San Gou, who had never been able to sit still, wanted to discuss last night's strange incident with Jiang Yue. But with an outsider around, it seemed inconvenient, and he was suffering terribly from having to hold it in.
The driver, Boss Zhou, was also from Star City. He usually delivered goods for a living, traveling all over the place, and had a very slick tongue. The whole way, he rattled off all kinds of jokes, most of them dirty rather than clean. He didn't care whether San Gou was underage or not. His hands drove the car while his mouth drove on, two vehicles traveling side by side, displaying the outstanding qualities of a veteran driver.
People who spent all year driving on the roads were especially wary of discussing strange incidents that happened on them. During the two- or three-hour trip, Boss Zhou's mouth barely stopped, yet he never mentioned a word about yesterday's bus.
Jiang Yue's home was in the east of the city, while Boss Zhou lived in the north. He could only drop the brothers off at a fork in the road.
They flagged down a taxi by the roadside, hopped in, and immediately gave the name of their residential complex.
"New Moon Bay."
New Moon Bay had buildings that were more than ten or twenty years old. When it was first launched, it had once been hugely popular for a time and was quite famous in Star City. Naturally, a taxi driver wouldn't be unfamiliar with it.
People in the taxi business all had a living map in their heads. As soon as they heard they were going to New Moon Bay, the route was automatically planned in their minds.
"Brothers, we'll have to take a detour today. Traffic's being controlled on the section of Lotus Leaf Avenue by Star City Second Hospital."
"Traffic control on that stretch?" Jiang Yue sounded doubtful.
Lotus Leaf Avenue was one of Star City's main roads. The section by Star City Second Hospital was often congested even outside rush hour. At noon, if traffic was being controlled, who knew how badly the surrounding roads would jam up.
"Isn't it strange? I've driven taxis for eleven years, and I've only encountered traffic control on Lotus Leaf Avenue twice in total. The last time was many years ago, when the leader came to Star City for an inspection."
"Is the leader here again these past two days?"
"This time, it really isn't. I heard it's temporary control. I picked up a passenger from the Second Hospital just over half an hour ago. According to the other drivers, something happened over there."
"What happened?" Whenever Jiang Yue heard that something had happened, his eyelids began twitching.
"I heard a patient jumped from a window in the ICU."
"Would a person jumping from a building warrant traffic control?" Even a kid San Gou's age couldn't be fooled by that explanation.
Jiang Yue fell silent instead.
Leaving aside the fact that the taxi driver's story had already passed through who knew how many hands, even if it had come directly from the source, it was riddled with suspicious points.
A patient admitted to the ICU was completely incapable of caring for themselves.
Besides, anyone who had been to a hospital knew how sturdy the windows in the wards were. Even a healthy, strong man might not be able to force one open. If an ICU patient had that kind of strength, why would they be in the ICU?
Even taking it a step further, even if the news was true, it still wouldn't warrant traffic control for the entire section of road.
The taxi driver spoke with obvious exaggeration, his eyebrows dancing as he said, "According to what I heard, this incident was really eerie."
"How eerie?"
"The ICU room's door wasn't opened. The patient had pried the window apart with his bare hands and jumped out. The ICU was on the top floor of the building, which had a full eighteen stories. They said the concrete ground had even been smashed into a pit."
"Jumping from the eighteenth floor and not making a pit in the ground would be the eerie part."
"Making a pit in the ground isn't eerie at all. What's eerie is that there was no blood, no body... Apart from a pit, there was nothing! Now that's eerie!"
At this point, even the taxi driver felt a little spooked. He nervously glanced twice at the rearview mirror.
If Jiang Yue's physics teacher had been there, he certainly would have cited formulas, calculated the potential energy produced by jumping from the eighteenth floor and the resulting force, and then reached a scientific conclusion—
Not only would the person have died, but the state of the corpse would have been horrendous.
The eighteenth floor...
Jiang Yue was utterly speechless. How bizarre did the building designer's thought process have to be to set the total number of floors at eighteen?
