Are they still salvageable? Little Tuanzi couldn’t answer that yet.
One thing was certain: Duan Xing was beyond saving.
“I don’t understand any of this. I swear I didn’t do it. Don’t you dare frame me!” Duan Xing’s face had gone deathly pale, his neck stiff with defiance. Yet the tremor in his eyes and the sickly, shifting color of his skin betrayed him—he was panicked, not innocent.
His whole rise to the top had been built on stolen luck and a handsome face that could be turned toward a camera. He had no real acting chops, no real singing or dancing talent—just a pretty mask. He wasn’t even good at managing expressions. A lot of people saw through him the moment they looked closely.
The studio backed away as if from a spreading stain. In that cramped space, Zhao Tang and Duan Xing became isolated—an awkward, silent vacuum forming around them. They were effectively cut off.
But their fate was of their own making.
Nian Nian lifted her chin, a little haughty. Whether they admitted it or not, she had said what needed to be said. Once the show was over, the proper authorities would come to investigate. Using occult methods to commit crimes wasn’t something the law ignored—just that most people didn’t know where to turn. Duan Xing only knew one trick; he wasn’t a fully initiated occultist. If the right people were called in, they would find evidence and arrest him in no time.
“None of that matters,” Nian Nian said. “What matters is this: if you two won’t tell me where the real practitioner of these dark arts is, those three won’t spare any of you. This has a head and a tail, and I’m not going to cover it up. Outside of me, there’s nobody here who can help you.”
Her words were blunt truth, but to ears already trembling they sounded like a threat.
Duan Xing shrugged, clinging to a single hope. He thought Nian Nian was just a little fortune-teller with a knack for numbers; he couldn’t be that helpless. If the people behind him were really powerful, they would surely have a way out. Clutching that fantasy, he kept denying everything.
Zhao Tang, younger and with a smaller capacity for pressure, blew up in a howl of tears. She rubbed at her eyes and wailed, “I really don’t know where my grandma went. I’ve never met her. Please save me—please! I’m sorry, I was wrong, I won’t push you anymore! It was my fault with the sandbags too—please forgive me! I don’t want to die!”
The sight of the three mummified bodies had shattered her. Even Nian Nian, who reads faces for a living, could tell she wasn’t lying. But unless someone offered a solution, those three corpses were going to make everyone pay.
“You don’t have to know,” Nian Nian said quietly. “If you’re willing to give me a lock of your hair, I can find your grandmother’s location.”
Finding someone with that kind of ritual wasn’t hard for a practitioner. For ordinary family ties, sometimes a hair was all it took. But the person who had done this wasn’t an amateur—she could only use a long-distance locating spell and bring the person out that way.
Zhao Tang hesitated. She already had a growing certainty that her grandmother had been involved. But hearing the accusation out loud—hearing that her grandmother might have done these things “for her sake”—she didn’t want to betray her.
The three mummies began to stir, a ripple of agitation passing through them. Their heads twisted, they made soft, chilling chuckles—like wind through dry leaves.
“They’re angry,” Nian Nian warned, pointing at the onlookers. “If you keep hesitating, anyone related to you will be in danger. I can protect my father and brother—those men can’t beat me—but if you don’t hand something over, they’ll be dragged down with you.”
Adults around her, who had been shielding the little star and looking to her for answers, suddenly shifted their attention. Nobody wanted to risk those mummies. The weak hope of salvation was the kid with the strange powers.
“Just a few hairs. What’s the fuss?” someone snapped.
“You heard her—your grandmother caused this. Are you going to cover for her?” another added.
“All this hesitation—don’t you actually know where she is?” voices rose in accusation until Zhao Tang, already fragile, broke down again.
A couple of cowards volunteered to seize some hair themselves and dash it to Nian Nian, but the cameras were on, and as they moved the room tensed. Duan Xing kept his stubborn posture, staring at the crowd as if daring them to touch him.
Hands trembling, Zhao Tang tore out a few strands of hair and handed them over. “Take them. I really don’t know anything. If you can’t find her, you can’t blame me.”
Nian Nian accepted the hair, murmured the incantation, and began to count and pinch the air with her fingers. Her expression shifted from concentration to frown. Something was wrong—no, not wrong. Terribly wrong.
No wonder she hadn’t been able to find Zhao Tang’s parents’ whereabouts earlier. Where they should be... they were all in the underworld.
But that made no sense. They weren’t supposed to be dead. How could they be in the underworld?
“Did you find them?” a photographer asked, voice barely steady.
“Yes,” Nian Nian answered, nodding. Then she turned toward one of the little mummies. “I’ve located who killed you, but going there won’t be easy. Will you come with me?”
The small corpse paused, its head jerking stiffly as if thinking. After a long moment, it gave a rigid nod.
Nian Nian took a talisman from her small satchel and spoke to her father, tenderness and duty folded in her voice. “Dad, I have to go out for a while. I don’t know when I’ll be back. You should go home and stay with my seniors and my master—they’ll look after you.”
Her father’s face fell. Not because she told him to find her master, but because of what lay behind the words—the hint that someone was plotting against his daughter, that the threat wasn’t over yet. Yu Shanhe liked to believe he’d lived an honorable life; he hadn’t made many enemies, certainly none that would drag his family into something this dark. To think that someone would use him to hurt his daughter made his blood boil, but it was the helpless kind of anger—he could do nothing but worry.
“It’ll be all right, Dad,” Nian Nian said, feeling the power inside her. She’d come on this show in part to gather faith-energy; she’d amassed enough for what she needed. This was only about dealing with a desperate occultist. It didn’t require an ocean of belief—just the right amount.
Her father exhaled, the tension easing slightly. “Be careful. If you’re tired or can’t do it, come back. I’m here for you.”
He looked on the verge of tears, love and worry etched into every line of his face. Nian Nian smiled, warm and reassuring. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.”
There was no time to stall. After she finished, she opened a gate to the Nether Realm. The three mummified bodies lined up and stepped through. Nian Nian followed them into the doorway. The moment the last one passed, the opening closed, a dark ring of nothing sealing itself shut—and the people in the studio froze.
The viewers watching the livestream froze too.
“That happened for real—this isn’t some special effect, right?” someone in the chat typed.
“Is the world… becoming magical?” another wondered.
“What did I miss? How is this real?” more comments flooded in alongside wild emojis. Some hailed Nian Nian like a saint, others made jokes about worshipping her for fortunes.
The director, pale and suddenly very small, had to accept reality: the recording had to stop. This had gone far beyond a weird TV stunt. First, dried corpses crawling out of a wall. Then those corpses pointing out a killer. Then a celebrity scandal collapsing live on-stream. And now—someone vanishing into a portal. It was unprecedented.
He hurried to get the remaining innocent guests to safety and told everyone the show was suspended for the moment. As for when production would resume—well, that depended entirely on Nian Nian. The girl had vanished on camera. Until she returned and they could give the public a coherent, acceptable explanation, there was no way they could keep filming.