"I had brushed past the murderer several times. Every time I knocked on a door in the corridor, I could see the villain inside. He might have seen that I was carrying a gun and tried to flee out of fear. I shot at him, and he stopped moving. But I knew he wasn't dead."
"He was still hiding among the crowd."
Big Brother, you're not exactly in perfect health yourself. Damn, just imagine someone knocking on your door in the middle of the night with a gun in hand.
They opened the door and saw the train conductor's pitch-black gun muzzle aimed at them. If a normal person didn't run, that would be proof they had something wrong with their brain, right?
Do you want to hear yourself!?
You shoot someone, and they stop moving!?
Isn't that obvious?
"I gathered everyone together. I wanted to take everyone into Carriage Three for a trial. No one could escape my interrogation. I was a falcon of the battlefield, but every time we passed through a tunnel, I felt something stabbing at my mind. All I could do was watch helplessly as someone slaughtered these passengers."
The corner of Qin Shang's mouth twitched again. By the time he read this, his thoughts had suddenly become much clearer.
"I thought of a way to overcome this crisis: we could hold hands and get through it together. That's right, as long as everyone held hands, the moment the madman in the group let go, we would know who it was. Then we could catch him!"
"That's right. Once we reached Carriage Three, the villain hiding in the group would have nowhere to hide..."
Strange. This also differed from Background Story's account.
Qin Shang wanted to keep reading, but he discovered that there was nothing below.
That was right. Much of the diary's content was repetitive. This was all the text that could be extracted.
Mr. Jack and Miss Mary actually shared a hobby: printing out their diaries. And not just one copy?
Or could it be that the game developers had printed them?
Qin Shang thought for a moment, then subconsciously rubbed the sheets of paper.
They were stuck down firmly, but two centuries had passed. With outside force applied, they came off easily.
He saw the words on the back of the paper.
"Name: Jack"
"Occupation: Middle Eastern Special Forces"
"Age: 33"
"Cause of illness: Psychological trauma caused by postwar sequelae, possibly related to watching his comrades disappear one after another during the war. He was a reserve soldier who had only been dispatched and had never been to the battlefield. He had always handled logistical tasks, so he had never directly faced the bloody battlefield. Unable to accept his comrades disappearing day after day, he suffered immense pressure. For psychological reasons, he was sent back and exiled to work as a frontline reserve soldier."
At that moment, Qin Shang's pupils suddenly contracted.
The content itself was irrelevant. What concerned him was the paper. The feel of this paper...
His expression changed dramatically. He grabbed Little Loli and ran toward the very front of Carriage One. There was usually a duty roster or something similar posted at the front of a train.
"Miss, tell me the names of the staff members written here!"
"Big Brother, aren't you a priest too? You should be able to see it. My English isn't very good. I can only recognize that it says Jack..."
Qin Shang was furious. Forget it. He couldn't count on this girl.
He sprinted to the very front. The moment he looked closely, his expression changed drastically.
Conductor: Jack
Train attendant: El
Train attendant: Philip
Train attendant: Dibis...
Qin Shang scanned the list but didn't see Mary's name.
There was no Mary. There had never been any such staff member.
"Fuck!"
At that moment, a crazy thought took shape in his mind!
He immediately dragged "Grandpa Niu cosplaying as a maid to seduce Zhuangzhuang's mother" to Carriage Two. Mary's diary was posted on the wall there, so Qin Shang raised his hand and casually tore off one of the diary pages beside the window.
The next moment, his expression became two "fucks."
"Name: Jack"
"Occupation: Middle Eastern Special Forces"
"Age: 33"
Qin Shang's features nearly twisted together as he subconsciously cried out,
"Mary and Jack are the same person. That's why neither of their diaries gives the other much attention."
"Because this Jack has dissociative identity disorder. Miss Mary is Mr. Jack, and Mr. Jack is Miss Mary..."
The mystery of the strange deaths beginning when Mr. Jack led everyone out of Carriages One and Two and through the tunnel had been solved.
According to Background Story, Miss Mary was the one responsible.
So it was obvious that these two people were the same person.
Qin Shang wasn't making a wild guess. There were plenty of details like this.
For example, the clothes, which were repeatedly emphasized!
Both Mary's diary and Jack's diary had repeatedly emphasized their clothes.
"It matches Background Story's account. No wonder both Jack and Mary repeatedly emphasized their clothes..."
"A cross-dressing enthusiast flaunting himself in front of everyone in this era would be ridiculed by the entire crowd. They'd sooner castrate him than humiliate him."
"Men are almost obsessively crazy about their sacred treasures. Practicing occasionally isn't enough—they have to bring them out every now and then to compare lengths and check the results of their training!"
The corner of Qin Shang's mouth twitched. That Mr. Jack was clearly a cross-dressing enthusiast.
There was another event shared by the two identities: after the passengers teased them...
The passengers died!
Mary during the day, Jack at night!
That was why Miss Mary's entries contained more information.
As a train attendant, she could receive more information. After Mr. Jack's personality awakened at night, he had to drive the train.
As the conductor, he didn't have much time to interact with the passengers...
No, that wasn't right.
Mary's occupation as a train attendant should actually remain uncertain!
He had never done anything a train attendant was supposed to do. Her diary was practically a record of taking leave every single day.
That was because she wasn't a train attendant at all!
