Global Collapse-Chapter 561 - 529: Last Night’s Dream of Falling Flowers in the Quiet Pond_1
"What?" Cang Yue, who was closely inspecting the bus, turned her head towards the direction of the voice.
She saw Keke eyeing a certain spot on the ground, and Xia Jianren, about two meters to her right, was staring at the same spot.
Between them... where a person had just been standing.
Cang Yue stared in shock at the empty patch of ground. "Where's Wang Chuan?"
"He was just here!" Xia Jianren exclaimed, gesticulating wildly. "Then he disappeared in the blink of an eye!"
The streetlights illuminated the nearby ground. Cang Yue stared intently at the place where Wang Chuan had just been standing, but not a single trace remained.
She took a deep breath. "It's a ghost..."
Indeed, the instance wouldn't let them get through the next thirty-six hours easily. Even being near Gu Mian wasn't safe. The ghost had already made its move. They had to find a way to survive, and quickly! It seemed the most efficient method now was what Gu Mian had suggested: driving the bus, taking Zhao Shuang to revisit those places—only that could stimulate her to remember what happened on October 1st. Why had they argued? Why had Zhao Shuang been left at the base halfway up the mountain? Why had the bus plunged from the mountain? Only if Zhao Shuang remembered quickly could they find a way out!
"Let's head towards Fenshan Mountain now!" Cang Yue said, her heart still pounding with fear as she looked away. Wang Chuan had vanished this time; who would be next?
As she spoke, she turned to Xia Jianren and Keke. "You two okay?"
Keke nodded. "I'll go to Fenshan Mountain with you."
After witnessing Wang Chuan's sudden disappearance, Xia Jianren certainly didn't dare to remain idle. He nodded firmly. "I'm going too."
For Gu Mian, who had already been planning a day trip to Fenshan Mountain, taking a few more people wasn't a problem.
Zhao Shuang had no objections and agreed to go to Fenshan Mountain with the others.
They didn't dare call another car; now, this dilapidated Spirit Car seemed safer than any vehicle they could randomly hail in the middle of the night.
Gu Mian returned to the driver's seat. When the other four boarded the Spirit Car, they discovered it was bloodstained inside.
"After all, it tumbled and rolled down the mountain. The people inside definitely got tossed around a few times," Gu Mian explained.
Cang Yue found a relatively clean spot to sit, only to see that most of the seats were stained with blood. Bloody handprints also marked the ceiling and floor, looking as if someone had struggled desperately inside the vehicle. The other three sat next to Cang Yue, none of them daring to stray too far.
Luckily, it was five in the morning, and not a single car was on the road. Otherwise, any other driver would have been startled by the sight of this nearly scrapped Spirit Car.
The Spirit Car's windows were all shattered. Gu Mian wasn't driving slowly, and a cold wind gushed in through the broken panes. Cang Yue leaned against the window frame, looking out at the quiet city. Lights still glowed in a few houses. The wind whistled past roadside billboards, making them RUSTLE. Leaves on the trees in the green belts swayed. A blast of cold air struck her face, reminding her of winter mornings spent cycling to work. For a moment, she felt she was back in those days.
But before she had time to savor it, Keke's voice pulled her from her reverie.
"Look at these handprints."
What is it? Cang Yue wondered, looking at Keke, who was tilting her head back to study the bloody handprints on the ceiling with a flashlight. Keke was shining her flashlight on a certain spot on the ceiling. Following the beam, they saw a series of somewhat connected handprints.
"Look at this series of handprints," Keke said, gesturing with her flashlight. "Judging by the size, they look like they were left by the same person."
The beam of her flashlight traced the bloody handprints, which disappeared near the edge of the right-side window. The group looked closely at the window's edge and found clear marks where a blood-soaked hand had clawed at the frame above it. They gathered, looking up at the upper edge of the window.
Xia Jianren said over the wind, "So, after the Spirit Car rolled down the mountain, someone crawled out from here, right?"
The thought that just a few days ago this vehicle had contained over thirty corpses made him shudder.
"Yes," Cang Yue nodded. "The news said that when this vehicle was found, it was overturned—upside down, with the roof on the ground and the chassis facing up. These bloody handprints must have been left by someone still alive who crawled out of a window."
Who could have crawled out...?
Keke stared at the bloody handprints on the window's edge. "The police must have found this too. That's why they mobilized manpower to search the entire mountain for survivors."
Including the driver, there were eight missing people. None of them had been found, dead or alive. Not long ago, they had seen the driver. The driver had become a ghost, so he was confirmed dead, but his body had still not been found.
"Could it be that among those eight people, the others, besides the driver, are still alive?" Xia Jianren smoothed his tousled hair.
Keke nodded. "Someone must be alive. But there's one thing I've always found strange...
"Logically, when this vehicle rolled down from the mountain, even if the people inside didn't die, they would be seriously injured. Even if someone alive tried to crawl out, they wouldn't have been able to crawl far. The police should have been able to find those missing people near the vehicle.
"But they've been searching for so many days, and still, no trace of them, dead or alive. Could someone have hidden them?"
If anyone in this instance was most likely to have hidden those people, it would undoubtedly be Zhao Shuang, who was right beside them. But the police had, of course, considered this. They had thoroughly investigated Zhao Shuang and found her completely clean; there was absolutely no way she could have been at the scene.
Cang Yue looked at those around her. "Do any of you remember who the eight missing persons are?"
Zhao Shuang remembered this clearly.
She said, "The driver was Zhao Jianming, and the others were seven of our colleagues: Qian Xinguo, Xue Guang, Hu Shufeng, Jiang Mei, Gan Da, Qiu Hongyu, and Lu Xian."
"One of them must have left these bloody handprints," Keke said, looking at the handprints that vanished at the window's edge.
However, where these eight missing people had gone remained an unsolved mystery. They might be useful in finding a way out of the instance. Perhaps when Zhao Shuang regained her memory, they would find clues about these missing people.
"Speaking of which..." Cang Yue said, looking at Gu Mian in the driver's seat. "When you stopped this Spirit Car, did you happen to see how many people... or ghosts... were on it?"
It seemed she had grown accustomed to Gu Mian's habit of flagging down Spirit Cars.
Gu Mian didn't have the habit of counting passengers before boarding. So Cang Yue's hope of deducing whether the missing people were still alive based on the number of occupants in the Spirit Car came to nothing.
Fenshan Mountain drew nearer, and the sky began to lighten. Cang Yue pulled out her instance-issued phone and glanced at it. The top right corner showed a dangerously low battery icon next to the current time: already past six in the morning. Traffic would start picking up soon.
「Meanwhile, Wang Chuan was astonished to find he hadn't died.」
When he opened his eyes, he saw a slightly yellowed ceiling above him, from which an old-fashioned chandelier, untouched by a duster for who knew how many years, hung. A glance to the side revealed a moderately-sized window. Outside the window, the sky was a greyish hue, and a few pairs of sparrows streaked across it, CHIRPING noisily.
