Don't Discriminate Against Species

Chapter 100 - You Mean You Understand?

Zhuang Qing carried Fu Li home and then stuffed him into the quilt. Looking at the way he lay on the bed with his belly facing up, Zhuang Qing shook his head wordlessly. Truly a stupid yao spoiled rotten by his elders.

Cold wind arose. He walked to the windows, closed them, and pulled the curtains shut.

Zhuang Qing left the guestroom. Standing along the corridor, he gazed at the luxurious crystal chandelier in the living room. Suddenly, he covered his face with both hands and rubbed his face with all his might.

Zhou Nan was a shut-in addicted to games. For other shut-ins, even if they disliked social interaction and chose to stay home all day, they would still have fixed income from work such as writing, drawing, translation, various kinds of online livestreaming, and so on. But Zhou Nan was different. He was only fond of nesting at home and relying on the inheritance his parents had left him to pass his days. He spent every day seeking self-satisfaction by killing people in-game or posting sensationalist comments beneath all sorts of news articles to vent his dissatisfaction with life.

However, he discovered that some inconveniences had appeared in his life recently. In the middle of the night, the sound of a woman crying and cursing could be heard from the toilet, and he constantly dreamed about his family’s elders scolding him. He didn’t take these seriously, but unexpectedly, bruises started appearing on his legs and buttocks a few days later. As long as he sat on a hard stool, he would experience unbearable pain. He mustered his courage to go to the hospital for a check-up and even spent a considerable sum of money on the physical check-up. In the end, no problem was found. Angered, he went online, cursed doctors for being liars, and then posted about his recent experiences on a certain supernatural forum.

Unfortunately, the post he sent out did not attract the attention of other netizens. His post was very quickly pushed down the front page by the other posts. He was a little disheartened, but also had no other option. On that night, the strange sound of the woman crying in the toilet intensified. All eight generations of his family surrounded his bed, cursing and hitting him. He couldn’t sleep well at all the entire night.

The next afternoon, he pulled the covers over him and was about to catch up on sleep when the doorbell rang.

He got up from the bed with some impatience. Massaging the aches that had spread to his waist, he pulled open the door with a scowl and half-awake eyes. “What do you want? I don’t buy insurance and purifiers.”

“Comrade, sorry, we’ve disturbed you.”

Only then did Zhou Nan notice that the speaker was wearing a police uniform. He looked quite amiable though, was he a civil policeman from the local police station? He felt a bit nervous. Had his curses on the internet been reported?

“I-Is something the matter?” Zhou Nan glanced at the two men behind the civil policeman. The one on the left was around 1.8m or 1.9m and had a figure men would be envious of. His looks were also the aggro-pulling sort. So what if he was good-looking, wasn’t he just a neighborhood policeman following behind a senior civil policeman? Zhou Nan couldn’t help but think. The man on the right was slightly shorter and had a smooth, bald head. It was fortunate that he appeared kind, otherwise passersby might call him a hoodlum when he walked on the streets.

“No, we’re just knocking on doors to conduct interviews on public opinion,” The civil policeman took out his identification. “Sorry for the disruption.”

Zhou Nan, who cursed people unceasingly on the internet, was the non-provocative type in reality. Seeing that the policeman had taken out his identification, he hurriedly opened the door and took two steps back. “Please come in, please come in.”

“Ah,” The bald man walked in and was greeted with a house full of empty drink bottles. Takeout boxes were also piled high on the table. He almost didn’t know where to put his feet.

“Pardon the mess,” Zhou Nan kicked the mass of rubbish in the house to the left and right, and at long last managed to clear a small path. “Please.”

The entire house was in a mess; it was practically a trash pit. The bald man’s sense of smell was a bit more sensitive and he was very unaccustomed to the smell in the house. Unable to bear it, he opened the living room windows. Neither did he dare to sit on the couch in the living room that had accumulated a thick layer of dust.

Zhou Nan grabbed at his oily hair. He took out a few drink cans from the fridge, but was turned down by the extremely handsome man.

“Thank you for your kind intentions, but we have rules – we can’t take anything from the masses,” The handsome man seemed to be interested in Zhou Nan’s house. Stepping on the rubbish, he smoothly made his way to the toilet door. “Is this your bathroom?”

“Wait.” Zhou Nan thought of his bitter experiences during this period and said hesitantly, “There’s something off about that place, you’d better not go in.”

He was very jealous of this sort of man who was good-looking from head to toe, but if something were to really happen to him, the small bit of conscience he still had wouldn’t be at ease either.

The handsome man opened the bathroom door and glanced in. Zhou Nan, who was behind him, saw the yellow sink, dripping tap, and filthy toilet bowl. His face turned a subtle shade of red.

“The bathroom is quite big,” The handsome man closed the door, shutting the smell of the toilet in as well. Zhou Nan secretly heaved a sigh of relief. If things were to continue like this, he would die from awkwardness.

