“What kind of effect does that talisman of yours actually have? Are you going to confess honestly yourself, or should I come over and force you to confess?”
Xun Fang’s expression distorted for a fraction of a second before she forced a smile. “What are you talking about? The talisman is just for repelling ghosts…”
Hiding behind several passengers, she incited them, “Is she possessed by a ghost?! Everyone jump her together and tie her up!”
Hesitant and wary of the chainsaw in Su Cheng’s hands, none of the passengers dared to step forward.
Su Cheng let out a cold laugh. “Your talisman is a ghost-summoning talisman, isn’t it? The reason three people died last time was because they accepted your talisman.”
Wasn’t Xun Fang giving these soul-summoning talismans to the other passengers precisely to divert the ghost’s attention onto them, thereby keeping herself in a safe position?
“Just now, when you locked me in the restroom, you secretly stuck the talisman onto my back.”
Su Cheng tossed the crumpled ball of talisman paper onto the floor.
“You conspired with him to lock me in the restroom to isolate me and leave me helpless, and then you stuck a ghost-summoning talisman on my back. Heh, what a brilliant scheme!”
“It’s just that you must be very disappointed that I came out alive.”
Su Cheng’s well-reasoned and evidence-backed accusations caused the passengers to exchange glances and take a few small steps away from Xun Fang.
These passengers were utterly spineless to begin with. Though they appeared to be huddling together, their mutual trust was actually fragile. The moment they spotted a flaw, they would follow the crowd.
“It wasn’t me! Don’t frame me!”
Acting like a victim of a false accusation, aggrieved and innocent, Xun Fang pointed at Chen Renping. “I gave that talisman to him, and he was the one who pasted it on your back! What does that have to do with me?”
Su Cheng was almost so angry she had to laugh. Even at a time like this, she was still framing and passing the blame!
Wielding her chainsaw, Su Cheng approached. “Everyone else step aside. If you get accidentally injured, don’t blame me.“
The passengers scrambled to hide behind their seats, leaving only Xun Fang stranded in the aisle.
Xun Fang backed away step by step until her back hit the door at the carriage junction. “What do you want?“
“I don’t want anything.“
“I can tell you more information about this train!“
Su Cheng paused her steps. “Tell me. If the information you provide satisfies me enough, I can consider going a little easier on you.”
Seeing that Su Cheng stopped approaching, Xun Fang breathed a slight sigh of relief. “Actually, the killer from three years ago was never brought to justice; his family used a scapegoat to swap him out.”
Pointing at He Lie, who was huddled and clutching his leg, Xun Fang said, “He is the killer from back then.”
The passengers erupted in a din of shock, turning their heads in unison to look at He Lie.
He Lie’s expression darkened. “What nonsense are you spouting?”
“Tch.”
It would be a crime for someone like Xun Fang not to be an actress.
Seeing that Su Cheng didn’t even bat an eye, Xun Fang said anxiously, “You better not disbelieve me. The corpse in his suitcase is the proof. Only someone unhinged like him is capable of dismembering a body!”
“I know you might not believe me because of what the guy surnamed Chen probably told you. But why do you trust him so much?”
“Your understanding of the train’s old case is built entirely on the words of a single person. But what if that person deliberately deceived you, or isn’t even clear about the facts himself?”
Xun Fang’s expression didn’t look fake. Her somewhat jumbled sentence structure and every detailed gesture were brimming with the anxiety of seeking trust and the panic of being misunderstood.
Su Cheng looked over at Chen Renping among the passengers. The man was staring fixedly at Xun Fang, deep in thought, as if pondering something…
Someone was lying.
Calming down, Su Cheng asked, “How do you know so much?”
Seeing her waver, Xun Fang relaxed slightly and explained, “My sister was one of the victims, which is why I’ve been investigating in secret all these years.”
With that, she looked earnestly at Su Cheng. “You’d better believe me. Of these two men, one is deceiving you and the other is the killer. Men are no good!”
“That talisman wasn’t mine; my talismans really are all ghost-repelling talismans.”
Xun Fang offered an explanation for every single suspicious point Su Cheng raised.
And these explanations sounded entirely reasonable.
