“So if you encounter things that are no longer human in the future, you must…”

“Kill.”

As soon as this somber word came from Twenty-fifth’s mouth, Xiao Nanzhu’s movements paused. He seemed to smell the heavy scent of blood in his nose and hear distorted screams in his ears, causing him to momentarily space out. Seeing that he was just staring at his hand without speaking, Twenty-fifth thought Xiao Nanzhu was unwilling to bloody his hands. So he glanced to the side, lowered his voice, bowed his head, and with a solemn expression, said:

“Misfortune is a dead thing, only gaining flesh and blood when it attaches to a human body. These days, as the year-end approaches, it’s a time when evil spirits gather. You might have to personally handle a few. Those things on those people just now were unformed misfortunes; I’ve already dealt with them myself. But there won’t be a next time for this. Your grandmother used to like to record everything; you can look for whether she left you any advice… As for that Li Mao who withheld workers’ wages, and that Zhao Tiansheng who gave all his money to his lover, don’t help such people anymore. They’re full of malevolent energy, just looking at them brings bad luck. Doing bad deeds over time will lead to things going poorly. Those evil spirits only target people who do unconscionable things. They now only think their luck is bad, but how could they not reflect on what they’ve done before? So in the future, you’re not allowed to help those people, otherwise your grandmother would surely be furious if she knew…”

Earnestly lecturing Xiao Nanzhu, Twenty-fifth furrowed his brows, and as he spoke, he even stopped peeling peanuts. With a worried expression, he nearly let out a long sigh. Realizing that all those words meant only this, Xiao Nanzhu’s gaze softened, feeling somewhat helpless about this calendar spirit’s shy and stubborn nature. However, he already had his own set of principles for doing things, which might not be as black and white as Twenty-fifth required, but wouldn’t lead him astray. At this moment, he understood that it was better to placate the oddly serious Twenty-fifth, although his tone… somehow sounded like his deceased grandmother telling him not to skip school to go to the arcade.

“Fine, fine, I’ll try my best.”

Xiao Nanzhu’s compromising words made Twenty-fifth, who had been worried for quite a while, breathe a sigh of relief. He turned to look at the old wall clock and realized it was almost midnight. Because he needed to rush back to the almanac, or he would miss the hour, Twenty-fifth didn’t finish his food and left in a hurry. Before leaving, he very politely said “see you next year” to Xiao Nanzhu, who nodded and watched him transform into a bright light, fixed on the almanac page for the twenty-fifth day.

After he left, Xiao Nanzhu sat in the living room, which had once again returned to dead silence, and was silent for a moment. Suddenly, he laughed rather inexplicably.

“Ah, grown one day older again…”

Leaning against the sofa backrest and muttering to himself, Xiao Nanzhu, with a cigarette in his mouth, picked up his phone to check. Cao Chong, Zhao Tiansheng, and Li Mao had each sent him messages. The content was nothing more than matters closely related to their own interests, requiring no guesswork. Xiao Nanzhu casually glanced at them, took note, and put his phone aside, his mood still good. After he stretched and stood up, he suddenly remembered what Twenty-fifth had said about his grandmother’s work records. After walking around the not-so-large house in his cotton slippers, he finally found a dusty yellow booklet on the toilet’s handwashing shelf.

His grandmother’s habit of misplacing things hadn’t changed over the years. Since Xiao Nanzhu was very familiar with this, finding it wasn’t too difficult. After taking a bath, he lay askew on the bed and casually opened the slightly moldy booklet. The first thing he saw was his grandmother’s exclamation about how Mr. Liu, who practiced tai chi sword in the park, was very ethereal, and how she must use first-class fan dancing to attract his attention and prevent him from chatting with the square-dancing Auntie Zhang.

“…”

He couldn’t help but laugh silently, not knowing how to evaluate his grandmother’s personality and temperament. Flipping through it further, he could see scattered events that had occurred on various dates, arranged clearly by year and date. Since this record began from fifty or sixty years ago, many parts were unclear. However, when Xiao Nanzhu turned to the very beginning, which was when his grandmother Xiao Ruhua first started writing her diary, he found that the day he saw was precisely New Year’s Eve of that year, and his grandmother had left only this sentence:

[This is the most unfortunate New Year’s Eve I’ve ever had, not because my father didn’t come home for the New Year, not because Zhang Qiang who runs the small store at the alley entrance brought his girlfriend home, but because New Year’s Eve is really a…]

The writing afterward was no longer clear, but Xiao Nanzhu felt that his grandmother must have been in a bad mood when writing this passage. He inexplicably recalled how Twenty-fourth had a face full of avoidance when mentioning New Year’s Eve, and his curiosity about that day grew stronger. But there were still a few days until New Year’s Eve, and he couldn’t rush it now. When he was thinking about looking at his grandmother’s evaluation of tomorrow’s calendar spirit who was about to appear, he saw a full page of his grandmother’s annotations on the origins of the Qixi Festival and Valentine’s Day.

