Chapter 59: Can an Object Really Ward Off Misfortune?

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Chapter 59: Can an Object Really Ward Off Misfortune?

Chen Yuan had thought that even after Yu Shenliu said what he had said, his life would not change all that much. As it turned out, things were not nearly that simple.

Things he had once taken for granted as ordinary care between friends now seemed to carry an unmistakably flirtatious air. And so he found himself at a loss, muddling through one thing after another. This was the first time Chen Yuan had ever encountered something like this, so how could he possibly know how to react?

And after he had muddled through that night and tacitly accepted Yu Shenliu’s confession, he could no longer simply reject him outright, including all those almost possessive gestures, like picking him up and dropping him off or bringing him meals.

Chen Yuan was genuinely starting to find it troublesome. All he could do was quietly change his routine, going from spending his mornings at the shop to staying there all day, doing his best to avoid spending too much time alone with Yu Shenliu.

Compared to someone as hopelessly innocent as Chen Yuan, Yu Shenliu might never have been in love himself, but he had certainly seen plenty of it from the sidelines. And with Yu Zhi, Sis Li, and the others offering advice behind the scenes, he quickly gained the upper hand.

He was constantly using little gestures to make Chen Yuan blush and leave him so flustered that he had no idea how to react. In fact, Yu Shenliu was more than happy to see Chen Yuan reacting so differently from his usual calm self. It proved that he had gotten under Chen Yuan’s skin, that he could make the other man’s heart flutter and stir his emotions.

Even if it was not quite the kind of reaction he wanted yet, those feelings would slowly change, wouldn’t they?

As it turned out, everything was just as Yu Zhi and Sis Li had said. When pursuing someone, you had to be shameless, thick-skinned, utterly shameless, and shameless to the bitter end. Whatever worked was a good method.

After all this time, whenever Chen Yuan saw him, he would show a subtle awkwardness, as though he wanted to turn and run, only to force himself to stay put at the last second.

If not for everything he had been doing lately, Yu Shenliu probably never would have discovered that he had such a deeply mischievous side hidden within him. He kept finding new ways to tease and bully Chen Yuan, only to soothe him and smooth his ruffled feathers when he was about to run away. The feeling was downright addictive.

Even after Sis Li learned what he had been up to and described his behavior as “perverted” and “twisted,” Yu Shenliu still could not seem to rein himself in.

Unable to take it anymore, Chen Yuan had started hiding out at his shop long before opening time. Right now, he was sitting there quietly casting a divination for himself.

The result was enough to give him a headache.

The Qian Hexagram : The Creative works sublime success, furthering through perseverance. The Qian Hexagram symbolizes great fortune, harmony, and strength.

However, that wasn’t the important part.

The Qian Hexagram consisted of six yang lines, with Qian above and Qian below, forming a double-yang configuration. And considering his current situation, what was Chen Yuan supposed to make of that?

He stared at the copper coins scattered across the table, then quietly lowered his head and rested his cheek against the tabletop, letting out a long sigh.

He did not want to think too hard about how things had ended up like this.

Right now, Chen Yuan felt completely passive, always being led around by Yu Shenliu for one reason or another. Of course, it was not really that Yu Shenliu was playing him. Chen Yuan simply could never seem to figure out how to deal with him.

During this period, he had experienced a level of awkwardness he had never encountered in his entire life. Even though Yu Shenliu had never actually done anything improper, Chen Yuan still felt as though he were being pursued from all sides with nowhere to escape.

He checked the time. It was almost nine, which meant it was about time to open the shop.

Chen Yuan stood up, stepped out from behind the screen, and opened the glass door.

A crowd was already waiting outside. They did not dare make a commotion or jostle one another. Before Chen Yuan came out, they had been quietly chatting among themselves, exchanging whatever information they knew.

During this period, Chen Yuan’s shop had become a new and rather famous social gathering spot in Jincheng. It was quite an amusing development.

And because there was no real barrier to entering this particular social circle, people would occasionally drop by just to see whether they might happen to meet someone unusual.

Once the door opened, the person with the first number of the day followed Chen Yuan into the inner room.

“Then, what would you like to ask?”

Chen Yuan sat down in his usual seat, putting aside his tangled thoughts from earlier as he asked the visitor.

The visitor was a young man in his twenties who looked fairly handsome. But with just a cursory glance, Chen Yuan could already see quite a few things about him that were out of the ordinary.

The jade pendant hanging from his neck on a red cord was only partly visible, but it was probably a Guanyin pendant. One wrist had a red cord with a yellow triangular charm hanging from it, presumably a talisman he had obtained somewhere. On his other wrist was a string of Buddhist prayer beads. Even his clothes seemed deliberately chosen, all in black and white.

It was obvious that he was deeply interested in metaphysics. Otherwise, he would hardly have gone to such lengths.

Chen Yuan couldn’t help feeling that he was rather blindly devoted to it.

Although the young man was only a few years younger than Yu Shenliu, his emotional maturity was probably worlds apart. Anyone who saw Yu Shenliu would think of him as mature and composed, whereas this young man looked more like a student who had only recently entered society.

Sometimes, a person’s bearing was simply obvious.

Even though Yu Shenliu knew quite a bit about metaphysics, he would never go as far as this young man and practically cover himself from head to toe with protective objects.

There were many situations in which too much was as bad as too little. The more deliberately one tried to arrange absolutely everything around oneself—feng shui, appearance, lucky objects, and so on—so that every last detail was perfectly auspicious, the less likely one was to obtain a good result in the end.

