"I’m done filling it out."
The interface switched back to the ride-sharing app. There were still 7 people in the queue ahead of him.
The girl looked satisfied, her head bowed as she stared at her phone screen, her finger rapidly swiping down to refresh something.
Suddenly, her finger froze.
"Nine... nineteen years old?"
She jerked her head up, her eyes even wider than before, staring in disbelief at the tall, slender young man in front of her:
"You’re only nineteen? A sophomore... or a junior?"
"Sophomore. Is there a problem?"
The girl’s expression changed in an instant, becoming utterly priceless.
It was a complex look, a mixture of shock, embarrassment, guilt, and an ’Oh crap, I’ve really screwed up’ realization.
Nineteen years old.
Not even the legal age for marriage.
And he was still a student, living in an ivory tower.
This definitely couldn’t be the thirty-five-year-old, overseas-educated Ph.D. that her mom had set her older sister up with for a blind date!
She’d gotten it wrong.
So, so wrong.
"No... no problem!"
She gave an awkward tug at the corner of her mouth and subtly shuffled half a step back:
"Um... that thing, this trigram... no, this card reading shows..."
She stammered for a while, unable to keep up the charade, and could only force herself to spout some nonsense, her voice laced with guilt:
"The cards show that you are indeed young and promising! A boundless future awaits! Ha, haha."
Just then, a white sedan pulled up outside the lobby’s Rotating Door and honked once.
"My ride is here."
Yu Xian didn’t pay any mind to her change in attitude. Not wanting to keep the driver waiting, he hurried out into the downpour.
"Hey... handsome, my bad! Sorry for wasting your time. As an apology, I’ll give you a free trigram reading! If fate brings us together again... Hey, take care!"
The moment the car door shut, the strange girl and the lobby’s Rotating Door were sealed away behind him.
Wen Xiao stood rooted to the spot, watching the car disappear into the gray, misty rain. She let out a long sigh of relief.
She opened her WeChat conversation with Wen Yu, her two fingers jabbing angrily at the screen:
"Wen Yu!!!!! You’d better explain yourself! Where the hell were you for your blind date today!!!!!"
...
The rain outside the car window grew denser, and the air inside smelled of leather seats.
Seeing Yu Xian’s pale face in the rearview mirror, the driver cracked open a window to let in some air.
A damp, cold, earthy-smelling wind rushed in, clearing Yu Xian’s head a little.
Wen Yu’s earlier words were still echoing in his mind.
From her perspective, it was a case of collective hysteria among a group of poor souls who couldn’t accept the departure of their loved ones.
But something still felt off. The unsettling feeling hadn’t gone away.
’Where did the problem lie?’
Capgras delusion. This was clearly an extremely rare condition.
The victims’ family members developing this syndrome was like seeing a person fall down on the street. It might just be because they were careless.
But if you saw ten strangers all fall in the exact same spot, in the exact same way, at the same intersection...
...you would never think they were all just "careless."
’Is there an invisible tripwire stretched across it?’
The probability of "collective hysteria" on this scale was, one could imagine, incredibly low.
There was clearly something about this that didn’t add up.
’So, let’s try another line of thought. What if these people aren’t suffering from "hysteria"?’
’If a person couldn’t accept a loved one’s bizarre suicide and subconsciously wanted to deny that reality, how would they react?’
Death is an objective fact; one obviously can’t deny death itself.
So the most natural reaction should be, "He couldn’t have committed suicide, it was murder," or "My child must have been possessed to kill themselves."
This kind of denial is usually aimed at the *cause* of death—the suicide itself.
But the families’ reactions were that their loved ones had been "replaced."
This was a highly illogical conclusion, as it denied the "identity of the deceased."
If it were an isolated case, it could be called a coincidence. But it wasn’t.
’So on what basis did these family members determine that the victims had been "replaced"?’
Based on Wen Yu’s assessment that there was "no objective evidence," it certainly wasn’t their appearance, voice, or memories.
It must be something more fundamental.
Human intuition can be frighteningly sharp sometimes. He remembered reading about a "twin-partner experiment"; even with twins who were almost identical, their partners or family could instantly tell the older brother from the younger.
’Perhaps what those family members felt was an ineffable ’sense of unfamiliarity’?’
An impostor.
For some reason, that word flashed through his mind.
A cool spray of rain hit his face, making Yu Xian shiver.