“I’ll go to the other households to do the survey, you two can take a look around this place,” The older policeman smiled at the two young men before swiftly retreating from the house. He moved so quickly that it seemed as if he was running for his life.

The embarrassment in Zhou Nan’s heart intensified. He was the only one who still couldn’t pick out any faults.

“Sss,” He twisted his waist, and was instantly in such pain that he sucked in a breath of cold air.

“You’re injured?” The handsome man looked over with deep concern, his expression so sincere that Zhou Nan subconsciously spoke about the events that had occurred in recent times. Even the strange crying sounds in the toilet were told to the other party. Only after he had finished saying everything did he realize with a start what he had said. He hurriedly waved his hands. “I may have been too tired lately and hallucinated. I don’t promote feudalistic superstitions...”

“I know,” The handsome man patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t be anxious, it’s not anything major.”

“Fu ge,” The bald man taking a breath of fresh air at the living room window shouted. “Boss notified us that the meeting will start at eleven o’clock.”

“I know. The matter here can be settled in half an hour,” The handsome man glanced at the clock on the living room wall. Unfortunately, the dust-covered clock had long gone on strike, so he had no choice but to take out his phone to look at the time.

Zhou Nan stole a peek at it. It was actually the latest model of a certain major brand. It was said that there were still many people queuing on the internet to purchase it, yet this neighborhood policeman had already started using it. He’d even talked about not taking anything from the masses just now, but here he was taking out a phone from a major brand. Zhou Nan felt a little upset as he thought of this.

“My name is Fu Li. I’m not an employee of the local police station, I’m under another department,” Fu Li looked at the dejected young man whose hair resembled a bird’s nest. “My department’s colleagues saw your post on the internet, so I came to your house to take a look.”

Post?

Zhou Nan stared blankly. This handsome brother calling himself Fu Li was talking about the post he had sent out yesterday about being haunted?

“What department are you guys from? Does my house... really have unclean things?” Frightened, Zhou Nan shifted backwards repeatedly, as if putting a few steps of distance between him and the toilet would make it safer.

Hiss. Fu Li didn’t pay any heed to him. He grabbed at empty space at the toilet door and actually dragged out a woman dressed in white. This scene scared Zhou Nan till his legs softened. His body swayed, falling onto the pile of trash. “W-What is this?”

“This is a toilet god. It’s also okay for you to call her a toilet ghost. In the past, humans had the habit of making offerings to kitchen or toilet gods. For some people, because they made offerings with sincerity, their homes would have souls born from their belief. They are what you humans call home deities,” Fu Li looked at the weak, incessantly-weeping toilet god in front of him. “She is your house’s home deity.”

“C-Celestial being... she’s not a ghost?” Zhou Nan stammered. “Why does my house have such a thing?” He didn’t believe in these. Where did the belief come from?

“Of course she’s not a ghost,” Fu Li tapped the toilet god. The toilet god’s body turned corporeal and she gained the ability to speak.

“Many thanks, daren,” The toilet god bowed to Fu Li. She was a very good-tempered home deity.

“You have already grown so weak, why not leave this house?” Fu Li didn’t understand. When a toilet god no longer received a mortal’s offerings, they could search for a new believer. Although there were few humans nowadays who believed in such things, finding one would not be a problem. Why would she wrong herself by remaining in this dirty and messy place?

The toilet god raised her head, revealing a delicate and pretty face. “Because I promised someone that I wouldn’t leave unless the Zhou family’s descendants personally declare that they no longer need me.”

Fu Li turned towards Zhou Nan. Zhou Nan was so scared that he nodded repeatedly. “I didn’t know there was a celestial being in the house. If I knew, I would definitely have set her free.”

“I remember that you home deities have a habit – if the household was constantly noisy or they behaved in unscrupulous ways, you can manifest unusual phenomena as a warning to them. Why didn’t you do so?” Fu Li rarely came to the human world in the past, but he had listened to stories of home deities. One example was of a child around seven or eight years old who didn’t understand the rules and would constantly cry, making a fuss. The child would even run to the kitchen to urinate. Not long later, this family’s rice suddenly couldn’t be cooked and no matter how much firewood they burned, it was all useless. After that, this family promised to discipline the child well, offered incense, and kowtowed. Only then did their lives return to normal.

After being disciplined, this child became better and better, and was even a successful candidate in the highest imperial civil service examination. Later on, the legend of home deities blessing families circulated around the human world.

The toilet god’s face was a little flushed. “This Mr Zhou doesn’t cook at all. I arranged for two snakes to come in and warn him, but there was too much rubbish in the house, which attracted many mice. In the end, those two snakes were stuffed from eating mice.”

“Is your promise to that human so important? So important that you would rather have your soul extinguished than to leave this place?” Fu Li couldn’t understand the toilet god’s way of thinking.

