Chapter 430: Ticket Check

Taking in Liu Xin's words and watching her sudden transformation, a rush of realizations hit me.

The college student she had seen was herself. In her final moments, she had witnessed her own death—a highly unusual experience I was hearing about for the first time.

The Liu Xin before me had lost all traces of her sweet, innocent face. Her youthful body was now deformed. The bones of her upper half had caved inward as if crushed beneath something massive, and her blood-soaked flesh was plastered against her coat.

Her thrashing caused quite a commotion in the quiet carriage. The passengers in the surrounding rows began to sway slightly, their drooping heads threatening to lift.

"Liu Xin, calm down." Honestly, seeing the girl beside me undergo such a drastic transformation was a massive test of my own psychological endurance.

The innocent beauty had instantly turned into a blood-soaked corpse. I kept talking to comfort her, trying to stop her hysterical screaming, but it did little good.

She thrashed like an epileptic having a severe seizure, her shrieks growing increasingly piercing. A deep sense of unease washed over me as I watched her writhe in such agony.

"Mr. Lu, make her shut up! If she keeps this up and wakes the whole train, we're done for!" A good portion of Feng Minglong's body was still hanging off his seat; he stuck out conspicuously in the neatly aligned row.

I knew I couldn't let her keep thrashing either. Steeling myself, I clamped one hand over her mouth and pulled her into a tight hug against my chest. "It's not real, none of it's real."

It was like embracing a jade statue. The sensation was indescribable—freezing and slick with gore. An intense chill flooded my body, and my Yin Meridian automatically activated.

Low, muffled sobs echoed against my chest. Once Liu Xin finally stopped thrashing, I slowly loosened my grip.

When she was completely calm, I glanced down. The woman in my arms was back to normal. All the blood was gone, and the wound on her forehead had healed. Her glasses were just sitting askew on the bridge of her nose, giving her an oddly endearing look.

"She's back to normal?" Feng Minglong and I were both stunned, yet the girl herself hadn't noticed anything unusual.

She shoved me away with a sullen scowl and scooted closer to the homeless man. Her face looked even paler than before.

Afraid that pushing the issue might trigger another episode, I didn't press her. I checked my coat—not a single drop of blood. It was as if the whole ordeal had been a hallucination.

'Liu Xin's phone froze at 11:10, and she saw what she looked like right as she died. That means 11:10 is likely her exact time of death! When a person dies, their time in the Yang Realm stops right at that second.' This was just my own speculation, entirely without evidence: 'Back at the Jiangcheng Northern Suburb Subway Station, I checked the time multiple times, including one last look while waiting for the train. The clock on the wall consistently showed 11:11. Whose time of death was that? The homeless man's? Feng Minglong's? Or my own?'

A frozen clock seemed to signify the moment of death. With that in mind, I pulled out my phone and checked the screen: 12:16 AM.

The numbers were still changing. My time was still flowing.

'It seems that while I was hiding in the restroom, the others in the subway station were slaughtered by the Blood Fox, and I just narrowly dodged a bullet.' That thought raised another question: 'There were two other people in the station at the time: the homeless man and Feng Minglong. Which one of them does 11:11 represent as a time of death?'

I leaned more toward the homeless man, because even though Feng Minglong appeared perfectly normal on the surface, he had done something that still made me shudder in retrospect.

He had silently hidden atop the restroom stall, watching me. Truth be told, my five senses had been enhanced multiple times; no matter how careful an ordinary person was, I would have noticed them. Yet, in the pitch-black restroom, I hadn't sensed the presence of another person standing right next to me at all.

'Maybe he wasn't even human anymore by then.' I glanced at Feng Minglong, who was still muttering and complaining under his breath beside me.

Another question surfaced: 'Why does he have a seat? If my guess is right, every passenger on this train should be dead. Liu Xin died in a car crash, and the homeless man was likely killed by the Blood Fox. Was Feng Minglong killed by the Blood Fox too?'

'No, that doesn't add up. According to his initial story, he came in to check for lingering passengers shortly after I entered the restroom. He spotted me right then, and he hid in the stall next to mine, secretly watching me the whole time. That means he must have stayed in the restroom without ever stepping out. If he had left, I should have heard his footsteps.'

The entire sequence of events actually wasn't complicated, but there were logical gaps in certain places that made it very hard to figure out.

'Where exactly is the problem? The Blood Fox never entered the restroom, and both Feng Minglong and I stayed inside without leaving. So why does he have his own seat on this train? In other words, how did he die?' I shot Feng Minglong another look. The man gave me a very ordinary impression; I hadn't felt any suspicion toward him when we first met. He had acted exactly like a completely normal subway station employee.

'After Liu Xin boarded the train, she didn't realize she was dead; she witnessed her own death from a bystander's perspective. That implies that for a period of time after death, a person might continue to act on their memories and obsessions from life. If I think about it that way...' I vaguely felt like I had caught onto something: 'Could Feng Minglong have died before I even entered the subway station?'

I was startled by my own thought. I possessed the Judging Eye, after all, yet during the long period I spent talking with him, I hadn't noticed anything out of place.

'It's terrifying when you really think about it! Feng Minglong died long ago, and he's been wandering the subway station as a ghost. He took the initiative to find me, acted incredibly helpful, and even watched me in the stall for an entire hour. What was his purpose?' The closer he sat to me, the more palpable that reality felt.

Feng Minglong was pressed right up against me now. I could clearly sense his fear and his unease at being in a completely unfamiliar environment. Everything he showed matched his identity perfectly, which gave me a feeling of having nowhere to start: 'I know full well he has a problem, but I don't know what angle to think from to find a breakthrough.'

"Wh-why do you keep staring at me?" Feng Minglong was getting creeped out by my gaze. He tried to shrink away, but with no extra seats available, he could only meet my eyes with a bitter face. "Everyone has their own seat. Why don't you go look around again?"

"Look for what? Answer a question for me first: do you have a phone or a watch on you?" Liu Xin's phone time was frozen at 11:10, which was likely her time of death. If I could see the frozen time on Feng Minglong, I could easily prove my deduction.

"No, management requires all phones to be locked in our lockers to prevent employees from slacking off on shift."

"Bullshit. How come I've never heard of subway stations having that rule?"

I reached over to dig through his pockets, but he raised his hands in exasperation to stop me. "Why are you being so unreasonable?"

"It's for your own good." Before I could find Feng Minglong's phone, another complication arose in the swaying train.

In the pitch-black carriage far down the line, a shadowy figure swayed as it walked closer. With seats on both sides, the aisle was very narrow. The silhouette would take a few steps, then pause to look left and right, as if checking the number of passengers.

"Crap." I abandoned my attempt to verify Feng Minglong's identity. I quickly lowered my head, relaxed my breathing, and assumed the same posture as the surrounding passengers.

Upon seeing the shadow, Feng Minglong seemed to realize the severity of the situation as well. He wedged himself desperately inward, managing to squeeze the remaining half of his body onto the seat, then ducked his head, not daring to utter another word.

Not a single sound remained in the October 28th Carriage. Amidst the dead silence, the dark figure slowly drew closer.

With my head bowed, I couldn't hear any footsteps. I could only secretly use my peripheral vision in the dark to look toward the center of the aisle.

The shadow slowly drew near from a distance. Time passed slower and slower, and sweat slipped endlessly down my cheeks.