Not the Best Start Chapter 1

"Tomorrow at 3:15 pm, you turn from Third Avenue to Fifth Street. A freight truck will hit the side guardrail, three meters away from you. Your shoulder will be broken by an untied piano, but you will not die on the spot." Ethan Shen wrote down his words word by word on a piece of paper with an expressionless face, and handed it to the man across the iron fence, "But I'm not sure if you will die in the hospital."

The man looked at the note in his hand with a complicated and doubtful expression, then glanced at Ethan Shen.

"If I... don't go at that point---"

"That's the second-order prediction, Mr. Connor. It will happen no matter what. You'd better protect your shoulders within this month." Ethan Shen's eyes, which had been wide open, suddenly closed. He shook his head vigorously. When he opened his eyes again, he put on a pair of glasses to cover up the bloodshot in his whites of his eyes.

The man seemed to want to say something else, but Ethan Shen had already stood up: "I have to go. Mr. Connor. I will text you the price this time and transfer the money to my account within 15 working days."

When Ethan Shen left the room through the back door, he squinted his eyes because of the glaring sunlight outside. His head was still a little dizzy, but he quickened his pace and got into a small car nearby. The air conditioner was on in the car, and a young man asked him: "How are you?"

"I haven't done this for a long time. I'm a little uncomfortable." Ethan Shen gently pressed his eyeballs and took off his glasses.

"...If you are short of money, you can really ask me to borrow it." Blake Pang handed him a bottle of mineral water. Ethan Shen took it, opened the lid and took a few sips.

"It's okay. I'm not used to owing money."

Blake Pang started the car, looked at him a few more times, and said, "Actually, I don't quite understand why someone would spend money to buy their own bad luck. If you see good luck, I think you will probably become rich overnight."

"I also hope that what I see is good luck." Ethan Shen's face turned pale, and he took another sip of water. "There are always some people. It doesn't matter who good things happen to. Once bad things happen, it may be a tragedy for a person."

Blake Pang said as he drove: "Won't they think you are a jinx... the kind that is very effective?"

"That's why I quit for so many years." Ethan Shen didn't want to talk about this issue. He fastened his seat belt and put the water bottle on his legs. Blake Pang looked at him and said, "Do you want to take a break?"

"I want to. But not right now. I have to get back to the house."

"I'll help you pack... When can you settle down?" Blake Pang said, "Moving every year is tiring for you, but not for me."

Ethan Shen was silent for a while, and then he said: "When you leave me, I will probably find a place to settle down."

Blake Pang also fell silent. He sighed and whispered, "I also prefer to be your friend, not a spy."

Neither Ethan Shen nor Blake Pang spoke. Before the black car drove to the suburbs, Ethan Shen received a call asking him to translate a document. The information had been sent to his mailbox.

"The client is in a hurry, can it be done tomorrow night?"

"No problem." Ethan Shen rubbed his Jingming acupoint and replied.

Blake Pang whispered, "You can't do that. You still have to clean up the house."

Ethan Shen hung up the phone and said, "I'm short of money. I can pack up the things the day after tomorrow."

Blake Pang had no choice but to surrender.

After Ethan Shen returned to his new home, he didn't have time to sort everything out. He took out his computer first. The internet was not working yet, so he had to leave the house and go to a coffee shop near the city to use the internet. Blake Pang sent him home and then came back. He sighed with a headache when he saw the mess in the house.

Ethan Shen bought a second-hand house this time. One hundred square meters is more than enough for a single man, but not enough for Ethan Shen and Blake Pang. Ethan Shen's current job is translation, which requires a lot of information, and he also has several thick diaries and record books. Blake Pang lives with him.

Blake Pang knew that Ethan Shen kept a diary every day, and his notebook was used to record the "customers" he had met.

Ethan Shen is very special. He can see big things that are about to happen to a person, but only bad things, not good things. He used to get into a lot of trouble because of this. When Blake Pang found him, he was in prison and was almost treated as a murderer. In the seven years that Blake Pang followed him, he looked through many of his old cases, and also learned from Ethan Shen that his "omens" had never been wrong.

Three years before Ethan Shen was released from prison, he recorded all the "clients" he had met before. He had eleven notebooks, and every time Blake Pang helped him move, he had a chance to take a look at those notebooks. They were packed in a large box with a lock on it.

Blake Pang stood in the middle of the room, holding Ethan Shen's keychain in his hand, on which was the key to unlock the box.

In the past year, Ethan Shen hardly took any clients. But Blake Pang knew how Ethan Shen would remember those people.

Photos, names, occupations, dates of birth. Things done and words said before the consultation. Ethan Shen could remember their conversations word for word, as if he was not a "person" during that period of time.

Blake Pang opened the box and took out a notebook.

"March 9, 2007. Lydia Wang, journalist, born on May 12, 1982.

