Chapter 51

Ke family.

Ke Xingzhou was carried back. When he returned, his eyes were tightly shut, his brows furrowed deeply in a “川” shape, and his right hand was still tightly gripping something, as if he had just had a nightmare.

His fiancée was also brought back with him.

Ke Xingzhou was about to leave for the program group, and when he was going downstairs, he saw Ke Xingzhou being carried in. The girl with a doll face beside him was crying so much that her eyes were swollen, her expression full of sorrow, as if her man had died.

His heart skipped a beat, and he quickly stepped forward to take a look.

Fortunately, although Ke Xingzhou's face was pale, with no color even on his lips, he was still alive.

He let out a breath of relief, then turned to look at the girl beside him: “Are you his fiancée?”

When Ke Xingzhou got engaged, he was still in the countryside, so he didn’t recognize the girl in front of him. But seeing the red string connecting her to Ke Xingzhou, he could roughly guess.

— Only those who can eventually marry and enter into marriage will show the red string.

Those tied by the red string are each other’s true match.

Ke Zhengye had meddled with matchmaking, and he had actually found Ke Xingzhou a true match. This was probably the best decision he had made in his decades of life.

Ke Xingzhou clicked his tongue in wonder.

The girl probably had heard about the situation with the Ke family. Although her gaze was unfamiliar, she still nodded: “I’m Qin Qin. You’re Ke Xingzhou’s mysterious little brother? He’s mentioned you before. He said you two have a good relationship, but you never seem to meet.”

Ke Xingzhou: “……”

What exactly had Ke Xingzhou been saying about him outside?

He furrowed his brows and glanced at Ke Xingzhou.

Qin Qin was still sobbing, and Ke Xingzhou didn’t know how to comfort a girl, so he stayed silent for a moment.

Suddenly, he felt a gaze, as if it had substance. He turned his head and saw a chubby Taoist priest being escorted by the butler into the house.

Taoist Qian was stroking his beard and scrutinizing the Ke family’s interior decorations with an air of disapproval.

Recently, supernatural events had been frequent in the capital, and families with some background had started to increase their contact with Taoist temples and monasteries. He had been invited by Qin Qin’s family to attend a banquet today. Originally, he thought it would be just an ordinary gathering, but who knew he would actually encounter something.

Ke Xingzhou was still not completely out of danger, so under Qin Qin's family’s request, Taoist Qian had come along to help watch over the situation.

Who knew that as soon as he entered, he would spot a familiar face in the midst of the luxurious decorations in the room.Taoist Qian looked at Ke Xingzhou's youthful, ink-like face with some suspicion. He felt that it looked vaguely familiar, but couldn't recall where he had seen it before.

Qin Qin saw him enter and quickly stood up to introduce the two: "This is Taoist Qian, thanks to him, we were able to find Ke Xingzhou in time tonight. Taoist, this is Ke Xingzhou's younger brother."

Upon hearing that Ke Xingzhou was Ke Xingzhou’s brother, Taoist Qian’s doubt immediately dissipated.

Family members usually share some resemblance, and he thought the familiarity might be due to that.

Ke Xingzhou, however, was somewhat surprised. Could they really need the Taoist for something this small?

He felt that things were turning out to be more than he had expected and frowned. "What happened to you guys?"

Qin Qin wiped away her tears and took a sip of the hot tea the butler handed her, hesitating before speaking.

It was clear that Ke Xingzhou really didn't believe in Ke Xingzhou’s ability to predict the future. Even his fiancée didn’t really believe that telling Ke Xingzhou about what had happened tonight would be of any use.

But the shock Qin Qin had experienced today was too great. She couldn’t casually talk about matters of the high society, and Ke Xingzhou was unconscious. After thinking for a moment, she spoke up: "It happened like this…"

What happened today really scared her to death.

Qin Qin had been talking to Ke Xingzhou on the phone when she suddenly heard his screams and immediately panicked. She quickly told her parents, contacted the organizers, and rallied everyone to search.

Taoist Qian was invited by Qin Qin’s family, so he was naturally part of the search team.

While calculating the direction, he led everyone in a systematic search. Fortunately, the place where Ke Xingzhou had been was not far, and they soon found him in the garden.

However, when they found him, Ke Xingzhou’s condition was extremely bad.

Not only was he drenched, but his entire body was so cold that his face had turned purple. His coat was lying on the ground, and for some reason, his pocket had been torn.

