Su Cheng opened her eyes to find herself sitting on a train seat.
The train was traveling at a steady speed. The lights inside the carriage were bright, while outside the window it was pitch black, with sporadic tree shadows flashing by.
The wristband displayed the instance time: 20:00.
[Welcome to the special instance: Train Ghost Story]
[1. Basic Task: Successfully get off at the terminal station. Upon completion, you will receive 1000 points and return to the apartment.] [2. Side Quest: Reenactment of an Old Case, 500 points.] [3. Side Quest: The Redundant One, 800 points.]
As expected of a special instance, it throws three tasks at you right off the bat.
Compared to ordinary dungeons, the reward points for a single task equaled those of two or three ordinary dungeons combined.
The abundance of rewards faintly made her uneasy.
After all, in Su Cheng’s understanding, points were directly tied to task difficulty.
Compared to ordinary dungeons, a special instance was no longer just about basic survival. The two side quests did not have clear methods for completion, requiring Su Cheng to explore the relevant information on her own.
[Ding ~ Smart backpack mode converted.]
Su Cheng steadied her mind and found an extra wallet in her pants pocket. Touching the wallet allowed her to view three storage slots.
After confirming the location of the smart backpack, Su Cheng calmly began observing the situation inside the carriage.
The air conditioning was on, making it very cool. There weren’t many passengers in this carriage, and they were sitting sparsely apart.
The row where Su Cheng sat was occupied only by her, and diagonally up to her left was a girl wearing headphones.
Aside from a child’s crying, there was no other loud noise.
The situation she could observe from her seat was limited, so Su Cheng simply stood up, stepped into the aisle, and walked forward.
In front of the girl with headphones was a couple, and the incessantly crying child was their son.
The couple seemed to be sulking; both shared the exact same red face and neck, stubbornly refusing to look at each other while letting the boy sitting between them cry.
No wonder the girl in the back seat had to wear headphones; the boy was indeed very noisy.
Walking further ahead, on the right sat a mature woman with perm-waved wavy hair, a swaying red skirt, and a purple silk scarf.
She sat with her legs crossed, her short red skirt making her thighs look exceptionally fair. She languidly propped her chin in her hand, her fingers lightly tapping the bag at her waist as she looked out the window.
The woman in the red skirt seemed extremely sensitive to other people’s gazes. She turned her head, locked eyes with Su Cheng, and curved her red lips into a smile.
Wearing heavy, striking makeup, she smiled like a blooming red rose—dazzling and eye-catching.
Caught red-handed, Su Cheng didn’t feel awkward at all. She offered a slight, polite smile before continuing on her way.
Diagonally above the red-haired woman sat a bald, pot-bellied middle-aged man.
Su Cheng caught him occasionally glancing stealthily at the woman in red.
Further ahead were a white-haired old grandmother sleeping and a young man playing on his phone.
At the junction of the carriage, there was an electric water boiler supplying hot water, but a locked door blocked the way forward to the next carriage.
Su Cheng tried pushing it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“What are you doing?”
Su Cheng turned back. The white-haired grandmother had woken up at some point. Her expression was kind and gentle, and she looked like she was just asking out of pure curiosity with no malice.
Su Cheng maintained her composure. “Isn’t this the restroom?”
“Of course this isn’t it, the restroom is back that way.”
Su Cheng put on an expression of sudden realization. “Oh, thank you. Then why can’t this door open?”
The grandmother furrowed her brows in bewilderment. “Is that so? It seemed like it could be opened before…”
Su Cheng continued to ask, “Grandma, how much longer until we reach the final stop?”
“Oh, you child, our next stop is the terminal station. We’ll arrive in about ten minutes.”
“Alright, thank you, Grandma.”
After offering a polite thanks, Su Cheng retraced her steps. She hadn’t walked more than a few paces when she heard the grandmother behind her shaking her head and sighing: “Young people these days, they don’t even know where the train restroom is…”
Arrive in ten minutes?
Impossible.
A special instance would never be this simple.
Passing her seat, Su Cheng continued walking toward the restroom at the rear.
Further back were a snuggling couple, two matrons—one fat and one thin—chatting away, and a gloomy middle-aged man with heavy dark circles under his eyes.
Feeling Su Cheng’s scrutinizing gaze, the middle-aged man raised his head and shot her a cold look. Though he said nothing, his aura was intensely oppressive.
Sitting in the seat closest to the restroom was a young man in a white T-shirt.
He was very tall, huddled in his seat with his arms wrapped around his head and messy hair. He paid no attention to the people walking past or their footsteps.
The air near the restroom was polluted by a foul stench, and Su Cheng couldn’t help but cover her nose.
She glanced at the hunched-over youth. With such a strong odor, couldn’t he smell it?
