Spirits and Supernatural Beings

“Lazybones, get up! Lazybones, get up!” Wu Ming felt as though he had been awakened by the cold, likely from a fever. His vision was blurry, his whole body ached, and his head was heavy with dizziness.

Wu Ming squinted weakly, groping around for his alarm clock. After fumbling for a long time without finding it, he forced his groggy eyes open and looked around. Only then did he realize he had slept the entire night on the floor. No wonder he’d caught a cold—it was freezing in the middle of winter. A puddle of spilled instant noodles had dried on the floor, the yellowish grease congealing on the power strip, making for a rather disgusting sight.

Then Wu Ming remembered: he’d been knocked out by an electric shock. Lucky to still be alive, really. But the thought only made him feel more desolate. He was already twenty-eight, still without a girlfriend. If he had a live-in girlfriend, things like this wouldn’t happen. Living alone, who knew—one day he might die in his rented apartment and no one would notice.

He sighed and started to tidy up. At that moment, his phone rang. Fortunately, Wu Ming always charged his phone as soon as he got home; otherwise, with the way these new smartphones devoured power, it would have been dead and shut down long ago.

He glanced at the caller ID: “Chubby.” Chubby was a colleague, a second-generation rich kid who drove a sports car to work every day. As he liked to say, his salary wasn’t even enough to cover gas. He only worked there because his father forced him to, to keep him from mixing with the wrong crowd.

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