The CEO Bought the Villa With the Ghost Cultivator Inside novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Mirror
Meiyin buys the lake villa for quiet and, on her first night, a woman in white steps out of the bronze mirror with a sword and asks who dared change her bedchamber.
Gu Meiyin signed the last page of the deed at four in the afternoon.
By eleven that night she was standing alone in the master bedroom of her new house, eating cold noodles out of a carton.
The villa sat on the shore of Dianshan Lake, seventy minutes from her office, behind a stone gate with two worn stone lions.
Nobody knew she was here.
That was the point.
Three weeks ago a judge had stamped her divorce final, and Jiang Xue had walked out of the courtroom in a cream blazer without looking back.
Meiyin had signed the villa's papers the next morning.
She wanted a house with no memory of anyone else in it.
The previous owners had left one thing behind, an old bronze mirror taller than a door, bolted to the bedroom wall.
The agent had said it was too heavy to move.
Meiyin looked at it now, at her own tired face in the dull green metal, the black bob, the dark-red lipstick gone pale at the edges.
She put the carton down.
The white jade hairpin in her coat pocket had gone warm.
She took it out and held it up.
It was her mother's, the only thing of hers Meiyin had kept, a plain pin with a small carved cloud on the end.
It had never once been warm before.
"Strange," she said to the empty room.
The mirror clicked.
A thin line of white light ran down the middle of the bronze.
Meiyin did not move.
Then a hand came through the metal, pale, long-fingered, with the nails cut short.
A second hand followed, gripping the edge of the frame.
A woman stepped out of the mirror.
She wore a white inner robe and a silver-grey outer robe, with a silver sash at her waist.
Her black hair fell straight to her hips.
In her right hand she held a sword, and the point of it was already at Meiyin's throat.
"Who," the woman said, in a voice rusty from lack of use, "dared to change my bedchamber?"
Meiyin looked at the blade.
Then she looked at the woman's face.
It was a hard, beautiful face, white as paper, with a mouth that had not smiled in a very long time.
"Your bedchamber," Meiyin said.
"There was a rosewood bed here."
"There was a rosewood bed here?"
"And red lanterns, and a screen painted with plum branches."
The woman's eyes moved over the room, the grey carpet, the white walls, the recessed lights, the suitcase open on the floor.
"What is this place?"
"It's my bedroom," Meiyin said.
"I bought the house this morning."
"Bought." The woman said the word as if it had a bad taste.
"The Su family do not sell this house."
"They sold it three owners ago."
The sword did not move.
Meiyin had spent twelve years learning how to keep her voice level in rooms full of angry men.
She used that voice now.
"Take that out of my face, please."
The woman's eyes narrowed.
"You are very bold for a servant."
"I'm the owner."
"You are a woman in strange clothes who has broken into my chamber."
"I'm a woman who is eating noodles in her own bedroom."
Something in the woman's face flickered, a second of confusion, there and gone.
Then the point of the sword dipped half an inch.
The woman stepped closer.
She lifted her free hand and laid it flat against the center of Meiyin's chest, over the open collar of her shirt.
Her palm was freezing.
It felt like a plate of ice pressed against Meiyin's skin.
Meiyin's breath caught, and her heart gave a hard double beat under the cold fingers.
The woman felt it.
Her eyes went wide.
"You have a heartbeat," she said.
"Most people do."
"I have not felt one in a very long time."
Her fingers spread, slowly.
Meiyin did not step back.
She told herself that was because of the sword.
It was not because the cold hand was starting to warm against her.
"What is your name?" the woman said.
"Gu Meiyin."
"Gu." The woman frowned.
"That is not a Su name."
"No."
"Then how do you have that?"
Her eyes had dropped to the white jade pin in Meiyin's hand.
The color drained from her face, if there had been any color to drain.
"Give it to me."
"No."
The hand on Meiyin's chest closed into a fist around her shirt.
"Give it."
"It was my mother's." Meiyin caught the woman's wrist with her free hand, hard.
Skin met skin.
The woman hissed through her teeth.
But she did not pull away.
Her wrist was thin and cold and trembling.
"Who are you?" Meiyin asked.
"Bai Ling," the woman said.
"Of the Qingyun school.
I swore on this sword to guard this house in the sixth year of Xuande."
"The sixth year of what?"
"Xuande." Bai Ling's voice cracked on the word.
"The sixth month.
It was the sixth month a moment ago."
Meiyin let go of the wrist, took out her phone, and held up the lit screen.
It said Friday, November 6, 2026.
Bai Ling stared at it.
She read the numbers, then read them again.
She did not breathe at all.
Then she turned and ran.
She ran for the bedroom door, down the stairs in a rush of silver-grey cloth, and out through the front hall into the garden.
Meiyin ran after her in her stocking feet.
Bai Ling reached the stone gate, with its two lions, and threw herself at the open iron bars.
Something invisible flung her back.
She hit the gravel hard, the sword spinning out of her fingers.
Meiyin dropped to her knees beside her and caught her under the arms.
Bai Ling was shaking so hard her teeth knocked together.
Her skin through the thin white cloth was as cold as a winter lake.
"I cannot leave," she whispered.
"I cannot leave the house."
"Okay," Meiyin said.
"Okay."
Bai Ling's fingers clutched at the front of Meiyin's shirt.
"You are warm," she said, with her forehead against Meiyin's collarbone.
"Please.
Do not let go."
Meiyin did not.
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