Chapter 7: Noodles

The seal on the door was not meant for the living.

Pingan found that out when he walked straight through the strips of yellow paper and out into the street.

Nothing happened to him at all.

Zhuoran, a moment behind, put one foot over the threshold and jerked back with a hiss.

The paper had glowed a dull orange and bitten him through his boot.

"Warding paper," Pingan said, sucking his own thumb. "It keeps the dead in. Or out. I can never remember which."

"It's very clear which," said Zhuoran. "It's in."

He looked at the long strips, then at the room behind him, and then at the sunlit window.

"I suppose that leaves me the inn."

It was a large inn.

It had a kitchen, a common room with six tables, a yard with a well, a woodpile, a stable and a mule.

For a man who had spent a hundred and thirty-one years in a gourd, it was practically a country.

Auntie Xu found him standing in the middle of her common room at midday with his hands behind his back.

She took one long look at the ash-grey hair, the burned black robe and the scar on his neck.

"Can you carry water?" she said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Water. Buckets. Two. From the well to the kitchen. Can you carry them?"

"I am dead."

"That's not what I asked."

"I can carry water," said Zhuoran, slowly.

"Good. Nobody eats free in my inn, ghost or no ghost. Sixteen buckets."

She handed him the yoke.

Pingan, watching from the stairs, had to put a hand over his mouth.

It was the first time anyone in the world had given his ghost a chore.

Zhuoran took the yoke and put it over his shoulders.

He walked out to the well with the stiff dignity of a lord on his way to an execution.

By the sixth bucket the villagers had started coming in.

They came in ones and twos, farmers and boatmen and old women, on the excuse of lunch.

They sat at the back tables and stared.

They watched the tall, ash-haired man cross the yard without spilling a drop.

He set the buckets down and went back for more.

An old ferryman muttered something about "the Red Moon" and spat.

Auntie banged a ladle on his table.

"Eat your noodles, old man. And watch your mouth. He's carried more water in an hour than your son did all spring."

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