

“Hit me then.
If you can, break all the teeth in my mouth.”

Yan Yu shook his head, 

“Naïve child.”

A female waiter passed by then, holding a tray, and on it, there was a flaming blue cocktail.
Perhaps it was because the floor was uneven, but her body suddenly twisted when she had been walking perfectly fine, and in the midst of all the shocked gasps, that glass of alcohol flew right towards Xun Chuan’s face.

Shocked, Xun Chuan instinctively brought his hands up to block, when he felt a strong push at his shoulder.
He was immediately pushed further into the booth, and at the same time, Yan Yu threw the coat beside him, and with a twist of his hand, blocked all, if not most, of the alcohol away.

The coat began to burn a little but the flames were quickly stomped out by Yan Yu.

When Xun Chuan came back to his senses, he discovered that at some point his whole body had lain over Yan Yu’s leg and his face was directly facing…… directly facing his……

Yan Yu lowered his eyes to look at him, with his lips slightly tilted up, 

“You’re not getting up? What, want to help me…… hmm?”

Xun Chuan’s face burned red.
Ignoring the female waiter beside them who was bending at the waist and apologizing, he quickly and clumsily climbed back up from Yan Yu’s body.

Xun Chuan: “You big pervert!”

Yan Yu laughed, 

“I am a pervert.
They all say so.”

Facing up against those uncaring laughing eyes, Xun Chuan’s already burning red face burned to an even higher degree, so much so that he felt his whole body smoking up.
He forcefully scrubbed the sweat off from his palms and tried his best to put on an arrogant and stubborn front, 

“They…… they said it right.
You are a scummy pervert.
This was my own misfortune, always getting into no good every time I meet you.”

Yan Yu said, 

“That is because you aren’t having a good year.
You shouldn’t have stepped out of your door today.”

And then he stood up to leave.
Before he left, he purposefully squeezed Xun Chuan’s buttocks, and in the midst of this bomb he dropped onto Xun Chuan, he calmly judged it as, 

“Hmm.
Quite busty.
A bit of springy-ness.”

Xun Chuan blew his top, 

“Fuck!”

Yan Yu said, 

“Yes, you are to be fucked.”

And then he came back to earth, eyes once again faced with the icy cold room, instead of the rowdy nightclub.
Yan Yu took the cigarette back from Xun Chuan’s hand and smushed it against the table, 

“Did you forget what I said yesterday.”

“Then kill me……”

Even if he turned into a ghost, that bad habit of Xun Chuan where he liked to provoke Yan Yu had not changed a bit.
He slowly loosened the strength in his hands and brought his cold, dead lips next to Yan Yu’s cheeks, staring right into his eyes, 

“Why don’t you kill me?”

Yan Yu raised his eyebrows slightly, 

“You know that I can’t kill you right now, so go reincarnate.
After all, Dong Zi has already died.”

Xun Chuan’s resentment was growing stronger with each day that passed.
The few times Yan Yu stayed his hand meant he had already missed the best time to kill him.

“He died.
Does that mean I can live again?”

The color of blood almost filled up Xun Chuan’s eyes again, and the hand that was grabbing onto Yan Yu tightened unconsciously.
With his face murderous and filled with hatred, he said in a faint voice, 

“Him dying a thousand times, a million times, still won’t resolve my hatred, do you understand?”

Yan Yu suddenly flipped his hand and went to embrace Xun Chuan’s waist.
Slightly pushing him forward, he forced Xun Chuan to come closer.

Xun Chuan was momentarily shocked.

The two of them were silently frozen in this position and after a while, Yan Yu finally said, 

“Do you have any more regrets or things to do to resolve your resentment? I’ll help you.”

After it was all resolved, it would be time to go for his new life.

Xun Chuan immediately understood his meaning.
He was not annoyed, and he was not angry.
His cold fingers slowly curled over Yan Yu’s eyebrows, and his face turned contemplative.
Yet it held that feeling of a cat playing with its prey as he said, 

“Unfulfilled wishes huh…… there are too many……”

Yan Yu looked at him, 

“Like?”

Xun Chuan chuckled lowly, looking exactly like the malicious ghost he was, 

“Like? Like how you are still alive, like how after I reincarnate, you will still live freely.
What do you think? How could I ever be willing in these circumstances?”

Xun Chuan seemed to be really hurt and both of his hands covered his face, as if he was crying.
Yet Yan Yu could see through the gaps of his fingers his twisted and crazed eyes.

“So? How could I ever be willing……?”

Yan Yu didn’t respond and the two of them were frozen like this.
Until suddenly a squeaking noise, “zhi ya zhi ya” rang out from upstairs.
It was accompanied by low panting and moans, as if it was crying in pain, but it also didn’t seem to be like that.

“Ah…… Ah…….
help…… help…… help ah ah ah ah ah ah…….
ah ah ah ah…… no……”

The woman’s voice was delicate and soft, trembling at the ending tilts of the cries, and it was not hard for other people to imagine what was happening.
And that bed seemed to be taking on an arduous task, squeaking nonstop and transmitting all its sound without fail to a human and a ghost.

These sounds sounded absolutely not normal.

Yan Yu looked up at the ceiling and a golden light flashed by his left eye, but he could only see a cloud of thick black “ghost” energy.
His feet moved slightly, but whatever he was thinking, they receded back instead.

That sound continued and following the passage of time, those cries were getting louder and louder, making it even more easy to imagine a scene.

Xun Chuan seemed to sense something then and he also looked up, with his eyes turning playful.
Seeing that Yan Yu’s eyebrows were furrowed, he couldn’t help but slightly hook up the corners of his lips.
A finger slowly brushed up and down on Yan Yu’s cheek, bringing on some flavor of an ambiguous meaning.
With a sweet and seductive tone of voice, even more charming than that woman’s above, he said,

“Do you want……”

Yan Yu raised his eyes, and he was greeted by the sight of Xun Chuan’s pale white beauty of a collarbone.

TL Tidbit:

Just a quicker reminder that was previously mentioned in Volume 1 and 3: “xiao” can be a part of a name or as a prefix for someone younger, or for an affectionate way to call someone (at least someone a bit better than acquaintance).
Xiao-Su here is a nickname of sorts/affectionate way to call her, rather than her actual name, which will be appearing later (and we’re using the dash here to our advantage to hopefully be helpful in denoting difference.
As I mentioned in the updates section, we are currently in progress to update previous chapters of better wording (could be debated) and just fixing up some inconsistencies between the volumes/chapters and this is sort of a change we’ll looking to adopt.
But in any case, just a note, in case it gets confusing of the two separate names used for Xiao-Su later!) 

Hope you all had a great weekend, and see you thursday, Galactic Judges ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