Ke Xingzhou seemed to have a mental breakdown. He was screaming like a madman, full of aggression, biting anyone who came near him, but strangely, Qin Qin was the only one he didn't attack. However, Qin Qin couldn’t handle this big man, and in the end, she could only hold him and slowly comfort him, nearly freezing herself.

After a long time, she finally managed to coax him back into the house. Ke Xingzhou probably relaxed mentally and developed a high fever, then passed out.

The group was momentarily at a loss for words, unsure of what to say.

The Ke family’s eldest son was a model praised among families in the lower circles—gentle, handsome, and sensible. To see him like this scared them all half to death.

Qin Qin thought someone had bullied Ke Xingzhou, so she angrily found several second-generation rich men who liked to tease him and questioned them. However, none of them admitted to being responsible.

Though Qin Qin was small and prone to crying, she had a fierce temper.

She was convinced that someone had bullied Ke Xingzhou and intentionally thrown him into the snow to freeze him, and demanded to see the surveillance footage on the spot.

The second-generation rich men were also innocent. Though they liked to play around and didn’t like Ke Xingzhou, they weren’t stupid—was prison food better than their family’s gourmet meals?

To prove their innocence, they agreed to let her view the footage.

To their surprise, when they watched the footage, everyone was stunned.

Ke Xingzhou had actually walked out on his own!

Not only that, but after staying alone on a secluded small balcony for a while, he seemed to have completely changed. His face was flushed, and he was exuding the sour smell of being in love. He walked out, completely ignoring people who greeted him, stretching out his hand, and heading toward the door.

Afterward, he even lay down in the snow by himself.The crowd was already dumbfounded at this point. When they saw Ke Xingzhou suddenly sit up and tear his clothes, they actually felt a bit of normalcy—someone about to freeze to death would indeed feel a burning sensation due to the malfunctioning of the body’s temperature-regulating center, which causes a temporary rise in surface temperature.

However, such a scientific theory appearing in such a ridiculous situation actually seemed a bit abnormal.

Ke Xingzhou's behavior was simply not something a normal person would do, but if he had gone crazy, he still managed to rationally answer Qin Qin’s call and even spoke to her a few times.

The few people who saw the surveillance footage suddenly broke into cold sweat.

If he wasn’t crazy, could it be that it was haunted?

Speaking of which, there had indeed been many supernatural incidents in the capital recently, and several of them were connected to the fake young master of the Ke family.

Ke Xingzhou had also been found through the help of a Taoist calculating directions; otherwise, he would have frozen to death much earlier.

For a moment, no one dared to stay any longer. The originally planned evening banquet ended abruptly because of this unexpected incident.

“The organizers originally planned to send him to the hospital for an examination, but he refused to go, saying he had to go home to see you... Oh, and before he passed out with a fever, he kept muttering that this talisman paper in his hand was given to him by you, and that he couldn’t lose it,” Qin Qin said, wiping her eyes and sighing deeply. “If you two hadn’t grown up together as brothers, I’d almost ship you two.”

Ke Xingzhou: "............"

That’s really unnecessary.

Taoist Qian, standing by, looked at Ke Xingzhou’s right hand after hearing Qin Qin's words, and only then did he notice the talisman paper Ke Xingzhou had been tightly holding in his palm.

The vermilion ink on the talisman paper had faded, and the edges had burn marks, clearly indicating it had been used and was now ineffective.

This talisman... was given by this young man?

Talisman... young man...

A certain memory, long buried, suddenly stirred within him. Taoist Qian recalled a time before the New Year when he had been severely slapped in the face by a young Taoist, and as he looked at Ke Xingzhou’s face, the more he looked, the more familiar it seemed.

No, it couldn’t be?!

Taoist Qian suddenly froze, his face turning pale.

Ke Xingzhou looked at him in confusion, wondering why this Taoist always acted strangely when he saw him.

Was he here for a ritual?

Ke Xingzhou thought to himself that he had been invited by the head of the Changsheng Temple to attend a ceremony and had originally planned to greet him and ask about the procedures, but seeing Taoist Qian suddenly avoiding him like this, he abandoned the idea.

Zhu Chu’s analysis had indeed been correct. The Taoist temple needed to be strengthened before it could be taken seriously by others.

Ke Xingzhou sighed deeply at this thought.

Currently, their own temple still had to rely on forwarding lottery draws to attract attention. How could they compare with those large, established temples?

By coincidence, at this moment, Ke Xingzhou suddenly woke up, opened his eyes groggily, and saw Ke Xingzhou. His expression instantly became very complicated.

"Xingzhou, you..."