For one thing, such arrangements had extremely strict requirements, and the slightest mistake could produce the opposite effect.

For another, the Heavenly Dao leaves room for imperfection, and when anything reaches an extreme, it must reverse.

Chen Yuan was no different.

He knew plenty of taboos and understood that certain arrangements could produce better results, but unless it was necessary, he never changed the way he lived simply because metaphysics recommended it or because doing so would supposedly bring better results.

At its core, metaphysics was merely a means to an end. If a person became controlled by the means, they would lose sight of the purpose in the first place.

“My name is Li Xiaohua,” the young man began. “Actually, I’ve done some research into metaphysics myself, though of course, compared with a professional like you, Master Chen, I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable.”

Chen Yuan listened with a smile.

“Well, how should I put it…” Li Xiaohua scratched his head. “Ever since I was little, I’ve always seemed to run into all sorts of strange things.”

“When I was little, I was very weak physically. I often got headaches and fevers for no apparent reason, and sometimes I would, well, how should I put it… go blank. I’d just sit there looking dazed, as if I’d lost consciousness.

“My grandmother said it was because my Bazi was weak and my hun and po souls were unstable, so I would often lose my soul. Whenever that happened, my grandmother would ‘call my soul back’ for me. I don’t really know what that was all about. I was too young to remember.

“It was never anything serious, but then one time, for some reason, I jumped into a pond while I was playing outside and almost drowned. I was only barely rescued.

“My mother had my Bazi enshrined at a temple, making me a child entrusted to Guanyin, essentially placing me under the Bodhisattva’s protection. After that, a lot of those strange things stopped happening.”

“Because of all that, my family has worshipped Guanyin ever since. And I’ve worn consecrated Buddhist prayer beads, Bodhisattva pendants, talismans, and things like that pretty much all my life.

“I don’t actually dislike them. It’s just that I feel like other people must think it’s strange. A grown man wearing all these odds and ends can look pretty weird.”

“People say that wearing things like these can ward off misfortune for you. And apparently, if you raise a good pet or something, it can ward off misfortune for you too.

“I don’t really want to keep wearing all this stuff, but I’m worried that something might happen if I stop. And another master once told me that there are all sorts of ways to alter your fate and ward off misfortune.

“So could I raise a pet or something to ward off misfortune for me, and then take off all these pendants and charms?”

Chen Yuan noticed that when Li Xiaohua described his situation, he had mentioned “another master.”

As expected, he wasn’t the only expert in this world. There had to be other people with genuine knowledge of metaphysics. Chen Yuan simply hadn’t encountered a second one yet.

Still, Li Xiaohua’s question was rather interesting from Chen Yuan’s perspective.

In fact, questions about “warding off misfortune,” “accumulating virtue,” “attracting wealth,” “turning one’s luck around,” and the like were exactly what people who didn’t understand much about the true principles of metaphysics were most interested in. Or rather, they were what ordinary people cared about most.

After all, these were the concerns most closely tied to everyday life. Talking about turning one’s luck around or warding off disasters might sound vulgar, but who among the living wasn’t preoccupied with such worldly concerns?

Wine, women, wealth, and power—people naturally pursued them. There was nothing unusual about that.

And many charlatans made a living by exploiting people’s concerns about these very things.

The simplest and most enduring scam involving metaphysics, one that people fall for time and time again, was to tell someone, “You have a major disaster coming. If you want to avert it, you need to pay this much money and do this and that.”

No matter how elaborate the scam was, it ultimately came down to the same basic premise.

The only difference was that instead of “averting a major disaster,” it might be “if you want to get rich,” “if you want a boost to your career,” or “if you want to stay safe and sound.”

People had always pursued these things, and as long as people had such desires, there would always be someone ready to exploit them.

Likewise, a charlatan might initially refuse to take your money, only to demand even more in the end, whether for performing some ritual or under the pretext of having something enshrined before Guanyin.

Leaving aside the issue of charlatans, using various protective objects was in fact a common practice in metaphysics.

Buddhist prayer beads, beaded bracelets, special pendants, talismanic papers, and the like were all quite common.

Even the talismans on Li Xiaohua’s wrist came in all sorts of varieties: some were meant to keep you safe, some to protect your studies, and some to safeguard your wealth and fortune.

Some people wore them around their wrists, others around their necks, while objects meant specifically to protect one’s wealth were often tucked into a wallet.

Of course, among the things sold on the market nowadays, useful ones were few and fraudulent ones were many.

Someone would slap a Pixiu bracelet together and claim that a high monk had consecrated it, which was enough to make anyone laugh.

And there were even people so muddleheaded that they practically wanted to buy these so-called “ritual tools” by the dozen, hanging them all over themselves like a jewelry rack.

In fact, wearing one or two such items was beneficial to a person, much like a longevity lock. But wearing too many would do more harm than good.

In Chen Yuan’s view, everyone’s blessings were limited, and so was the number of such items a person could withstand.

It was like soy products: they’re good for you, but if you eat too much of them, some people can end up developing kidney stones.

And it wasn’t quite that simple, either.

Protective objects like these needed time before they could actually protect you. Most such objects possessed a certain spiritual nature, and only after their owners had interacted with them over a long period and continually nourished them with their own human energy could they perform their intended function.

If someone got a dozen or more of them all at once and switched between them every day, what effect could they possibly have?

Forget whether they could develop enough spiritual nature in the first place. Who could possibly nourish that many objects?

If you expected all those things to protect you, you’d be lucky if they didn’t leave you looking as though a female ghost had sucked the life out of you.

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