“He was a very good person who could see me from young,” The toilet ghost revealed a warm smile. “He accompanied me all the way, spouseless and childless. Even when he was about to die, he couldn’t let go of the fact that it would be his relatives who would be with me. He stubbornly held on, unwilling to take his last breath.”

“He only left with peace of mind after I promised to stay with the Zhou family,” The toilet god lowered her head, concealing the emotions in her eyes. “Over these years, I’ve already grown used to it.”

Zhou Nan, who was sitting paralyzed on a pile of rubbish, stared blankly. He had heard his father mentioning when he was still alive that their family had also once been illustrious. There had been an olddddd ancestor more than two hundred years ago who had even been a successful candidate for the highest imperial civil service examination and became the region’s official. It was just that he didn’t wed a wife in his entire life and passed away from illness before reaching the age of thirty. Their clan had been taken in by a branch family of this ancestor.

In his memories, his grandfather would burn joss sticks and paper as offerings to the kitchen god, home deity, or whatnot when he was alive. After grandfather passed away, his dad would occasionally do the same. But when it reached his generation, he forgot about this matter. Now that he was looking at the home deity, the fear in his heart was gradually replaced by shame. Touching the bruises all over his body, he smiled bitterly. “Home deity, I know I was wrong, but you beat me up too viciously too.”

The toilet god asked in confusion, “My soul was on the brink of dissipating of late, how could I have harmed you?”

Zhou Nan shivered in fright. “You mean there are other ghosts in my house?”

Fu Li looked at Chu Yu, who shook his head. “There is no aura belonging to evil ghosts.”

Fu Li knew what to do upon hearing this response. He told Zhou Nan mildly, “Perhaps your family ancestors who haven’t reincarnated couldn’t bear to look on and came over to teach you a lesson.” The house was full of rubbish and stink. No matter how lazy he was, he shouldn’t turn his house into a rubbish pit.

Zhou Nan’s shoulders shrank back. He peered around the house in alarm, as if wanting to see if there were any manifestations of his ancestors around him.

Fu Li ignored him, instead turning towards the toilet god. “If this Mr Zhou releases you, do you have any place you want to go to?”

The toilet god shook her head. “I don’t want to come into contact with any other human family apart from the Zhou family.”

“Even if your soul were to scatter?”

“Yes, even if my soul is scattered,” The toilet god smiled and nodded.

“Why?” Fu Li found it even harder to wrap his head around this. “That human merely accompanied you for a few short decades. Do you not even want your life?”

The toilet god looked at the handsome yao cultivator daren with profound cultivation before her, and let out a light laugh. “Yao god daren, you probably don’t understand what love is, right?”

Fu Li replied, “I do understand. Many elders have loved me from young, I love them too.”

“Not the same, that’s not the same,” The toilet god’s smile became even gentler. She looked at Fu Li just like she was gazing upon an uninformed junior, despite the fact that she hadn’t even lived three hundred years while the one standing before her was a great yao with more than four thousand years of cultivation. “There is a type of love that cannot be replaced by anyone. You will want to be with him in every life, never to be apart.”

Fu Li looked at the toilet god with pity. “But human lifespans are short, you cannot be with him forever.”

“Yup. But if I’ve fallen in love, then fighting for it day and night is also okay,” The toilet god saw the pity in Fu Li’s eyes and smiled gently. “Even if he’s human, I will still acknowledge it.”

Fu Li didn’t understand love, so it wasn’t his place to evaluate whether or not such behavior was clever or foolish. But this affection was worthy of his respect. He thought about it and then said, “If you have nowhere to go, you can come to our place as logistics staff. That place of ours has many female cultivators like you.”

The toilet god smiled silently.

“The Zhou family will not need a toilet god in the future,” Zhou Nan stood up. The dejected him seemed to have some vigor at this moment. “I will take good care of myself on my own, you can leave with this handsome guy called Fu Li.”

He wasn’t capable of sincerely making offerings to the so-called home deity. His life’s interest lay in the virtual world, and it would remain that way his entire life. Someone who was useless at life was destined to remain that way forever. He didn’t want to drag others down with him. Moreover, the toilet god was the lover of his ancestor. According to family hierarchy, he would even need to address her as ‘ancestral grandmother’. His face burned at the thought of his ancestral grandmother living in this dirty house with him.

The toilet god pondered over it before shaking her head. “May I request yao god daren to give me some time? At the least... I must teach this child how to live independently before I can leave with peace of mind. After all, he is... Yu Zhi’s descendant. I must take good care of him on behalf of Yu Zhi.”

Zhou Nan wanted to say that he didn’t need anyone to teach him how to live, but faced with a floor of trash, he had no way of voicing it with conviction.

