A debt-ridden tycoon inherits a luxury mansion, but the tenants are not human.

On the eleventh day of the seventh lunar month, at night, two hours before midnight, it started raining heavily in the west of the city, the rain pattering against the roof tiles.

Chen Mo stood in front of the ruins of the New City Department Store, holding a black umbrella—this was the former site of the Qingyun Theater. The five-story concrete frame was exposed in the night, the scaffolding was rusty, and a few windows that had not been completely dismantled rattled in the wind with a sharp sound. The bronze mirror given to him by Zhou Wenyuan was tucked into his inner pocket, and he could feel the chill through his clothes. Chen Mo used his spiritual vision to scan the entire building.

Ordinary ruins appear grayish-white in the spiritual vision, but this place is different—a dark red halo shines from deep underground, the halo alternating between light and dark, with a slow and heavy rhythm. The red light spreads upward along the cracks in the foundation, gathering into a blurry outline at a certain location on the third floor of the unfinished building. That outline can be vaguely seen to be the shape of a stage.

"Shake the light position..."

Chen Mo muttered to himself.

He recalled the star map shimmering on the bronze gate, and also the broken array lines in Shen Mo's remnant soul's memory. Among the seven anchor points, Yao Guang, the master of Po Jun, symbolized the end and rebirth, while also representing a certain extreme instability.

The rain is getting heavier.

Chen Mo passed through the gap in the fence and stepped into the ruins. The ground was covered with murky water, mixed with construction waste and filth. The air smelled musty, but deep within this musty smell, he smelled another scent—a very faint fragrance of cosmetics and the aroma of sandalwood, the smell of a backstage opera troupe from the Republican era.

He walked up the stairs that hadn't been completely demolished yet, his footsteps echoing in the empty building, each one heavy and oppressive.

By the time they reached the third floor, the red light in their spiritual vision was already blinding, and the scent of cosmetics was becoming increasingly strong. This floor was originally planned as a clothing section of a shopping mall, but now only concrete pillars and exposed pipes remained. However, at the center where the red light converged, the scene began to distort.

Chen Mo stopped in his tracks. Ten meters in front of him, ripples appeared in the space. At the center of the ripples, a wooden stage slowly emerged. It was not a physical object, but a projection. However, one could clearly see the carvings on the pillars, the faded curtains, and the wear marks on the stage surface.

In the center of the stage stood a bronze mirror, not the one Zhou Wenyuan had given, but a larger one, a makeup mirror set in a mahogany frame. The mirror was covered in dust, but it reflected the scene below the stage: several rows of empty benches, and in the first row, a figure sat a woman in a cheongsam, holding an oil-paper umbrella, with her back to the stage.

Chen Mo took a breath and took out the bronze mirror that Zhou Wenyuan had given him from his pocket.

The moment he took out the mirror, the makeup mirror on the stage suddenly lit up with a ghostly green light. The two lights converged in the air, connecting the two mirrors, and the bronze mirror in his hand began to get hot.

Chen Mo looked down and saw himself slowly changing in the mirror. His facial features softened, his skin turned white, and the corners of his eyes turned slightly up. A few seconds later, the person in the mirror had completely transformed into Liu Fengchun's half-makeup face: his right eye was exquisite and charming, while his left eye was plain and ordinary.

"He...is seeing through your eyes."

A voice came from behind.

Chen Mo turned around abruptly, and the beam of his flashlight swept across the stairwell to find Zhou Wenyuan standing there. He was still wearing a Zhongshan suit, but now he was holding a black oil-paper umbrella with the Big Dipper pattern embroidered in silver thread on its surface.

Chen Mo did not put down the bronze mirror, which was so hot that he could hardly hold it.

"Didn't Mr. Zhou tell me to come alone?"

"The plan has changed."

Zhou Wenyuan walked slowly closer, raindrops dripping down the edge of the umbrella, but strangely, the raindrops slid away automatically as they approached his body.

"The Eternal Life Society members are also nearby tonight; you can't handle them alone."

Chen Mo felt his blood run cold.

