“Why should we believe you? How do you know so much?”
Twirling a strand of her falling curls around her index finger, the woman in the red skirt asked casually, voicing the very question Su Cheng also wanted to ask.
With a dark expression, the middle-aged man offered no explanation, saying harshly, “Believe it or not, it’s up to you.”
With that, he scanned every passenger present and asked with a chilling air, “Do you even remember why you appeared on this train? Is there really a train conductor?”
His words stirred a thousand ripples.
Except for Su Cheng, the expressions of the passengers changed over and over again.
“I—I was just heading home…”
“There hasn’t been a train conductor this whole time. Why didn’t I notice that at all?!”
“Why do I have zero impression of it… What on earth is going on?!”
“Y-You said earlier that ghosts kill people too…”
Only the wife, clutching her son, did not participate in the conversation. With a dazed expression, she muttered vague words, immersed in her own world and completely indifferent to everything else…
Su Cheng took in everyone’s expressions, though she still couldn’t read the woman in the red skirt.
Sitting with her legs crossed and rocking languidly, the woman remained completely calm and at ease, regardless of the corpse or the ghosts.
Su Cheng paid special attention to her demeanor and didn’t miss the flash of interest that flickered deep within her eyes when she looked at the middle-aged man…
Suddenly, the woman turned her head and stared straight at Su Cheng. Raising her eyes with a half-smile, her lips moved as she mouthed a sentence: “Am I pretty?”
Caught red-handed once again, Su Cheng remained thick-skinned, offered a polite smile, and then looked away.
Failing to get a response, the woman in the red skirt let out a soft “tch” and locked her target back onto the middle-aged man. “Since you know so much, you must know how to get off this train, right?”
All the passengers turned to look at the middle-aged man with collective anticipation.
“I don’t know.”
The woman in the red skirt covered her mouth and chuckled softly. “Really? How come I feel like you’re purposely withholding it from everyone else? When everyone else knows nothing, you know this much… I have reason to suspect you’re in cahoots with the ghost.”
Amid the hesitant suspicion of the other passengers, she added, “Is there any possibility you’re part of a gang, trying to win everyone’s trust and then working hand in glove with the ghost from the inside out…”
The bald man stared unblinkingly at the woman in the red skirt, infatuatedly chiming in, “I think that’s totally possible too!”
He inched two steps closer to her, vowing with affectionate devotion in his bean-sized eyes, “Don’t be afraid, I’ll protect you.”
The woman in the red skirt dropped the corners of her mouth, her smile turning somewhat eerie. “Is that so?”
The headphone girl shook her head. “I don’t believe it. If the uncle is a bad person, why would he tell us to stick together and not straggle?”
The bald man sneered, “Then tell me, why would he know so much? He’s definitely colluding with the ghost!”
As he finished speaking, the bald man cast a wink toward the woman in the red skirt as if fishing for praise, only to notice she was glaring at the uncle, letting out a low scoff from her nose and showing open hostility toward him.
In the end, about half of the passengers chose to believe the uncle. They changed seats to sit around him near the rear section of the train.
The woman in the red skirt and the bald man sat in the two middle seats.
Su Cheng, the old grandmother, and the couple sat slightly ahead, at a distance neither too close nor too far from the others.
Only the youth near the restroom remained completely alone.
“Should we go call him over?”
The headphone girl looked left and right, noticing that everyone else was selectively ignoring her words.
Hesitating for a moment, she intended to go call out to the youth anyway, but an older matron grabbed her hand.
With darting, evasive eyes, the matron leaned close to her ear and lowered her voice, “Don’t go! With him sitting alone over there, we have an extra layer of safety! Besides, it’s almost time to enter the tunnel!”
“How can you be like this!”
