Yu Lanchuan couldn't help but feel that this line of hers was rather sinister, so he quickly asked. What are you planning to do?

Gan Qing replied. Nothing. Just wanna have a chat with him.

Alliance Leader Yu's heart was extremely weary. Don't be reckless!

Gan Qing didn't reply with words; she replied with a Panda Mr. Kim meme—Women who are beautiful are all unreliable.

Who wants to get into a meme war with you!

Yu Lanchuan wanted to kneel in surrender to this walking meme. After explaining things to Yang Yifan, he rushed to Gan Qing's location.

In the past, "Doctor" Zhao had opened a beauty salon. Later on, he realised that the competition in that industry was getting more and more intense, so he switched industries. He found a source and brought a diploma from them, then went through one month of training and image transformation. After that, he wiped all traces of his old self from his face, changed his hair and appearance, and just like that, he became a "psychology consultation expert" and opened this Peaceful Mind Clinic.

He had used one weekend to earn a large amount of "peaceful mind" money—in the afternoon, he received three batches of clients who paid money to listen to music and take a nap, sold two long-term treatment packages, and added more than ten clients who asked him to help buy the Intelligence Pill. The growth in the numbers in his accounts was very pleasing and he happily hummed a song as he went home.

The place where Doctor Zhao stayed was not far from the restaurant where Nie Ke had passed money to him the other day. On his way home, he had to walk through a small lane. Even though it was a little unsettling, it wasn't very long and he was already very familiar with the way. This mister was immoral to the core, so he was naturally a materialistic person who worshipped money and firmly believed in the power of the renminbi to repel evil spirits, and did not fear the dark. As usual, he switched on the light on his phone, swung his legs, and hummed an opera tune as he strolled home.

However, today, there seemed to be something different about the little alley. As he walked, the northwest wind stopped and his surroundings suddenly quieted down. An indescribable feeling crawled up his spine.

Doctor Zhao warily shone his phone around but didn't see anything. He suspected that he was being overly sensitive, so he took a deep breath to calm down and sang out, "I used to lie hidden and live a carefree-"

He hadn't sung out the word "life" yet when someone seemed to chuckle softly in the darkness.

Doctor Zhao immediately shut his mouth. At the same time, he suddenly realised that his footsteps sounded a little unnatural—they had a rustling sound.

Did he step on something?

No, something was wrong!

Abruptly, he stopped moving. The rustling sound didn't immediately stop, there were a few additional rustles! It was like there was someone purposely imitating his steps but their steps were not very accurate.

"Is anybody there?" Doctor Zhao turned back and shouted. Behind him was a deserted lane. He started to feel nervous for no reason because he was suddenly realising that this familiar lane was darker than he expected. It made him feel unsafe, so he quickened his steps.

The rustling sound tailed him like a shadow. Doctor Zhao turned his head around a few times, his heart thumping faster and faster, his palms starting to turn damp.

Just as he was about to reach the end of the lane, there was suddenly the sound of someone running quickly behind him. It was fast and heavy, like the ear-splitting sound of the drums, crashing against his eardrums with no warning.

It might be a type of animal instinct—when walking alone in a very quiet place, the sound of hurried footsteps very easily made a person shudder and feel like they were being chased, especially when that person was already starting to feel scared.

The sudden and towering sound of the footsteps frightened Doctor Zhao until his knees weakened. He lifted his phone hastily, shining in the direction where the footsteps were coming from.

With the light, he saw clearly the lane behind him and his hair stood on end. It was still as deserted as ever—when the light swept across the lane, the steady and heavy footsteps unexpectedly disappeared into thin air!

Doctor Zhao was stupefied for a while. Then, very quickly, he turned on his heels and fled. He didn't know if he was imagining things but when he turned his body, he seemed to hear a woman laughing!

In one breath, he ran 800 meters. Doctor Zhao nearly puked his lungs out, running madly towards the main road. His palms were already wet with cold sweat and he almost couldn't hold on to his phone.

He hastily wiped his sweat with his sleeve and took a long exhale. Nervously, he gripped his wallet in the pocket of his pants, and recited a couple of sutra phrases.

"I'm just scaring myself." He patted himself on the chest and let out a laugh, as though to comfort himself. "Jumping at shadows, how silly."

Doctor Zhao lived alone and had sent his wife and child to live overseas. This way, he could brag when he brought this up to outsiders and he also had freedom to do whatever he wanted to. On this night, he didn't want to be alone for some reason, so he scrolled through his phone while opening the door. Just as he was wavering between the beautiful receptionist and a female patient he had just hooked up with, he felt something amiss. There was an ominous feel in the warm air in the house, a chill brushing past him…

Who opened the window?