"The Longevity Society? What are they doing here?"

"Harvest".

Zhou Wenyuan stopped five meters away from Chen Mo, his gaze fixed on the stage.

"Liu Fengchun's cycle has accumulated seventy-four years of obsessive energy, which is an excellent supplement for the Longevity Society. They want to intercept this energy the moment you break the cycle."

"and then?"

"Then the formation will become unbalanced, the Yao Guang position will collapse, and the chain reaction may cause other anchor points to fail one after another."

Zhou Wenyuan spoke calmly, but his eyes conveyed a sense of pressure.

"So we need to cooperate. You put the mirror on the stage, and I'll be responsible for setting up an array to isolate the Longevity Society from interference. Once it's done, I'll tell you where the rouge is, and I'll also give you the clue to the tears."

Chen Mo stared at him: "How do I know you're not a member of the Eternal Life Society?"

Zhou Wenyuan smiled. He raised his left hand, palm up, and raindrops hovered half a foot above his palm, then condensed and changed color at a speed visible to the naked eye—from transparent to dark red, and finally condensed into a drop of blood.

Zhou Wenyuan flicked his finger, and the blood droplet flew towards the stage. Upon contact with the rippled space, it exploded, transforming into a pale golden light curtain that enveloped the stage.

"The mark of a tomb keeper lies in the ability to manipulate the energy within the array's range. The members of the Longevity Society use evil magic, relying on external objects and contracts; their natures are fundamentally different."

Chen Mo was silent for a moment before asking the crucial question: "Back then, was it really your master who pushed Liu Fengchun to hang himself?"

The smile on Zhou Wenyuan's lips vanished.

He admitted it very readily.

"Yes, the first guardian of Yaoguang Tomb, my master Zhou Huaiyuan, accepted the commission of the Longevity Society in 1948 to set up a time cycle array at Qingyun Theater. Liu Fengchun was the array eye he chose because Liu Fengchun's birth chart was pure Yin and he was an actor. Actors perform other people's lives on stage, and their souls are easy to leave their bodies, making them the most suitable carriers for this kind of time-based array."

Why choose him?

"because……"

Zhou Wenyuan paused, looking at the back of the woman holding an umbrella below the stage.

"Because there were people who shouldn't have been sitting in the audience, Liu Fengchun's play that night was a setup from the start."

Chen Mo followed his gaze, and under his spiritual vision, the outline of the woman in the cheongsam gradually became clear. She was in her early twenties, with a beautiful face. She wore a jade bracelet on her left wrist and tightly clutched a white handkerchief in her right hand. The handkerchief was embroidered with two words: "Feng Chun" (逢春, meaning "Spring Encounter").

"she is……"

"Su Jingwan, Su Wenjuan's grandmother, was the eldest daughter of the Su family, who owned a silk shop in Suzhou."

Zhou Wenyuan's voice was low and deep.

"She loved listening to Liu Fengchun's operas, to the point of obsession. Liu Fengchun was also interested in her, and the two secretly pledged their lives to each other. However, the Su family had already betrothed her to a warlord as a concubine, and the wedding was scheduled for the third day after that opera performance."

"So the scene that night was actually..."

"It's a farewell."

Zhou Wenyuan continued the conversation.

"Liu Fengchun knew he couldn't keep her, so he wanted to sing the last act of 'The Soul Leaves' on stage as an explanation to her and himself. Su Jingwan secretly came to see him without telling her family. She sat in the first row, clutching the love token she had prepared to give him—that handkerchief."

Amid the sound of rain, the ripples around the stage began to expand. The bronze mirror in Chen Mo's hand was so hot that he could no longer hold it. He had to activate his tenant resonance ability to draw the yin energy of the old house into his palm to barely counteract the scorching heat.

"That's when my master made his move."

Zhou Wenyuan continued.

"When Du Liniang was singing the part about her soul leaving her body and traveling to the underworld, Liu Fengchun was so emotionally invested that his soul was unstable. My master was backstage and used a black jade ring to activate a formation and push him—not his body, but his soul. He pushed his soul out of his body and stuck it at the point in time and space on the stage."