The headphone girl widened her eyes in disbelief, but as the matron pulled her down to sit, she was filled with indignation while simultaneously mindful of the ticking time. In the end, she didn’t get up again…
With the Soul-Guiding Needle gripped in her left hand and her right hand thrust inside her trench coat grasping her dagger, Su Cheng quietly waited for the train to enter the upcoming tunnel…
Rumble, rumble—
Bzzzt.
The lights flickered for two seconds and went out amidst the short gasps of the passengers.
The carriage plunged into darkness.
No one screamed; there were only heavy breaths muffled by fear and whimpers emitted through tightly covered mouths.
The old grandmother beside Su Cheng repeatedly muttered prayers to her ancestors, while the couple hugged each other tightly.
Su Cheng silently counted down the seconds in her mind.
28, 27, 26, 25…
“Click, click—”
The Soul-Guiding Needle, which had remained completely motionless until now, spun wildly and emitted a sound.
Drawing her dagger, Su Cheng felt her heart suddenly accelerate, a wave of tension making her mouth somewhat dry.
In the darkness, Su Cheng vaguely saw that after a flurry of swinging, the needle pointed toward the rear.
The group consisting of the white-shirted youth and the middle-aged man sat in the rows behind her…
Did the ghost choose them?
“Click, click—”
The Soul-Guiding Needle suddenly began spinning again, shifted its angle, and stopped pointing toward the bottom right.
The woman in the red skirt and the bald man sat in the seats down to her right.
Su Cheng faintly heard a commotion—a dull thud, like a heavy object collapsing.
Rumble, rumble—
Bzzzt.
The lights came back on.
Everyone collectively let out a sigh of relief.
Someone asked in a small voice, “D-Did someone die?”
Retrieving her dagger, Su Cheng stood up and looked toward the seat of the woman in the red skirt. The woman’s expression lacked its previous nonchalance; her delicate locks of hair were somewhat disheveled, and her face was pale.
And right at her feet was the bald man, sliced in half at the waist.
It was still a clean, neat cut.
The bald man’s expression was identical to the husband’s—eyes wide open, except his mouth was wide open as well, as if he had been slain the split second before he could utter a sound…
Blood pooled beneath the woman’s feet, matching the color of her high heels.
With a look of disgust, the woman glanced at the bald man, composed her expression, and stepped disdainfully over the corpse to walk to the other side, leaving red footprints behind where her high heels fell.
The woman said calmly, “Someone is dead, right here.”
The remaining passengers came over to take a look, and upon confirming that someone else had died, their terror turned into deeper panic, fearing they might be the next unlucky victim.
They completely believed the uncle’s words now.
“There’s a ghost! It really is a ghost! Th-This can’t possibly be something a human could do!”
“What do we do?! I don’t want to die yet, wuwu…”
Someone even began pounding on the train windows. “I want to go home! I want to get off this train!”
“Why is the ghost killing people?! Every debt has its debtor, don’t kill me!!”
Ignoring the commotion there, Su Cheng tiptoed around the corpse, bypassed the crowd, and walked toward the rear.
This time, the youth wasn’t huddled up; he was quietly gazing out the window, a melancholic gloom in his eyes, separating himself from the chaos as if in an entirely different space.
Su Cheng walked right up to him before he slowly turned his head. “Something the matter?”
Su Cheng pointed toward the front. “Someone died. Did you know?”
“Oh. And?”
Would an ordinary person face death with such indifference…?
Su Cheng: “Nothing, I just wanted to tell you that it’s best to stay with the crowd. Stragglers are very easy to be targeted.”
The youth remained silent.
Staring at him, Su Cheng continued, “Aren’t you curious about what’s targeting us? …It’s a female ghost, you know.”
Su Cheng hadn’t actually seen what the ghost looked like; saying “female ghost” was naturally something she fabricated to bluff him.
And that bluff actually managed to elicit a reaction: emotional fluctuations stirred within the youth’s calm, wave-less eyes—not fear, but a complex, indescribable pain.
This was certainly not a normal person’s reaction.