Right at that moment, the door closed with a loud, heavy thump behind him. The key he had used to open the door just now hadn't been taken out. Doctor Zhao abruptly twisted his head around, only to hear a clear clink. Someone had locked the door from the outside! He rushed to the peephole to look outside and at the same time, turned the door knob futilely. The noise activated the sound-activated light in the corridor but as before, he saw no one.

Doctor Zhao's heart was suspended in his throat. Right then, all the lights in the house suddenly turned off—someone had tripped the circuit breaker!

"Who is it! I'm calling the police!"

He had just finished speaking when from very far, a woman let out a high-pitched laugh and said softly, "Sure."

Doctor Zhao grabbed the umbrella that was at the door and turned his head in the direction of the voice. He realised in shock that one of the windows at the balcony was open. There was a… shadow of a long-haired woman floating outside the window. When the night wind blew past, the shadow even swayed slightly!

Doctor Zhao abruptly retreated a few steps, his back colliding with the shoe cabinet. His house was on the tenth floor!

The "shadow" reached out a hand, pressing against the glass window. Immediately after, the sound of fingernails scraping against the glass could be heard from that direction. The shadow sighed faintly. "If only I still had hands, I would also call the police. Doctor Zhao, I want to report you for conducting illegal medical treatments, for harming lives for the sake of money…"

In the pitch-black house, the man who was already so scared he could not think straight did not notice the threads as fine as hair slipping in through the edges of the opened window like a spiderweb. One of the threads moved slightly and a paper box on top of the fridge was dragged down. A pile of Ritalin scattered all over the floor.

Doctor Zhao fell on his butt. "I-I-I-I'm selling proper medicine! I-Imported from Pakistan!"

The "shadow" chuckled. "Imported?"

Ritalin, the so-called Intelligence Pill that Doctor Zhao was peddling, was also known as "Viagra for the brain" and was usually used to treat ADHD. There were people in other countries who liked to take a few pills for no reason other than to stimulate their brains. This kind of thing that could obviously result in addiction and had side effects were categorised under psychiatric drugs in the country and were officially controlled. Without a medical prescription, the "imported" pills that could be bought were either fake drugs or smuggled in by the black market.

"I-I buy on behalf-"

A box of pills suddenly flew up on its own and brushed past the man's ear, smashing forcefully against the shoe cabinet. Doctor Zhao howled and nearly lost control of his bladder. "I smuggled them! I smuggled them! The hospitals prescribe this medicine too, they won't result in death! If… If there are any problems, it's all because the patients themselves are- ahhh!"

His vision darkened. Another box of pills flew up, spinning like a top and hitting his face at a high speed. Doctor Zhao felt like he had been slapped across the face. He shrank his body back and cowered in a corner, his arms wrapped around his head.

"If there are any problems, it's all because the patients themselves are not in good health and it has nothing to do with you, am I right?" The "shadow" outside the window let out a low, scornful laugh. "Then what about me, what did you prescribe me?"

Doctor Zhao looked up in confusion. "What..."

"Don't remember? Let me give you a reminder. At the beginning of March this year, I bought ten consultation sessions from you. You even prescribed me medicine but they don't seem effective, Doctor," the "shadow" said in a soft, breathy voice. "It even seemed to worsen my condition. Every day… Every day, it was like I was trapped in a swamp. Countless hands stretched out of the mud, pulling me down relentlessly. Slowly, I became unable to talk and I had no strength left at all. What did you prescribe me? Doctor?"

"Doctor" Zhao initially did not understand but listening to her words, he suddenly recalled something and his face changed. "You… Who are you?"

"Who do you think I am? Me, I used to think I was crazy, I thought I was worthless. But after I left my physical body, I suddenly felt much better. I'm so unsatisfied, I had to come back and have a nice and proper 'consultation' with you." The sound of fingernails scraping against glass was increasingly ear-piercing. Right after that, the window creaked as it was pushed open even wider. A pale, withered hand stretched in. "Doctor Zhao, what does this mean?"

The man was scared senseless by now. He grabbed a decorative Buddha statue at the entrance hall, jumbled chants for dispelling evil that he learned from somewhere tumbling out of his mouth, and threw it towards the window. The porcelain statue and the window shattered together, and the shadow outside the window disappeared into thin air. But before he could relax, he heard the voice speak again. "Oh my."

The voice was right beside his ear. She was in the house!

The door to the innermost bedroom opened softly. From inside, that hand reached out. A blurry shadow of a woman swayed into the living room.

She laughed, piercing yet soft. "Looks like Buddha doesn't protect bad people. That was close."

"Are you Ding Xiang? Wang Xiaoqing? Hao… H-Hao Chunmei…" Doctor Zhao had pissed his pants in terror and was calling out a few female names in succession. Even the "female ghost" in the house was dumbstruck for a moment, as though she didn't expect this to happen. The crotch area of the man's pants were already soaked and he was talking incoherently. "I don't know anything, I didn't do anything to any of you. I-I-I was just helping people buy medicine. Whatever they wanted to buy, I helped them buy..."