By this point, he naturally realized what kind of situation he was in.In fact, before Qin Qin and the others arrived, he had almost been consumed by the ghostly figure disguised as Qin Qin. Fortunately, his body reacted faster than his mind, and he grabbed the talisman package that Ke Xingzhou had given him.

The talisman package suddenly emitted an astonishing amount of heat, making his palm feel a bit sore.

He was greatly alarmed and dared not release it. He could only endure the pain and held on tightly. The thing that was lunging at him immediately seemed to hit some hard barrier and was bounced away, its form becoming much fainter.

It probably realized how difficult the talisman was to deal with. The thing roared and lingered nearby for a while before finally leaving in unwilling defeat.

Ke Chenyi lay in the snow for a long time, his body temperature dropping rapidly. With the added shock, his mental state was extremely tense. When Qin Qin and the others finally found him, he confirmed that he was safe and then relaxed, his eyes rolling back before he fainted.

He only just slightly regained consciousness now.

Logically, after such a huge shock, he should have been having nightmares related to the events of today. However, the figure that appeared in his dreams was not the fake Qin Qin, but Ke Xingzhou from long ago.

At that time, Ke Xingzhou was only as tall as his chest, soft and white like dough, constantly saying, "Brother, you need to be careful today. Don’t pass by certain places, you might have bad luck."

To be honest, he had been very unhappy when a younger brother suddenly appeared in the family. Going from being an only child to needing to take care of a younger sibling was quite a big change.

Moreover, Ke Xingzhou couldn’t even speak well.

As a teenager, he had already started to rebel. Watching Ke Xingzhou babble, and seeing their mother call him "baby" and their father taking him on an airplane, Ke Chenyi grew to dislike his younger brother more and more.

He started deliberately ignoring Ke Xingzhou, or would act against him on purpose. If Ke Xingzhou told him not to do something, he would do exactly that.

At first, this behavior caused him a lot of trouble, but he didn’t care much at the time. A few minor injuries were nothing compared to becoming a coward who listened to his younger brother.

Until Ke Xingzhou turned five.

Ke Xingzhou suddenly got very sick for some unknown reason and was sent to the countryside. By the time Ke Chenyi came back from his holiday, their parents became very secretive about Ke Xingzhou's "predictions." Whenever they called Ke Xingzhou, they were stern, warning him not to believe a single word of it.

—He never believed it to begin with.

Ke Chenyi had once thought that Ke Xingzhou had made a mistake while trying to give someone a fortune, which led to that sudden illness. He then became even more convinced that Ke Xingzhou couldn’t really tell fortunes and was just spouting nonsense.

Until today.

When he saw his "fiancée" suddenly transform into a terrifying, distorted ghostly figure, what flashed through his mind were the words Ke Xingzhou had said to him over a decade ago.

"Brother, you need to be careful today. Can you take Zhou Zhou’s toy? It will protect you."

The past and present suddenly overlapped, and a mistake that had been haunting him for over ten years felt like a bullet to his forehead.

"..." Ke Xingzhou looked at Ke Chenyi, who suddenly began crying uncontrollably.

Ke Chenyi had been staring at him fixedly since he woke up, called his name, but said nothing else. His eyes turned red and he started crying.

This caused Qin Qin to look at them with an expression of curiosity.

Ke Xingzhou: "..."

After a moment of silence, Zhu Chu sent a message saying that the person coming to pick him up had arrived. Ke Xingzhou stood up and prepared to leave.

Qin Qin had talked with him for a while and had finally calmed down. When she saw that he was about to leave, she hurriedly stood up and anxiously asked, "Are you... leaving now? What if something like that happens to him again tonight?"She can't handle it on her own!

Ke Xingzhou, however, remained calm and pointed to Qian Daochang, who had been looking absent-minded since earlier: "Isn't there a professional here? For a small ritual like this, just ask him."

Hearing this, Qian Daochang's unsettled emotions finally calmed down a bit.

After all, Changsheng Temple was the most famous Taoist temple in the capital, and it had produced the current president of the Taoist Association. He would never let the reputation of Changsheng Temple be tarnished on his watch.

However, when he looked at Ke Chenyi’s situation, he couldn’t help but pause and fell into deep confusion once more.

If he wasn’t mistaken, it seemed that Ke Chenyi's luck had been taken by an evil spirit.

This was a situation he could solve, but at the very least, he would have to bring the believer back to the temple, have him bathe, fast, and undergo a 49-day ritual, then offer various tributes in place of the lost luck to appease the evil spirit before it would release Ke Chenyi.

This… how is this considered a small ritual?!