My name is Chen Huai. I'm twenty-eight years old, from Jiangnan, and currently "flexibly employed."
That's what my mom taught me to say. Tell people you're unemployed, and they look at you like you're garbage. Say "flexibly employed," and suddenly you sound like a freelancer. Respectable.
My mom cares a lot about respectability.
I don't.
---
If I counted every job I've ever had, two hands wouldn't be enough.
At eighteen, after failing my college entrance exams, I followed Old Chen from the village to collect scrap metal. We rode a three-wheeled cart through the streets, hollering "Scrap for sale — scrap for sale —" until our throats gave out. Thirty or forty yuan a day, if we were lucky. I quit after six months. Too embarrassing.
At nineteen, I went to Suzhou and waited tables at a restaurant. Carrying plates, wiping tables, being summoned like a servant. Two thousand two hundred yuan a month, room and board included — after deductions, eighteen hundred in hand. I lasted eight months before a drunk customer screamed at me. I took off my apron on the spot and walked out.
At twenty, I went into a factory to tighten screws. Assembly line work — the same motion, every minute, every hour, every day. Six screws a minute. Three hundred and sixty an hour. By the end of the day, my wrists ached so badly I couldn't lift them. Thirty-five hundred a month, overtime extra. This was the longest job I ever held — two full years. I saved thirteen thousand yuan. Then the factory relocated, and I was out of work again.
From twenty-two to twenty-five, I worked as a security guard, a delivery driver, a supermarket stocker, a wedding MC's assistant, and for a while, I wrote sponsored articles online. Five yuan per piece.
None of it stuck. Either the pay was too low, the work too exhausting, or I got into it with someone. My mom said I had "three-minute enthusiasm." My dad said I was "mud that couldn't be plastered to a wall."
They were both right.
But I couldn't help it. Some people are born knowing what they want to do with their lives. Others aren't. I was the latter.
At twenty-five, I ended up on a construction site, working as a laborer.
That's where I woke up.
---
The site was on the outskirts of the city, putting up a commercial building. The owner was a local man named Zhou. The foreman was called Ma — we all called him Brother Ma. He was a stocky man in his forties, skin darkened by the sun, a voice like a foghorn, but fair to his workers. He never held back wages.
My job was the most basic: hauling bricks, mixing mortar, passing materials. Six in the morning to six at night, with one meal from the site canteen in between. A hundred and twenty yuan a day, paid daily.
Not great. Not terrible. At least it was steady.
The trouble started in my third month.
It was autumn, and the weather was turning cold. Some workers were assigned to night shifts — guarding the materials, keeping thieves away. It was supposed to rotate. But one day, the night-shift workers started refusing.
It began with a guy named Xiao Liu.
Xiao Liu was from Henan, early twenties, not particularly brave, but always talking — the life of the site. One morning he came running to Brother Ma, face white as paper, saying there was a ghost on the third floor.
"What ghost?" Brother Ma didn't believe him. "You been drinking?"
"I wasn't drinking!" Xiao Liu was frantic. "I saw it with my own eyes! The lights on the third floor kept flickering on and off by themselves. There were footsteps — I went to look, and there was nothing. And then I shone my flashlight at the wall, and there was a shadow of a person, but there was nobody near me!"
Brother Ma brushed it off. Figured Xiao Liu had been half-asleep and imagined things.
But over the next few days, more night-shift workers reported the same thing. Lights flickering. Footsteps in the corridor. Shadows appearing from nowhere. One particularly jumpy worker ran off on the spot and never came back for his wages.
A rumor spread through the site: the land used to be a mass grave. Disturbing the earth had woken something up.
Brother Ma tried to keep a lid on it, but the workers were rattled. A few of the older ones threatened to quit. He had no choice — he went to the owner, Mr. Zhou, and said they needed to bring in a master.
Mr. Zhou was a practical man who didn't believe in any of this. But he couldn't afford delays on the schedule, so he agreed.
The night before Brother Ma was going to call someone, I couldn't sleep.
---
I have a problem: the more something's bothering me, the less I can sleep. That night I lay on my bunk in the workers' shed, listening to the wind outside, my mind going in circles. All I could think about was the "ghost" on the third floor.
I didn't believe in ghosts.
My grandfather had told me since I was small: there are no ghosts in this world. Only ghosts in people's hearts. He was an old Chinese medicine doctor who had seen a lot of things. He said most so-called supernatural phenomena had scientific explanations — ordinary people just didn't understand them, so they seemed mysterious.
That was one of the wisest things anyone ever said to me.
So that night, lying on my bunk, I started thinking seriously: what was the "ghost" on the third floor, really?