"and then?"

"Then Liu Fengchun's body went limp on the stage. Everyone thought he had suddenly fallen ill, and the theater was in chaos. Su Jingwan rushed onto the stage, held his hand and cried. Her tears fell on Liu Fengchun's face. It was that one tear that became the last anchor point of the cycle."

Zhou Wenyuan sighed.

"You can probably guess what happened next—Liu Fengchun was declared dead suddenly, Su Jingwan was forced to marry three days later, and died of depression a year later. But before she died, she sealed that box of rouge and that tear and left them to her descendants."

Chen Mo looked at the figure frozen in that moment of crying below the stage and felt a pang of sadness. More than seventy years had passed, and two people in love were stuck on stage, unable to finish their last act, and offstage, unable to shed their last tear. Their tragedy was merely used to maintain the formation.

"Now,"

Zhou Wenyuan folded his umbrella, and the rainwater evaporated automatically three inches from his body.

"Put the mirror on there. The cycle needs to be reset, otherwise the people from the Longevity Society will forcibly break it. When that happens, the energy will leak out, and this area within a three-mile radius will become a ghost town."

Chen Mo walked to the edge of the stage. There was a layer of water film in the ripple space, which felt sticky when touched. He stepped onto the stage, and the wooden floor made a creaking sound—he was really stepping on wood from more than seventy years ago.

The dressing mirror was three meters directly in front of him. With each step he took, the bronze mirror in his hand grew hotter. When he was only one step away from the mirror, fine cracks began to appear on the surface of the bronze mirror. Dark red liquid seeped out of the cracks—it was blood, or molten cinnabar.

Liu Fengchun in the mirror had opened her eyes. Both eyes were made up, revealing a complete face in blue, stunningly beautiful, yet also extremely sorrowful.

He looked at Chen Mo and parted his lips slightly:

"...Such a beautiful day, such a lovely scene, yet what a pity..."

The voice didn't come from the mirror; it rang directly in Chen Mo's mind. It was in the style of traditional Chinese opera, but it carried a sobbing tone.

Chen Mo endured his headache and slowly placed the bronze mirror in front of the dressing mirror. When the two mirrors faced each other, the stage was instantly illuminated by a dim yellow light. Oil lamps lit up from the four corners of the stage, the curtains moved without wind, and the sound of a huqin being tested came from backstage, sometimes soft and sometimes intermittent.

On the empty benches below the stage, one blurry figure after another began to appear. Some audience members dressed in Republican-era attire were eating melon seeds, some were fanning themselves, and some were whispering to each other, but all of their faces were blank, without any facial features.

Only Su Jingwan, the woman in the cheongsam in the first row, had a clear face. She looked up at the stage, tears welling up in her eyes, but they lingered in mid-air, condensing into glistening droplets that floated in front of her.

Chen Mo took a step back, wanting to leave the stage, but found that the wooden planks under his feet had changed. The original cement floor had disappeared, replaced by an old but sturdy solid wood platform.

He looked back at the way he came—the stairwell was still there, and Zhou Wenyuan was still standing there, but there was a transparent barrier between them, and he couldn't get out.

Zhou Wenyuan's voice came through the barrier.

"Don't panic, this is a normal phenomenon when the cycle starts. You are currently in the stage space of more than 70 years ago, but your body is still in reality. Calm your mind and wait for the two mirrors to resonate. The cycle will temporarily stabilize, and then you will be able to come out."

"How long will it take?"

Zhou Wenyuan took out an incense stick from his pocket, flicked it with his fingertips, and the incense lit itself without a flame, the blue smoke rising straight up.

"I will stay here for the time it takes for an incense stick to burn."

Chen Mo forced himself to calm down. He stood on the side of the stage, looking at the strange and tragic scene in front of him: the audience below was silent, the stage was empty but the sound of gongs and drums rang out, the makeup mirror and the bronze mirror shone against each other, and Liu Fengchun in the mirror had already begun to swing her water sleeves, making the final preparations before going on stage.