However… the logic still didn’t add up.
If everything really was as Xun Fang claimed and she was innocent, then why did Xun Fang shove her in the restroom? Why did she look so startled and panicked upon seeing the chainsaw in Su Cheng’s hands? Why did she incite the other passengers to subdue her?
Every single incident could perhaps be explained away somehow.
Yet an overabundance of explanations was merely disguise, and lies fabricated in a panic could not stand up to scrutiny.
Xun Fang was a master of psychology; her acting had caused Su Cheng to doubt and waver.
Someone with insufficient conviction might genuinely fall into hesitation.
Whether she overthrew her previous answer to choose belief in Xun Fang or adopted a compromise to rebuild her answer—
No matter the outcome, Xun Fang’s objective would have been achieved.
Yet, unfortunately, Su Cheng was someone firm in her own intuition and judgment.
She didn’t believe a single word Xun Fang had just uttered!
Lifting her chainsaw once again, Su Cheng marched toward Xun Fang. “Sorry, but I think it’s better to tie you up first and run my own experiments to prove the truth.”
“You’ll regret this!”
With a darkened expression and an angry curse, Xun Fang actually managed to open the door behind her and slipped right through!
She had the key to the door!
Using counterarguments to disarm Su Cheng’s hostility was merely her preliminary tactic; behind that door lay the exit route she had reserved…
Keeping his eyes locked on Xun Fang, Chen Renping followed closely behind her the second she stepped inside.
Watching the door as it prepared to close, Su Cheng sprinted forward and squeezed through just in time.
Click.
Following Su Cheng’s entry, the door gently clicked shut.
Crossing the threshold revealed an entirely different world.
Behind the door was still the exact same train carriage, but it was rendered solely in three shades: gray, black, and white—resembling an old-fashioned vintage television, with the entire scene cast in gloomy, dark tones.
Protruding from the walls were clusters of raised, root-like veins, varying in thickness, crisscrossing and spreading across the entire carriage.
If there were fluids flowing through those protrusions, they would look even more like blood vessels inside a human body.
This bizarre association flashed fleetingly through Su Cheng’s mind.
In the gloomy carriage, she was the sole flash of vibrant color—like an eye-catching, abrupt intruder.
Subconsciously holding her breath, Su Cheng knew this place was blatantly abnormal.
Putting away her chainsaw, Su Cheng drew her dagger. In a place tinged with such eerie colors, wielding a dagger capable of affecting supernatural entities was much more appropriate.
Starting from the rear of the carriage, Su Cheng walked step by step toward the front, passing rows of empty seats.
Tap, tap, tap…
In the silent carriage, only the sound of Su Cheng’s footsteps echoed.
Even though she walked very lightly, there was still a sound…
The floor beneath her feet rose and fell in a rhythmic, slight undulation—even and prolonged, exactly like a sleeping person breathing.
She felt as though she were walking inside the body of the carriage…
Yet how could a carriage possess life?
Steading her mind, Su Cheng cast away those bizarre thoughts.
Where had Xun Fang and Chen Renping gone?
Tap, tap…
Following the sound, Su Cheng turned her head and found herself staring straight at an eye that had burst out from the root systems on the wall—a black pupil and a gray sclera.
It blinked and blinked, calmly gazing at Su Cheng.
…
!
Tense from head to toe, Su Cheng nearly flung the dagger out of her hand the moment she laid eyes on it.
More and more eyes emerged from the root systems, wriggling their way out until they densely blanketed the entire carriage, all of them curiously observing Su Cheng.
Some possessed entirely black pupils, others had massive fields of sclera with pupils no larger than sesame seeds, and some were pure white sclera…
Thousands of eyes, big and small, stared at Su Cheng in unison, blinking away and emitting a chaotic, overlapping tap-tap sound.
The sound of a single eye blinking was faint, but the blinking noise of thousands of eyes covering the walls was enough to form an impossible-to-ignore, eerie form of noise.
The sound acted like an incantation, drilling into Su Cheng’s head and playing on repeat, trapping her inside a cage of sound.
Su Cheng shook her head in an attempt to resist the invasion of the sound.
Clatter…
The dagger slipped and dropped to the floor.