“Okay,” Fu Li agreed. He then placed a restriction on Zhou Nan preventing him from telling anyone else about this matter. According to the usual practices, Zhou Nan’s memories should have been wiped. However, the toilet god wanted to teach him how to live independently, so removing Zhou Nan’s memories would greatly limit what could be done.

Who asked him to always be so good at understanding human wishes? This was why he had chosen to compromise.

After Fu Li and Chu Yu left, Zhou Nan saw the toilet god actually helping him to tidy up the trash on the floor. He hastily leaped up from the floor. “P-Please sit. Let me handle the dirty work.”

He swept the trash that had accumulated on the couch onto the floor and then laid a towel on it. “Please sit, please sit.”

The toilet god sat down with an affectionate smile.

Zhou Nan ran back and forth ten times before throwing out all the rubbish in the house. He then started mopping the floor. After half an hour of mopping, he was so fatigued that his head was spinning and his eyes had dimmed. He blurted out, “Ancestral grandmother, is ancestral grandfather good-looking?”

After voicing this question, he hated that he couldn’t give himself a slap. What ancestral grandmother? Wasn’t this asking to be whipped?

But a glorious smile stretched across the face of the toilet god seated on the couch. She nodded. “Good little grandson, your ancestral grandfather was especially good-looking.”

“There is no man in this world better-looking than him.”

Fu Li and Chu Yu rushed back to the bureau and finished their meeting. Fu Li roughly understood the meeting content – the general idea was about loving the environment, protecting nature, and so on. The moment the meeting ended, he ran over to Zhuang Qing, and lay a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go eat.”

He had already promised to keep Zhuang Qing company, so he definitely had to do it well. Thinking about how Zhuang Qing had eaten on his own for almost two thousand years, Fu Li felt that he had to accompany Zhuang Qing to eat many, many times, so that he could experience the happiness of eating with a seatmate.

In Fu Li’s mind, Zhuang Qing was a lonely, exceedingly pitiful little cabbage growing in the ground who faced the harsh forces of nature on a daily basis.

The colleagues in the meeting room who hadn’t yet left all came to a halt, wanting to know how the boss dated.

Zhuang Qing turned his head and shot them a glance. A shiver crept up their backs and they scuttled out of the meeting room without looking back. Huang Can was the slowest and was blocked by his colleagues. In a moment of desperation, he transformed into his original form – a weasel – and squeezed out through a crack.

“What are they running off so quickly for?’ Fu Li reacted instantly, “No good, Chef Bao must have made some good food today. They must be running so quickly because they want to snatch the limited food!”

He grabbed Zhuang Qing’s arm and then dragged him out. “Let’s run faster, we can’t let them snatch it first.”

Zhuang Qing: ...

Why did he have to accompany this stupid yao to do a brainless thing like running quickly for the sake of food? He was the grand dragon of national fate, did he lack this bit of food?

Zhuang Qing had a straight face as he was dragged along by Fu Li in a run. The pursed corners of Zhuang Qing’s mouth curved upwards.

“Hold my hand,” Zhuang Qing gripped Fu Li’s hand tightly. “I’ll take you to snatch it.”

The management bureau’s colleagues felt like a golden light had flashed past them, but when they glanced around their surroundings, they discovered nothing.

“Your golden dragon clan is so fast,” Fu Li managed to snatch his favorite fish and shrimp. In a very good mood, he gave Zhuang Qing a fish. “The other yao can’t compare in this aspect.”

Zhuang Qing took a big mouth of the fish Fu Li gave him. He raised his chin high, an unperturbed look on his face. “It’s nothing great.”

“When Chef Bao makes good food in the future, I’ll take you to snatch it. They definitely won’t be able to out-snatch me.”

Zhuang Qing had already eaten one-third of the fish. He made a sound of agreement with an expressionless face.

As a result, there was an extra small piece of yellow croaker from Fu Li on his plate.

“Was there anything strange about the place you went to check on today?” Zhuang Qing asked.

“Yes, it’s a toilet ghost,” Fu Li recounted the entire matter. “I just don’t understand how those short ten years of love can be so important that she’ll give up on everything.”

The yellow croaker in Zhuang Qing’s chopsticks fell onto his plate. He lowered his head and expressionlessly wiped the spots of oil that had splashed onto the table. “There are too many things you don’t understand.”

“You mean you understand?”

Zhuang Qing raised his head, looking at him. “If I love someone, I will be even more ambitious than her. I won’t only be chasing after them morning and night.”

Fu Li was a little weirded out by Zhuang Qing’s gaze. There seemed to be a rabbit in his heart dancing. “T-That is indeed more ambitious.”

“En, as long as you understand that,” Zhuang Qing placed the yellow croaker into his mouth and elegantly chewed on it.

“The way you eat is so nice to look at, just like that pet of mine in the past.”

“Shut your mouth and eat, you’re noisy!”

“Oh...”

A minor in their rebellious period was truly hard to service.