It turned out that Western Valentine’s Day had only been introduced to China in the last twenty years due to cultural integration. Initially, it was a thoroughly Western holiday. Legend had it that during the ancient Roman period, because the tyrant [redacted] forced many loving couples to separate, a brave soldier unfortunately died on this day to be with his lover, thus making this day the Western Valentine’s Day.

This story was somewhat similar to the story of the Queen Mother of the West separating the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. But Qixi was originally a day when ancient women prayed for nimble hands and minds. On this day, women would make qiaoguo (clever fruit) and qiaobing (clever cake) to share. This crispy, lightly sweet fried pastry wasn’t expensive, made simply with dough sprinkled with sesame seeds and fried. Though not as delicate as roses, chocolates, or jewelry, it suited the festive occasion. Unfortunately, in recent years, people had gradually forgotten the true meaning behind this traditional festival. Apart from some elderly people, few bothered with making foods like qiaoguo. Some businesses, to create promotional gimmicks, went so far as to forcibly call the Qixi Festival the “Chinese Valentine’s Day,” which led to an extremely serious conflict between Valentine’s Day and the Qixi Festival.

His grandmother didn’t explain exactly what happened, but from the description, it was clearly nothing good. Casually flipping through the notes in his hand, Xiao Nanzhu became increasingly fascinated and, before going to bed, was still thinking about what kind of existence these festivals in his grandmother’s records, so different from ordinary people, really were.

That night, he had a somewhat strange and bloody dream. In the dream, he was cooking a pot of dragon whisker noodles. The noodles were soft and fine, the soup base was delicious and fragrant, looking very tempting. But somehow, a mass of dark evil spirits suddenly emerged from the horizon. Accompanied by sharp, distorted screams and the excruciating pain of flesh being torn apart, Xiao Nanzhu, to protect himself, could only repeatedly tear open the shells of these screaming evil spirits with his bare hands. The bright red that splattered onto his face and the human-like distorted faces also made his breathing heavy. The blood before his eyes blurred his vision. He knelt on the ground, exhausted, his knees feeling the filth and dirt on the ground. This feeling of being wrapped in flesh and blood was indescribably nauseating. Perhaps because he had just killed so many living beings that resembled humans, his heart felt cold. This intense sense of guilt made Xiao Nanzhu close his eyes involuntarily. Then, Xiao Nanzhu suddenly felt a cold hand grasp his chin, lifting it, and with a somewhat erotic gesture, slowly rubbed his dry lips.

“Very good.”

A voice as cold and piercing as that hand, even in praise, showed no emotional fluctuation. Xiao Nanzhu couldn’t see this person’s face clearly, but for some reason, he felt somewhat fearful. This unfamiliar emotion made Xiao Nanzhu irritably want to stand up, but no matter what, he couldn’t resist the will of the person before him. When he tried to open his eyes to see this bastard’s face clearly, all he could see was that blazing gold-red clothing that burned his eyes and beside him, a—

Woof?

…

When he woke up the next day, Xiao Nanzhu had almost forgotten about last night’s events. His memory stopped at the point where he began cooking dragon whisker noodles, so he decisively abandoned the idea of having porridge in the morning and prepared to make himself a bowl of noodles in the kitchen. But perhaps because his luck today was particularly poor, before he could finish cooking this bowl of noodles, an uninvited guest had already arrived punctually. When this calendar spirit, who emanated a pungent smell of roses all over, saw Xiao Nanzhu, he gave him a rather peculiar look, then familiarly smiled and said:

“Well, good morning, still a single dog, huh? So how are you planning to spend today, hahaha? Happy Valentine’s Day, single dog, hahahahahaha o(*≧▽≦)ツ”

Xiao Nanzhu: “(o#゜曲゜)o”