The "female ghost's" terrifying high-pitched voice lowered. Sadly, Doctor Zhao was already incapable of rational thought and did not notice it. "You said… 'any of you'?"

Yu Lanchuan ran madly the moment he got down from the cab. He was not familiar with the area and took a few wrong turns before he finally found the small neighbourhood where Doctor Zhao stayed. He looked at his watch—more than an hour had gone by—and he immediately broke out in a nervous sweat. If there was a pressure cooker, it was enough time to braise Doctor Zhao until his meat was falling off his bones!

He called Gan Qing's phone while trying to determine which building it was. The other party rejected his call.

Yu Lanchuan cursed, "Fucker!"

He was just about to call again when a twig suddenly flew towards him from the side. Yu Lanchuan subconsciously caught it. He looked up to see Gan Qing sitting on the edge of the flower bed in the neighbourhood, holding a wig and waving at him. Smiling widely, she asked, "Who's a fucker?"

Yu Lanchuan, "..."

"I told you I was coming to have a chat with Doctor Zhao, why are you panicking?" Gan Qing said. "So worried about me? I'm overwhelmed and shocked by your favour."

His face stiff, Yu Lanchuan said, "I'm worried about the person targeted by you."

"Don't worry. No deaths, no injuries, and no evidence left behind. I avoided the CCTVs and wiped my prints, aren't I reliable? Come, settle up the expenses first. Debts should be cleared between good friends." Gan Qing opened the calculator app on her phone and tapped rapidly on it. "Compensation for missing work, fee for running errands, information exchange fee, transport cost…"

The veins at Yu Lanchuan's temples started pounding.

"...I won't charge you for all that. After all, we see each other everyday, am I right?" Gan Qing said. "It's just that this made me miss an afternoon's worth of business and I've lost at least twenty sales of 'anti-Mercury retrograde charms.' Little Master Yu, how am I to explain this to the boss? I won't survive the coming days."

Yu Lanchuan had just encountered a President Yang who flaunted her wealth with style, and now he was meeting someone who moaned her poverty with equal flair. Both his spirit and his wallet suffered a double blow. In the end, the two of them went through a round of bargaining. Yu Lanchuan held his nose and bought twenty anti-Mercury retrograde charms from her at a bulk-purchase price, each one discounted by fifty cents.

Gan Qing finally spoke unhurriedly, "This person's clinic is basically a scam. He's actually a drug smuggler. He usually peddles some prescribed drugs illegally. He has many connections and his supply is reliable. His mouth is also tightly zipped so later on, someone introduced him to another business."

"What business?"

"GHB."

GHB was a type of narcotic. It was also known as a "date rape drug" and it was obvious how it was used.

"The price was very high so he agreed. He felt that if a murderer used a knife to kill someone, it was the murderer's fault and not the knife's fault, and that it was even more unrelated to the person who sold the knife," Gan Qing continued to say. "Slowly, other than GHB, there were people who asked him to help them buy other types of hallucinogens and narcotics. He realised that these customers all knew each other and the drugs were a tool for them to snare women. Usually, if they bumped into each other when they came to his place to pick up the drugs, they would even share their experiences—stuff like how to pick a target, how to make the target too scared to make a police report or to resist, and how to completely control her. These customers didn't mind their words around him. Later on, they even added him into their 'stamp-collecting community.' That Zhao fellow said it was like a gaming community. Everyday, they would show off their 'battle spoils.'"

Yu Lanchuan frowned. "Is Nie Ke in it?"

"He is. Nie Ke is one of his main customers. Apparently, a lot of people admire this Nie Ke a lot because he snared one Xiang Xiaoman and with that, wiped out twenty years of struggling, and became successful and well-known. He even made her completely submissive to him. Nie Ke's past deeds is a classic case study that's passed on in their community, along with a complete tutorial. First, beat down her self-esteem. Put sleeping pills and tranquilizers in her food and drink to make her drowsy for entire days so that she has no way to go out and work. Throw away the food she made in front of her. Bring her out to meet 'friends' and purposely let those 'friends' ridicule her to her face. Slowly destroy her mental state. Now that everything is in his hands, Nie Ke wants to completely get rid of her, so he's pretending to take her to see a 'psychiatrist'—this role is also a cameo played by that Zhao fellow. His job is to keep hinting and forcing her to 'reflect on herself' during the treatment period to make her symptoms worse. Nie Ke's plan was for her to kill herself or to find a suitable chance to send her to a psychiatric hospital."

"How about that?" Gan Qing tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. "Wasn't my plan foolproof?"