Including her, there were fifteen people in this carriage. The space was spacious enough that everyone sat sparsely, mostly grouping with people they knew.
Under normal circumstances, when vacant seats were plentiful, most passengers would choose seats far away from the restroom…
So, the question was: why did the young man choose to sit in this exact spot?
Since she had walked all the way to the restroom door, Su Cheng simply pushed the door open to take a look inside. It was unlocked.
The restroom space wasn’t large. It contained only a yellowed squat toilet and an old-fashioned manual-press water tank.
The trash can was more than half full, and there was a large mirror above the sink that reflected a person’s upper body.
Su Cheng took out the Soul-Guiding Needle. All the way here, she had been paying attention to its movements, but the long needle hadn’t spun at all.
Everything was as calm as the eve of a storm.
She frowned slightly, feeling that the foul odor she had smelled near the restroom actually felt a bit different once she entered inside.
There was a foul smell both inside and outside the restroom, but the stench inside leaned closer to accumulated excrement, while the stench outside was mixed with the rotting odor of dead rats.
An ordinary person would only think it smelled bad and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference at all.
It was only because Su Cheng’s five senses had been enhanced after unlocking her genetic lock that she was able to detect the subtle difference.
Covering her nose, Su Cheng suspiciously searched the corners of the restroom, but she couldn’t see the source of the odor. Turning on the faucet yielded normal running water without any strange smell.
“Where is that rotting smell coming from…”
Lowering her head, Su Cheng searched behind the sink pedestal and discovered a string of wooden bead bracelets.
The bracelet was wedged between the pedestal and the wall, covered in thick dust and spiderwebs. If Su Cheng hadn’t looked closely, she easily would have missed it.
After hooking the bracelet out and washing it clean under the tap, she discovered that two of the beads had characters carved into them: Mu Ling.
Mu Ling?
The owner of the bracelet?
The dust accumulated on this bracelet was enough to obscure the characters, and it had clearly been placed there for more than a day or two, meaning it couldn’t have been dropped by any of the current passengers outside.
Su Cheng pocketed the bracelet first, let out a breath, and left the restroom. She simply couldn’t stand the choking stench inside.
Rumble, rumble, rumble—
The train seemed to have entered another section of track, and the echo of its movement grew more hollow, as if it had entered a tunnel.
Bzzzt.
The lights flickered twice and abruptly went out.
Su Cheng paused mid-action on the restroom door handle. What’s going on?
The sudden darkness instantly tensed her nerves. For this to happen in a special instance meant something absolute was about to go down.
Vigilant, Su Cheng turned around, her eyes glowing faintly in the dark like an animal activating its night vision capability.
Staring into the cramped restroom, she drew her enchanted dagger and began to calmly count the seconds.
1… 2… 3… 4…
The Soul-Guiding Needle remained completely motionless.
In the quiet space, only the faint sound of Su Cheng’s slow breathing could be heard.
She stared across the entire washroom, nerves taut, second by second ticking away as nothing defying the laws of nature occurred in the darkness…
Rumble, rumble—
The train emerged from the tunnel.
Bzzzt.
As if someone had flipped a switch, the lights snapped back on.
Su Cheng’s nerves relaxed slightly along with the brightening lights.
The entire time spent going in and out of the tunnel was 30 seconds.
But immediately afterward, a scream pierced the silence: “Ahhhhh! Husband!!”
The outside turned chaotic and noisy.
“Wuwu wah wuwu, Daddy…”
“What’s going on?! So much blood! Someone’s dead!!”
“Where are the train attendants? Why is the door locked?! Where are the attendants, someone’s dead!! Call the police quickly—”
Su Cheng’s heart skipped a beat.
Sure enough, something had happened.
Yet the Soul-Guiding Needle she had kept in her hand the entire time hadn’t moved once.
Was it because the supernatural entity was far enough away from her that the needle couldn’t detect it?
Su Cheng walked quickly out of the restroom.
The passengers inside the carriage had already plunged into panic and chaos. Some passengers stood up in bewilderment to peer over, while others could no longer suppress their curiosity and walked toward the scene of the incident.
Passing by the huddled white-shirted youth, Su Cheng noticed he was still completely motionless. If not for the slight movement of his body from breathing, Su Cheng might have suspected whether he was even alive.
Guided by the cluster of gathered passengers and the crying voices of the woman and boy, Su Cheng guessed that the dead person was the husband of the family of three.
Approaching the surrounding passengers and looking at the “person” on the ground, Su Cheng instantly felt her scalp go numb.
In the aisle lay a headless corpse, and spurting bright red blood gushed along a neat, clean-cut cross-section, soaking through his upper-body work shirt. The blood pooled into a puddle beneath the severed neck…
Blood splattered on the walls, seats, and on the weeping mother and son sitting paralyzed beneath their seats.