'... Well, nothing special, I just felt really bad these past two days. My mom was in the hospital and I haven't slept well for three days. I just wanted to come and see you... Actually, I'm pretty scared...'

"A week ago? I've forgotten. Oh, by the way, on Wednesday I reported a suicide case and my boss gave me a bonus..."

'My colleague sent me here. My boyfriend is on a business trip... He cares about me very much...'

...

At 15:00 on March 20, 2007, I walked into a bookstore on my way to the hospital. I did not take the overpass leading to the hospital, but walked into the elevator. I walked out of the elevator and onto the rooftop, squeezed through the gap in the railing, and broke my nose. Then I fell from the rooftop and died on the spot.

No matter how many times Peng Hui watched it, he would be frightened by the first-person perspective. In all of Ethan Shen's records, his predictions were in the first person, as if he was the one who suffered the misfortune. Immediately after that, there was a news report of the day.

It was a newspaper clipping, with a very large photo covering the page: a dead woman, a large pool of blood, and an ambulance.

"Yesterday at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, there was a sound of heavy objects falling to the ground from the north side of Xinhua Bookstore. A 25-year-old young woman fell to her death..."

If Ethan Shen's prediction was based on a speculative analysis of the actual situation, he should not be able to pinpoint the time so clearly. Lydia Wang did have a tendency to commit suicide by jumping off a building, but for Ethan Shen, the most he could know was that her mental state was not stable.

Ethan Shen was accused of using hypnosis to control the victim to die at a certain time. But as far as Blake Pang knows, there are still some people who died at a time that was not consistent with his prediction. Among the people he predicted not to die, many were spared from serious harm because of his prediction. But none of them stood up when Ethan Shen was tried.

If it weren't for Blake Pang, Ethan Shen would have spent his whole life in prison.

Ethan Shen hadn't returned to the house by midnight. Blake Pang drove to pick him up from the cafe and forced him to sleep, but when he woke up in the middle of the night, he still saw the light of a flashlight in his room. The house had no electricity yet, and Blake Pang estimated that it was a difficult document to handle.

When Blake Pang got up the next day, Ethan Shen was still looking at it, his eyes red. Blake Pang asked, "How many more are there?"

Ethan Shen glanced at him, seeming to want to say something but stopping himself.

"If you are tired, just tell me. I can help you even if you don't want money."

"You don't know Latin."

"I can find someone who understands."

Ethan Shen did not object. Blake Pang knew that he had agreed, so he picked up the phone and dialed a number. While talking, he kept observing Ethan Shen. Ethan Shen sat at the table and continued to read the documents, rubbing his stiff left shoulder from time to time. Blake Pang put his hand on it, and Ethan Shen seemed to be startled. Blake Pang hung up the phone and said, "Don't sit in the same position all the time. Be careful of frozen shoulder."

Ethan Shen moved his shoulders and rubbed them.

Blake Pang looked at him for a while and gently pressed the buttons for him a few times.

"You have good cooking skills."

"When I was in the army, any teammate who had a bruise or injury would ask me for massage."

Ethan Shen paused and said nothing more.

Blake Pang was a member of the army, and he had known this for a long time. He had known this since the day he was under surveillance. According to Blake Pang, they would find several people like Ethan Shen every year. If they were harmful to society, they would be brought to justice immediately, and if they were harmless, they would be monitored. Ethan Shen belonged to the latter. Originally, he should have been the former, but Blake Pang saved his life, and the soldier also changed from secretly monitoring and tracking to openly guarding.

During these seven years, they went from being enemies who were wary of each other to being friends.

Blake Pang's friend who can translate was nearby and arrived half an hour later. When the doorbell rang, Blake Pang was making lunch and Ethan Shen got up to open the door.

The man outside the door was about 1.8 meters tall, very thin but strong, a little thinner than Blake Pang. His eyes were as sharp as the Blake Pang that Ethan Shen had seen for the first time.

Blake Pang poked his head out of the kitchen and said, "Fei, you're here."

The sharpness in the man's eyes faded a little. He gave Blake Pang a surprised smile and said, "Brother Hui, you have learned how to cook!"

Blake Pang said, "Bah, what can't you do, Brother Hui? Come in quickly. Hey, change your shoes! I just mopped the floor yesterday."

Ethan Shen gave him a pair of slippers, and Mason Yang walked in and looked at him twice. Ethan Shen said, "My name is Ethan Shen."

"Mason Yang."

The two nodded to each other and Mason Yang immediately walked into the kitchen. "I heard you say you want to translate a Latin article?"

"Yes, back then you had the highest diploma, but I thought it was useless. I never thought that you would be able to achieve this with your little literary skills."

Mason Yang glanced outside and saw Ethan Shen had already walked into the room, so he lowered his voice and said, "Is this the person you were tasked with?"

Blake Pang paused and said, "Yes."

"You also help him translate and cook?"

