Xu Xingcheng, Beyond Gender

After listening carefully to all of Anzhi Tinglan's stories, the fat man turned toward Gu Mian. "Doctor, doesn't that ghost she described—the one digging tunnels—sound awfully familiar to you?"

Gu Mian was too tired to analyze what "awfully familiar" meant. Instead, he recalled what had happened during his underground expedition a few days earlier.

In one of the caves closest to the surface, he had seen a paper figure digging upward. It sounded very similar to Anzhi Tinglan's description.

He could be sure that the second half of Anzhi Tinglan's story had taken place in that cave. But during the first half, in the sewer pipes, she hadn't seen the things making noises crawl out of the holes. Then, when she finally came face-to-face with one of them, she hadn't turned on the lights. So she hadn't seen what it looked like at all.

"What do you mean?" Anzhi Tinglan looked at the fat man. "You've seen the ghost I described too?"

The fat man gave Anzhi Tinglan a rough account of how Gu Mian had gone underground in the City of Inverted Sky with Xiao Qiao and Ghost Valley a few days earlier. "That's more or less what happened. The second half of your description matches what the doctor found in the first tunnel he entered. The paper figure digging upward in there was probably the ghost you ran into."

Anzhi Tinglan fell silent for a while after hearing his description. "A paper figure... You found it underground, so when the City of Inverted Sky rose into the sky, it must have brought up the sewer-pipe end and left the figure behind below."

"But there are some differences between our two accounts." The fat man made a circle with his hand to represent the paper figure's head. "When the