Lights flickering on and off — electrical problem. The most common thing in the world. Temporary wiring on construction sites is never up to code. Loose connections are normal.
Footsteps — the site had rats. Not unusual. Rats moving around at night, stepping on wooden boards or metal sheets, the sound amplified. Easy.
The shadow — now that was interesting. A shadow requires both a light source and an object. No light, no shadow. No object, no shadow. If the lights were flickering, the shadows they cast would flicker too, appearing to move.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
I sat up, and made the most reckless decision of my life: I was going to go up to the third floor and look.
---
The workers' shed was in the corner of the site, a short walk from the main building. I pulled on my jacket, grabbed my flashlight, and slipped out quietly.
The site was silent at night. Just the wind moving through the scaffolding. The moon was behind clouds. Everything was dark except for the circle of light from my flashlight.
I took a deep breath and walked toward the main building.
First floor. Second floor. Nothing.
Third floor. I stopped in the corridor, switched on my flashlight, and looked carefully around.
On both sides of the corridor were unfinished rooms, building materials stacked on the floors, temporary wiring strung along the walls. I followed the wiring to the electrical box and opened it. Sure enough — several wire connections were loose. I touched one lightly, and the light flickered.
Mystery one: solved.
Then I went looking for the source of the footsteps. I walked back and forth along the corridor a few times and noticed a metal step near the stairwell that made a clunking sound when you stepped on it. I crouched down and shone my flashlight underneath.
Rat droppings.
Mystery two: solved.
Now for the shadow.
I stood in the middle of the corridor and swept my flashlight beam across the wall, moving it slowly. When the beam passed over a corner, I saw a human-shaped shadow —
I nearly cried out.
But I forced myself to stay calm and look more carefully.
The "human shadow" was a old raincoat hanging on the wall. Its hood had drooped forward, and in the beam of the flashlight, it cast the shadow of a person standing with their head bowed, as if looking at something on the ground.
I stood there staring at that raincoat, and suddenly I wanted to laugh.
That's it?
That's what had a whole crew of grown men scared out of their wits?
I fixed the loose wire connections, wedged a brick under the metal step to stop it rattling, folded the raincoat and tucked it into a corner. The whole thing took less than twenty minutes.
Then I went back downstairs, back to the shed, and fell straight asleep.
---
The next morning, Brother Ma announced he was going to call in a master.
I stood in the crowd, listening to the workers chatter, and a thought surfaced in my mind.
A deeply unethical, highly profitable thought.
I walked over to Brother Ma and lowered my voice. "Brother Ma. Hold off on the master."
He looked at me. "Why?"
"I went up to the third floor last night and had a look," I said.
He blinked. "You went up there?"
"Yeah." I paused. "My grandfather taught me a few things when I was young. Nothing major, but I can handle something like this."
That was the first lie I ever told about my grandfather's mystical teachings.
Brother Ma stared at me for a few seconds. "You can fix it?"
"I can," I said. "But I'll need to go back up tonight to finish the job."
He thought about it, then nodded. "Alright. You do that. If it actually works, I'll give you a red envelope."
That evening, I put on a dark jacket and walked around the site. I stuck a few pieces of red paper — found in the shed — in several corners. I hadn't written anything on them, but I folded them in a complicated way so they looked like talismans.
I placed a brick next to the electrical box and called it a "suppression stone."
Finally, I lit three sticks of incense in the corridor — borrowed from the ancestral offerings in the shed — and muttered under my breath while walking slowly back and forth. What I was actually reciting was an elementary school poem about spring.
The whole ritual took less than half an hour.
The next day, the workers found the third floor completely quiet. No flickering lights. No footsteps. No shadows.
Brother Ma handed me a red envelope in front of everyone.
Back in the shed, I opened it. Inside was a thick stack of hundred-yuan notes. I counted them.
One hundred bills. Ten thousand yuan.
I sat on my bunk and stared at that money for a long time.
Ten thousand yuan.
Nearly three times what I made tightening screws for a month. Nearly six times what I made carrying plates for half a year.
For one night's work.
I folded the money carefully and tucked it into my inside pocket. Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling of the shed, and felt something quietly crack open inside me.
---
After that, I worked on the site for two more months, collected my remaining wages, and quit.
I used that ten thousand yuan to buy a Taoist robe, a feng shui compass, a supply of yellow paper and cinnabar, and a copy of "Introduction to the I Ching" — not to actually study it, but to learn a few phrases that sounded suitably mysterious.
Then I had business cards printed.
The cards read:
**Xuanzhenzi · Chen Huai**
**Feng Shui & Geomancy · Exorcism & Protection**
**House Calls Throughout Jiangnan**
My phone number on the back.