"We are friends." Blake Pang said, "This guy is a little special. He is not the kind of freak who harms people. I have been with him for seven years, and I have only seen people persecute him, but I have never seen him harm anyone."

Mason Yang was silent for a while, then said, "Then you still want to follow him?"

"My boss won't let me withdraw. My presence here is also a pressure on him. He has to move every year. If he doesn't move, he won't feel at ease."

"...mental illness?"

"Kind of. I've recently started to think that his abilities might be a form of mental illness."

"How to say?"

Blake Pang glanced outside the door, closed the kitchen door a little, and said, "He studied forensic medicine in college a few years ago. During his internship, he worked with the police on many cases and scored very high in criminal psychology assessment. Let's put it this way, after talking to some people, he can know for sure who the real suspect is."

"Many great psychologists..."

"Yes," Blake Pang interrupted him, "but he can also guess the next victim." Mason Yang was a little speechless.

"He has a very strong ability to speculate and can quickly think about things from the other person's perspective. He is very sensitive to people's negative emotions... I think it is this sensitivity that makes him like this."

"I heard he was a tough guy, but I didn't know how far he could go," Mason Yang said.

Blake Pang glanced at the door again: "His greatest strength is not this, his predictions can be accurate to the minute. When he was with the police force, he never made a mistake. Later, when he became a 'fortune teller' and told his clients his predictions, he was not so accurate anymore."

"You mean that after his 'clients' knew about it, they didn't follow his 'predictions'?" Mason Yang frowned.

"I think it's because they change their minds after learning of their fate. But... almost none of them have managed to avoid it."

Mason Yang smacked his lips. "If you hadn't told me he was just a forecaster, I would have thought he was a murderer."

Just as Blake Pang was about to say something, he heard Ethan Shen's voice at the door: "If you have discussed whether I am a murderer or not, please come and help me translate it. I need to hand it over to the client at 10 o'clock tonight."

Mason Yang and Blake Pang both stood still.

Mason Yang and Ethan Shen translated the document together. They worked so hard that it took them days and nights to finish translating. At 10 o'clock, Ethan Shen had corrected the last typo and sent the email. Mason Yang and Ethan Shen collapsed on the dusty sofa together.

Blake Pang held up the spatula and said, "Lunch has become a midnight snack."

Mason Yang sat opposite Ethan Shen and watched him eat. Ethan Shen ate very slowly, almost picking rice grains. Mason Yang lifted his desk and said, "Can you really see people's bad luck?"

Ethan Shen seemed to be awakened. He glanced at Mason Yang and said, "You want to know? The minimum price is 150,000."

Mason Yang's eyes widened: "This is robbery."

"This is the reserve price." Ethan Shen looked at him coldly, "If you die, you have to pay me more than half a million."

"Why should I pay you when I die?"

"Because you asked me to see it."

"What does over 500,000 mean?"

"Different ways of dying, different prices." Ethan Shen said coldly. He moved his shoulders, and Blake Pang, who was sitting on his left, pinched him twice. Mason Yang found their natural movements a little strange, but he couldn't say anything, so he had to continue asking: "Why are the prices different for different ways of dying?"

Ethan Shen rolled his eyes at him and said nothing. So Blake Pang had to speak for him: "When Liang shows himself to others, his body will also suffer side effects."

Mason Yang subconsciously glanced at Ethan Shen's left shoulder.

"It will be fine in two or three days." Ethan Shen continued to chew rice. Mason Yang drank a mouthful of soup and couldn't help but ask, "You can earn so much at once, why are you still working as a translator?"

"Not everyone can pay on time." Ethan Shen said something that made Mason Yang feel cold.

"Aliang's medical expenses are very high now. All previous debts have to be repaid now," Blake Pang said. "In recent years, the number of people he sees each year does not exceed five fingers. He also has to buy a house every year."

Mason Yang was speechless, and only answered his previous doubts in his heart. Ethan Shen had been taken care of by Blake Pang for the past few years. Even the housework was taken care of by Blake Pang. He had no worries about being retaliated. Logically, he should have lived a very comfortable life, but Ethan Shen looked very thin, as if he was seriously ill. His hair was neither long nor short, and he looked a bit sloppy and sick.

"I want a normal job." said Ethan Shen.

"Your current job is too energy-consuming." Blake Pang reminded him.

"I can only do line work." Shen rolled his eyes at him. He had to move constantly. No stable job allowed employees to move to other places at will. This job gave him more freedom.

Mason Yang stood up and said, "I'm done eating. Have you finished cleaning the room?"

Blake Pang said, "I have cleared two rooms while you guys are translating. Let's squeeze in tonight."

"Brother, I haven't shared a bed with you for a long time." Mason Yang seemed a little happy, which made Blake Pang stunned for a moment. Blake Pang glanced at Ethan Shen and said, "Be careful or I'll kick you off the bed tonight."