The person who had assigned him his work wasn't a modern capitalist. If they knew he had dissociative identity disorder, they couldn't possibly have given him two jobs and exploited him by making him work himself to death.
What was more, even modern capitalists—those utterly inhumane, ruthless ones—if they discovered that an employee had dissociative identity disorder, the most likely thing they would do wouldn't be to exploit a loophole and make him work two jobs.
They would fire him immediately.
"Then it was perfectly normal for the Jack personality to think Mary had disappeared. After all, he was Mary. When the Jack personality awakened and went on patrol, he went to the dormitory of the so-called 'Mary,' opened the door, and was naturally shocked to discover that Miss Mary wasn't in bed."
"Obviously. You're Mary yourself. The two personalities can't exist at the same time."
"When one of them is awake, the other must be dormant..."
"Because of his postwar trauma, he was constantly afraid that the people around him would disappear. This fear came from deep within his cowardice, and it gave birth to a second personality: Mary."
"To cope with this, he fabricated a lie for himself—a war hero, an extreme opposite who could protect his cowardly personality."
"Mr. Lu Xun once said that if you wore a mask for too long, it would grow onto your face. To tear it off again, you would have to tear skin and flesh. Jack imagined himself as a war hero, so he naturally couldn't accept the reality of passengers disappearing. That was why he began patrolling!"
"That also explained the strange looks from the passengers!"
Qin Shang rested his chin in thought.
"A male train conductor who liked to expose his bizarre cross-dressing fetish in front of everyone during the day."
"Moreover, he openly claimed to be the train attendant Mary and didn't care in the slightest. Even the most gentlemanly person couldn't control their strange gaze, right?"
"Wait, no. This personality defect should be cowardice. Otherwise, he wouldn't spend every day writing in his diary that he wanted to ask Jack for help..."
"The passengers' gazes might have been a blade that gave rise to this personality's feelings of rejection."
"But they absolutely couldn't have made the Mary personality kill people. That was a cowardly personality..."
"Combining the two diaries, the murders were basically all committed by the 'Jack personality,' except in the tunnel."
"So..."
"There had to be a trigger!"
"It probably had something to do with exploration. If I don't keep moving forward, I probably won't get any new clues."
"Unless I inherit So Handsome They'll Chop Me's mission and hints."
Qin Shang lowered his brows and pondered.
The Teacher occupation's deciphering skill had played an enormous role here.
Perhaps So Handsome They'll Chop Me, as a Martial Artist, could also provide him with some help.
Of course, he still didn't really want to accept an unnecessary mission.
He already had one more mission than everyone else because he was a Trickster, although the Trickster's hidden mission had yet to appear.
But Qin Shang guessed that it was probably related to exposing the God Slayer among the group.
Now that three missions were entangling him, it was hard to say whether he might end up getting himself killed.
"Carriage Three probably contains all the secrets, including why the Jack personality suddenly went mad, why he lost control, and his reason for killing people."
"Forget it. Cross out that last one. Madmen don't need a reason to kill. I still haven't figured out why so many HelloKitty figures were placed here."
Could it be that the developers of the Divine Road liked cats?
Why didn't they like Qimao? That was also a very cute cartoon character!
For some reason, cartoon cats basically didn't have mouths.
Tom, the disgrace of kittens, was an exception.
For example, Hello Kitty, and Qimao's logo.
Hmm... neither of them had mouths...
Hmm!?
No mouths!?
Qin Shang froze again. He suddenly thought of something.
"Big Brother, why don't we continue exploring?"
"I'm getting a little scared. The three of them have been gone for more than half an hour, and I can't hear them moving at all anymore. Did you discover something in those papers..."
At that moment, Little Loli—"Grandpa Niu cosplaying as a maid to seduce Zhuangzhuang's mother"—spoke in a trembling voice.
Qin Shang noticed that the girl was still holding a sheet of diary paper from the wall.
She had probably grown curious about its contents after seeing him stare at it and ponder for so long.
He just didn't know whether this little priestess, who lacked a deciphering skill, could understand British English...
In this kind of environment, everyone's desire to survive was at its peak. There was nothing wrong with searching for clues that could keep them alive.
Qin Shang sighed.
Actually, once Jack's dissociative identity disorder had been confirmed, he basically understood why the passengers had disappeared.
The conductor Jack had been wantonly taking lives under the pretense of investigating the matter. He was mentally unstable. At night, whenever a passenger was frightened and ran away during his room inspections, he shot them.
How could the passengers not disappear?
But setting Background Story aside, during the part where they entered the tunnel in Carriage Two, Qin Shang still hadn't figured out the direction in which the God Slayer had chosen to kill.
When everyone first revealed their occupations, only Green Grass by the River had lied among the six players.
That meant everyone else's occupations were correct.
Then why had the God Slayer chosen to kill the Teacher and Martial Artist first?
Was it really just random murder?
Or were these two occupations the greatest threats to him?
Sigh. If he couldn't get any clues soon...
He would have no choice but to inherit So Handsome They'll Chop Me's mission and hints.
At that moment, the two of them were in Carriage Two.
A cold wind swept through the carriage.
Thinking of this, Qin Shang turned his head, about to look at the corpse, but suddenly froze.
A chill so cold that it made his scalp go numb and his flesh creep instantly rose from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
Because the corpse...
was gone!
Before you continue