Striking while the iron was hot, Su Cheng continued, “Besides, don’t you think it smells awful around your seat…”
“Enough!”
The youth interrupted her in a cold voice. His gaze turned abruptly sharp, his muscles tensed all over, and his fists clenched as if exercising extreme restraint. “If there’s nothing else, get away from me!”
It was an unceremonious tone, bordering on a warning.
The perpetually aloof and melancholy person had suddenly put on a completely different face, turning sharp and thorny as if someone had touched his reverse scale.
Su Cheng raised an eyebrow, put on an expression of having her kindness treated like a donkey’s liver, and turned away.
Her original intention in seeking out the youth was to find out why the ghost didn’t attack him first—since he was clearly an easier target—and instead chose the bald man.
Though she still didn’t have the answer, it wasn’t a completely fruitless trip.
Could the killing ghost on the train be a female ghost?
Did the youth bring the female ghost onto the train? If that were truly the case, it would explain why the female ghost didn’t attack him.
Based on the youth’s abnormal behavior, Su Cheng could confirm that he was also a key figure in the side quest.
The main quest was to reach the destination, but to reach the destination, one had to break the train’s repetitive loop.
To break the loop, one inevitably had to get involved with the side quests.
Su Cheng couldn’t help muttering inwardly, “Although they’re called side quests, they’re just like the main quest—they have to be completed…”
The middle-aged man, the woman in the red skirt, and the youth.
All of them were high-priority targets.
When Su Cheng returned to the perimeter of the crowd, the middle-aged man was already closing his eyes to rest in his seat.
To her surprise, however, the woman in the red skirt had taken out a pile of talisman papers, nails, hammers, and other items from her bag, and was explaining to the rest of the passengers what had happened when the bald man died.
“Actually, the ghost initially targeted me, but because I had these items on me, it shifted its target.”
“The Taoist priest who gave me these items said that as long as you paste the talisman papers in every corner and drive soul-suppressing nails into special locations, no matter what kind of ghost is on the train, its soul will be scattered to the winds!”
Su Cheng’s eyelids twitched as she spoke up to ask, “What does the ghost look like? Is it male or female?”
The woman spread her hands. “It’s in the form of a ball of blood mist; you can’t tell its gender at all.”
This was an answer Su Cheng hadn’t anticipated. She had assumed the other party would claim it was a female ghost.
The old grandmother glanced at the talisman papers the woman in red had produced, half-doubting. “Does this really work?”
“Of course. These are good items. If I didn’t want to get off the train sooner, I wouldn’t even be willing to take them out.”
The two matrons—one fat and one thin—were the first to lose their composure. “Lassie, why didn’t you take these out sooner! Everyone, help her paste the talismans and drive the nails! Let’s get it done before we enter the next tunnel!”
The woman in the red skirt smiled. “Then I’ll have to trouble everyone…”
“Stop!”
The middle-aged man suddenly stood up and shouted a forceful intervention. Staring darkly at the woman in red, his eyes held unmasked scrutiny and probe.
Showing not a shred of fear, the woman in the red skirt deepened her smile. “Look everyone, my guess earlier was spot on, wasn’t it? He really is colluding with the ghost!”
The passengers who had previously trusted the uncle were now filled with shock, utterly unable to understand why he would stop them.
Regardless of whether the talismans worked or not, the uncle shouldn’t have tried to stop it!
One of the matrons questioned, “Why won’t you let us help the lassie paste the talismans?”
Several passengers united on the same front. “You’d better give a reasonable explanation. If you really are a traitor to humanity like she says, everyone won’t let you off!”
The middle-aged man’s expression grew even gloomier, yet he couldn’t utter a word. In this confrontational situation, his silence felt like a tacit admission after being exposed.
Even Su Cheng couldn’t understand why the uncle was trying so hard to stop them.
There was only one possible reason for his obstruction: he didn’t want the ghost’s soul to be scattered.
But why?
What connection does he have with the ghost…?