Meanwhile, the corpse’s head was wedged under a seat, its face directly facing the crowd, eyes wide open with lingering terror as if it had witnessed something utterly horrifying right before death…
Having left the body not long ago, the dead man’s head still retained some color. Separated from the neck, it rolled under the seat like a rubber ball—exceptionally creepy.
“Ugh…”
A passenger retched in terror, trembling as they backed away.
Su Cheng’s face turned pale, and she looked away. Even after witnessing the bloody “cannibalism” scenes in the zombie instance, she still found this too gruesome to bear.
She had always detested strong bloody odors.
The reason was likely because the blood of one’s own species always transmitted a signal of “danger”…
Who killed him?
The cut on the corpse’s neck didn’t look like something a human could accomplish.
Then it was… a ghost?
Combining it with the instance’s name… it was highly probable.
When was he killed? When the train entered the tunnel and the lights went out?
Then, why kill him?
Was it random or did it have a trigger condition?
Her mind filled with questions, Su Cheng took a step back, walking to a corner to observe the few passengers she had marked.
The wife had lost her wits out of terror over her husband’s horrifying death, clutching her son and trembling all over.
The woman in the red skirt looked calm, showing not a shred of fear as she slightly lowered her gaze, deep in thought.
The middle-aged man’s expression was grim; his heavy dark circles and despondent temperament made his gaze exceptionally gloomy.
Everyone else reacted normally. The headphone girl, the elderly grandmother, the gaming boy, the bald man… without exception, they were terrified or vomiting.
“What happened back then?!”
The middle-aged man glared coldly at the wife. His tone was sharp, almost like an interrogation.
“I, wuwu, I don’t know!!”
Dazed and terrified, the woman recalled the moment, her words in disarray. “When the lights went out, he went to the front to get hot water and hurried back to his seat in a rush. The moment the light came back on, the second I turned around, he, he fell apart…”
“Wah wah wah…”
Following the wife’s words into the memory, the little boy cried heartrendingly, clearly badly frightened and unable to calm down even while tightly hugged by his mother.
“Did any of you see anything at that time?”
The uncle’s gaze swept over the others one by one.
The headphone girl decisively shook her head, swallowing hard. “I, I had my eyes closed at the time. I have a habit of closing my eyes when going through a tunnel.”
The woman in the red skirt shrugged. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
The old grandmother and the young man shook their heads with pale faces.
Su Cheng carefully weighed the wife’s words.
The husband had gone alone to the junction of the carriage to get water, and then when the lights went out, he might have seen something. He met his misfortune while rushing back in a panic to his seat.
Does the ghost kill people when the train goes through a tunnel and the lights go out?
Su Cheng glanced at her watch. The grandmother had told her earlier that it would take ten minutes to reach the station, but thirteen minutes had already passed.
And how come the frames of trees passing by outside the window looked identical to the environment she saw when she first arrived at the instance…
Su Cheng’s fingertips twitched slightly. The train is looping over the same track section!
Did that mean the train was about to re-enter the tunnel…?
This hypothesis made Su Cheng’s hair stand on end. She hurriedly looked at the time on her wristband. If the ghost was going to kill again upon entering the tunnel, how much time was left before entering it?
A passenger shouted in panic, “Where are the train attendants? Why aren’t they coming…”
“It’s already 20:20, why haven’t we arrived at the station yet?”
“What on earth is going on here?”
Anxiety and unease are contagious; the carriage descended into a state of agitation.
“Quiet!”
The middle-aged man barked a command, his staring glare quite effective at intimidating people.
“In 10 minutes, the train will enter the tunnel again. During the 30 seconds inside the tunnel, the ghost will kill again! Everyone had better sit together; stragglers are very easy to target.”
The bald man irritably questioned, “Ghosts? What kind of joke are you playing?!”
“Do you think this kind of death wound on a corpse is something a human could make?”
“This, this…”
Everyone’s gaze fell upon the cut on the corpse’s neck, then averted it with discomfort.
Passengers murmured anxiously in whispers.
A minority doubted, but the majority already believed.
Su Cheng glanced at the unusually composed middle-aged man. How does he know the train’s tunnel entry and stop times so clearly?
You have to remember, Su Cheng hadn’t even thought of calculating the specific time the train reached the tunnel beforehand.
The 30-second duration inside and outside the tunnel was only something she intentionally calculated because she knew this was a special instance and the lights suddenly went out.
Moreover, the middle-aged man also knew there were ghosts on the train.
When observing everyone, Su Cheng had paid extra attention to their wrists, confirming she was the only player on the entire train.
The uncle was not a player. Not only did he know the train’s details, but he also knew there were ghosts inside—there had to be more to this story.
Who is he? What is his connection to the train?
Su Cheng had a premonition that the middle-aged man was deeply intertwined with her side quest…