Translator: CinderTL
Fatty's car was parked not far from the exit of the tunnel, at a fork in the road. When he saw Jiang Cheng's car emerge, his previously dull eyes lit up.
It was strange. Originally, their car had been following Jiang Cheng's, but in the tunnel, in the blink of an eye, the car in front disappeared.
Even the taillights were gone.
Banana Wolf, sitting in the passenger seat, immediately realized something was wrong.
After exiting the tunnel, Banana Wolf told the driver to stop nearby. They found this fork in the road and had been waiting ever since.
The driver beside him kept urging him, saying that parking here wasn't allowed and that they would be fined if caught by the traffic police.
But after Banana Wolf inadvertently revealed the half of a large knife in his bag, the driver's complaints immediately ceased.
Jiang Cheng's taxi pulled up beside them.
Chen Yi, who had been sitting in the back seat, was gone.
No one asked the foolish question of where Chen Yi had gone. Everyone fell into a natural silence.
Chen Yi was dead, killed by the ghost that had been targeting her.
A simple matter.
Chu Jiu, sitting in the passenger seat, was crying her eyes out. In the end, it was Fatty who carried her out of the car. Looking at this pitiful girl, Fatty wanted to tell some jokes to cheer her up.
But before he could open his mouth, his own eyes turned red. In Chu Jiu, he saw a familiar shadow.
Compared to Chu Jiu, Jiang Cheng was much calmer. He opened the car door himself and stepped out. "Let's go back," he said to Fatty and Wan Yuanning, who was beside him.
"How are you?" Hua Luo asked. He noticed Jiang Cheng's pale complexion and thought he might have been injured or frightened.
Looking back at the dark tunnel, what appeared in Jiang Cheng's mind wasn't the image of Chen Yi being restrained by the ghost or the moment before she jumped out of the car.
Instead, it was a scene from many years ago, in a dimly lit private room of a bar. A female officer with a neat ponytail had turned her back to him and shouted, "Hurry up!" She pretended to be full of confidence as she stared at the men and women crouched in the corner, saying loudly, "I'll wait here for you."
---
"Cough... cough..."
Violent coughing agitated her injuries. Her chest heaved up and down as she curled her body and suddenly spat out a mouthful of blood.
She slowly opened her eyes. Around her was endless darkness, devoid of any sound.
Beneath her was cold and damp.
She struggled to raise her hand, sharp pains shooting through her body intermittently.
It seemed that after jumping out of the car, she had been severely injured. Her left arm was twisted unnaturally, and her legs were covered in large abrasions.
She took a deep breath, then coughed violently again, bringing up a thick froth of blood.
Damn.
The thing she had feared the most had happened. Several of her ribs were broken, and it seemed they had punctured her lungs.
She tried to use her strong willpower to force herself to stand, but in the end, she was defeated by her broken body.
She knelt on the ground, gasping for breath.
Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth onto the ground. She had rarely been in such a sorry state.
But strangely, the pressure on her shoulders... was gone.
There was nothing to celebrate. The darkness around her remained, and all sound was blocked out. Clearly, this wasn't the tunnel.
At least, not the one she had entered.
The ghost was still here.
Hiding in the darkness around her.
She could even sense its suppressed breathing.
Those terrifying creatures had the ability to distort reality. It wasn't the first time she had seen it, but she thought it would be the last.
Now that it had come to this, she felt strangely calm.
She tried her best to lift her head and look in the direction she remembered. According to her guess, they... should have escaped.
She hoped they would all survive.
Fatty, Chu Jiu, and that guy who called himself Hao Shuai.
The image of his face surfaced in her mind, and Chen Yi pulled the corners of her lips into a smile that wasn't quite pretty.
So dishonest. Even at the moment of her death, he wouldn't reveal his real name.
Perhaps, as he had said, he was just a scoundrel who sweet-talked women, cheating them out of their money and virtue.
But when he saw her open the car door, his originally smug and shamelessly boastful expression suddenly changed. He became panicked.
Like a child about to lose his toy.
That shouldn't be... the look of a scoundrel.
A pair of cold hands reached out from behind and cupped her face, or more accurately, tightly gripped her chin.
Chen Yi didn't struggle. She had long heard the sound of breathing behind her, like a broken old bellows.
She slowly closed her eyes.
But the next second, light appeared in front of her.
"Tap."
"Tap."
"Tap."
The crisp sound of footsteps grew closer. The person walking was unhurried, one hand in the pocket of his trench coat, the other holding a large black umbrella. Beneath his feet were black leather shoes, the heels tapping against the ground, splashing small drops of water.
Because of the backlight, Chen Yi, whose consciousness was fading, couldn't see the person's face.
The person stopped in front of her, about three meters away.
"All those who want to harm her will only meet death."
For a moment, Chen Yi was stunned. Her vision immediately focused. The voice was familiar. Where had she heard it? Then, after a moment—
"It's you!" Chen Yi couldn't help but exclaim.
The black umbrella tilted slightly, revealing a pair of deep red eyes.
"Crack!"
The figure whose neck had been twisted swayed, then the next second, collapsed into the puddle in front of her.
---
In the evening, just before the sky turned completely dark, Jiang Cheng, Banana Wolf, and the others finally met up with their teammates from Building 3 in the lobby of Building 1.
But of the original four, only three remained.
Liu Guo, walking at the front, had a face as dark as if it could drip water.
"Lu Huaxu is dead," he said straightforwardly as he approached.
As soon as he finished speaking, Wu, standing beside him, lifted his gaze and scanned the group. Chu Jiu was sitting to the side, her eyes vacant, while Fatty crouched beside her, softly comforting her.
Chen Yi... was gone.
"Chen Yi's also in trouble," Hua Luo explained to Wu in a low voice.
Hearing this, Liu Guo paused for a moment, but Jiang Cheng looked at him and said calmly, "First, tell us what happened on your end."
"Through Manager Zhao, we contacted the company where Li Maoshen used to work, but they refused to deal with us. They just gave us the phone number of one of Li Maoshen's friends."
"This friend was once Li Maoshen's business partner, mainly responsible for filming, but later they had a falling out over the direction of their videos."
"Li Maoshen wanted to shoot some attention-grabbing videos," Liu Guo explained to Jiang Cheng. "The kind involving the supernatural."
"But his friend was too scared and absolutely refused, so they split up. But according to him, Li Maoshen later found another photographer. The strange thing is, not long after, he heard that both of them had died, and their deaths were very close in time."
"Since they were in the same circle, he knew the photographer's background. His name was Qiao Yu, and he lived not far from here, above a coffee shop."
(End of the Chapter)
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