I posted the cards to a few local forums and WeChat groups, and waited.
The first call came three days later.
An old woman named Wu. She said things kept falling off shelves in her home for no reason, and she suspected bad feng shui. Could I come take a look?
I put on the robe, picked up the compass, and took a cab over.
One look around her apartment told me everything: her bookshelf was slightly tilted. Anything placed on it was off-balance, and the slightest vibration would send things tumbling.
I didn't say that.
I held up my compass and walked three slow circles around the living room. Then I said, with great gravity: "Ma'am, the energy field in the southeast corner of your home is somewhat disturbed. We'll need to adjust the layout."
I leveled the bookshelf, rearranged the items on it, and placed a "protective talisman" — a folded piece of red paper — in the southeast corner.
The old woman was delighted. She pressed eight hundred yuan into my hands and insisted I stay for dinner.
Eight hundred yuan.
I sat at her table eating braised pork, and thought: this works.
---
The second job came a month later.
A restaurant owner. His kitchen staff kept hearing strange noises at night and refused to stay late. I went to investigate and found a nest of pigeons living in the exhaust duct. At night, the pigeons shuffled around, and the sound traveled through the duct — eerie, if you didn't know what it was.
I didn't mention the pigeons.
I walked around the kitchen, frowned at my compass, and announced: "The negative energy here is quite concentrated. A small ritual is needed."
I stuck a talisman near the duct opening and quietly sealed the duct with wire mesh — the actual solution. No pigeons, no noise.
The owner asked what the talisman was for.
"Suppression," I said.
He nodded and handed me fifteen hundred.
The third job was a woman in a villa. She said she kept hearing crying at night and hadn't slept properly in days. I sat in her bedroom for a while and listened. The crying was coming from outside — an old tree in her courtyard, its branches rubbing together in the wind, producing a sound that, in the dead of night, really did sound like weeping.
I didn't mention the tree.
I placed a coin in each of the four corners of the bedroom — "anchoring the four directions" — and set a small incense burner on the windowsill to "redirect the energy flow."
On my way out, I quietly re-sealed the weatherstripping on the window. No wind, no sound.
The woman saw me to the door with tears in her eyes, pressed two thousand yuan into my hands, and said she'd recommend me to her friends.
I sat in the cab on the way home, watching the streets go by, and felt something I couldn't quite name.
Not quite happiness. Not quite guilt.
More like... steadiness.
I had found something I was good at.
I'd never felt that before. Not collecting scrap, not waiting tables, not tightening screws.
But this — observing, analyzing, finding the cause, solving the problem, then packaging it as mysticism and selling it — this came naturally. Like it had been designed for me.
My mom said I was mud that couldn't be plastered to a wall.
But even mud has its uses, doesn't it?
---
And so I became a fake exorcist.
No lineage. No training. No real ability whatsoever.
Just a little observational skill, a little nerve, and something that — if you were being generous — you'd call business sense, and if you weren't, you'd call shamelessness.
I worked this trade for three years.
In those three years, I handled dozens of "supernatural incidents," and not one of them was real. Ventilation gaps, faulty wiring, rats, light refraction, structural quirks — every single time, I found a scientific explanation.
Every single time, I got paid.
I slowly built a reputation across Jiangnan. People called me "Master Chen" and said I had deep Taoist knowledge and a gift for exorcism. I never corrected them. As long as they believed, that was enough.
I bought a secondhand Audi. Rented a small apartment. Life was better than it had ever been.
My mom asked what I was doing these days.
"Freelance work," I said.
"Sounds good," she said.
"It's alright," I said.
I didn't tell her my freelance work was a con.
But I didn't feel particularly guilty about it either. My clients paid for peace of mind. I gave them peace of mind. That's a fair exchange. As for the methods...
How many people in this world have clean hands?
I told myself that, and kept going.
Of course, the work wasn't without its anxieties.
The biggest one was psychological pressure.
After every job, I'd have a minute or two of unease. Not conscience — more like professional anxiety. What if one day I ran into something I genuinely couldn't explain?
I made myself a rule: before every house call, look up the address online, check for any history, review the most common causes of "haunting." That way, no matter what I walked into, I'd have a plausible explanation ready.
Three years in, that rule had never failed me.
Every time, there was an explanation.
Every time, there was a payment.
I began to feel that this world was entirely explicable by science — that ghosts and spirits were nothing more than projections of human fear onto the unknown.
I was even a little smug about it.
Smug that I'd seen through it all. Smug that I was clearer-headed, more rational than my superstitious clients.
That smugness suited me just fine.
The Fake Exorcist's Casebook was open for business.
---
(End of Chapter 1)