Su Cheng’s breathing grew heavy. Closing her eyes, she clamped her hands tightly over her ears, yet she could not block out the blinking tap-tap sound echoing beside her ears…
Surrounded by eyes covering every wall, the blinking grew even more joyous.
Su Cheng’s entire mind was filled with the sound of eyelids fluttering. Never before had she heard this sound so clearly.
It felt as though she had been cast into a world consisting solely of eyes; they were observing her, curious about her, welcoming her… inviting her.
Triggered by some sort of summons, Su Cheng’s own eyes began to blink along with them in unison.
Struggling in a panic, she tried to widen her eyes, but she found herself utterly unable to control their fluttering.
Tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
Her eyes seemed to have developed an independent will, eagerly joining the rhythm of the other kindred spirits.
An itchiness plagued her eyeballs, as if they wanted to fly off and attach themselves to the wall.
Her eyes blinked faster and faster. Her vision flickered between light and dark, and the tap-tap sound inside her head blurred until she could no longer tell whether it originated from her own body or the eyes on the wall…
Stop!
Covering her eyes with her hands, Su Cheng found that even when covered, they refused to stop.
Her eyelashes brushed continuously against her palms like an invisible provocation!
Stop! Stop!
Su Cheng couldn’t understand why they insisted on fighting her. Compelled by some invisible temptation, dark malice surfaced, giving rise to an unprovoked wave of anger and resentment!
They were her property; by what right were they refusing to obey her control?
If they wouldn’t listen, they had no right to exist.
Her fingertips brushed against her eyeball mucosa, and the sharp stinging sensation shocked her into an abrupt recovery of consciousness as she jerked her hands back…
What was she doing?
Resentment and residual reason brawled fiercely inside her mind.
The walls full of prying gazes and the magnifying tap-tap sound suffocated her!
She wanted to gouge out those disobedient eyeballs, rip them out, let them go, and perhaps everything would finally end.
Yet reason intervened at the critical juncture, stopping her fingertips just as they touched her eyeballs… The contradiction left her helpless and tormented.
Why must it be like this…
Why won’t these eyes listen to reason? Why won’t they obey?!
Stop blinking!
Stop blinking already!!
“Stop blinking already—!!!”
Su Cheng unleashed a furious roar, pouring every ounce of her strength into it.
Huu, huu, huu…
The blinking noise vanished. All the eyes froze completely motionless, leaving only the sound of Su Cheng panting for breath.
Reaching up to touch her eyes, she realized they had finally stopped.
Gently stroking her eyelids over and over again, feeling as though she were witnessing a rebellious child finally turning docile, a mix of sourness and relief washed over her as a single tear slipped from the corner of her eye.
Click.
The door at the front of the carriage popped open, and a faint light streamed in from beyond the threshold, resembling salvation.
Picking up her dagger, wiping away the remaining tear tracks on her cheeks, Su Cheng didn’t look back as she sprinted desperately toward the front of the carriage.
The lingering gaze chased after her every movement… as if they were reluctant to part with her, hoping she would take them away together…
The moment she stepped across the threshold, a certain prying surveillance was cut off, and she transitioned from one space into another.
Sound finally returned to her ears—the rumbling of the train, the chatting of passengers, the giggling of children…
No longer was hers the only sound in existence.
It was deeply reassuring.
In a momentary daze, Su Cheng felt her frantically pounding heart gradually calm down.
Unable to help herself, she blinked her eyes twice—and stopped.
Touching her face, Su Cheng broke into a smile. That’s wonderful; she could fully control them once again.
The black wristband on her wrist was once more replaced by the familiar bracelet, and she was dressed once again in the yellow dress that had yet to be stained with blood.
She had transformed back into Mu Ling.
Only this time, the items inside her storage slots were inaccessible, leaving her with only the dagger clutched tightly in her hand.
Su Cheng had completely assimilated into this body, wielding it with effortless mastery as though it had always belonged to her from the very beginning.
Looking around left and right, she found the scenery intimately familiar.
She had returned to the murder carriage from three years ago.
If so, had Xun Fang and Chen Renping also entered the bodies of certain passengers…?