Of course, some taxi drivers simply had a professional habit of collecting hearsay, embellishing it with their own imaginations, and enjoying the thrill of attracting attention with bizarre stories.
Jiang Yue treated it as nothing more than a story.
Even as a story, though, it had far too many details that couldn't withstand scrutiny.
Naturally, Jiang Yue wasn't going to argue over it.
The car stopped at the entrance to the residential complex. The meter showed twenty-eight yuan. As a student, Jiang Yue didn't often use mobile payments and was still accustomed to paying cash.
He handed over thirty, and the driver deftly fished out two coins and passed them back.
Just as Jiang Yue took them, he suddenly grabbed the driver's wrist. His eyes stared fixedly at the driver's palm, surprise faintly showing on his face.
The driver was startled by Jiang Yue's sudden move. "Bro, I'm not into that!"
The man's head was fat and his face greasy, but that didn't stop his thoughts from veering off course. He actually thought Jiang Yue had taken a fancy to him.
Jiang Yue immediately released his hand and gave an almost imperceptible smile. "You've got the wrong idea."
He then added, "One more thing: you've gotten yourself into serious trouble."
The taxi driver bared his mouthful of yellow teeth. "What, are you trying to scare me? I may not have mixed with the Jianghu for many years, but I can still summon eighty or a hundred men with one phone call. Believe it or not?"
Communicating between people really was an exhausting affair.
The words at the tip of Jiang Yue's tongue were swallowed back after some thought. The other man didn't look like a good-natured person. Why bother doing something so thankless?
He pushed open the door and got out.
"Moron!" the driver cursed, then stepped on the gas and sped away.
"Second Brother, what was that about?" Based on his understanding of Second Brother, San Gou knew he would never cause trouble for no reason. There had to be a reason for what he had just done.
"That driver probably ran into something unclean, or else he just did something immoral. There's clearly a black line on his palm's lifeline, and it's devouring it."
"What does that mean?" San Gou asked curiously.
"It doesn't mean anything else. Based on my calculations, he should lose about twenty years of his life."
"Is it really that mysterious?" San Gou was shocked.
"This stuff really is that mysterious. It can only be explained to people with the right fate. Most people might not believe it anyway, which is why I didn't point it out just now."
"Not pointing it out was for the best. That guy's tone was irritating just to hear. If you'd told him, he might have asked you how to resolve it. Then he might have mocked you for a while too."
"Everyone has their own fate. You can't force it. Still, this matter really is rather strange." Jiang Yue's brows drew together slightly.
"What else is strange?"
"That black line is strange. Normally, black lines like that are faint and intermittent. They wouldn't be so easy to spot. His black line looked as if an earthworm had burrowed into his palm—fierce, urgent, and especially obvious. That means his calamity came very suddenly..."
"Could something happen to him on the road?"
"It doesn't look like it will be fulfilled through a car accident. There are no signs of a bloody disaster."
"Then is he going to get sick?"
"It doesn't look like that either. That's why it's strange."
Jiang Yue couldn't figure it out no matter how hard he tried. He had truly never heard of palm lines like this.
It was raining at noon, and there was no one wandering around outside the residential complex.
The building where Jiang Yue lived was an eleven-story mid-rise with two elevators and four apartments per floor. His home was Room 801 on the eighth floor, the easternmost unit.
After opening the door, San Gou plunged inside before Jiang Yue could even pull out the key. He was just about to burrow onto the sofa when Jiang Yue called out to him.
"San Gou, wait."
Something felt wrong to Jiang Yue. He hurried forward, moved behind San Gou, and stared at his buttocks, his expression turning strange.
"Second Brother, why are you staring at my butt?"
"What happened to your pants? How did they get so torn? Where did you find them?"
"How could that be? These are the pants I bought for the New Year. I only changed into them this morning." San Gou protested.
Jiang Yue gestured for him to take them off and look for himself.
When he saw the torn section on the seat of the pants, San Gou was dumbfounded too. He held the pants and stared blankly. He had changed into them before leaving home, and they had been perfectly fine then.
Pants having two holes in them wasn't particularly unusual.
What was unusual was that judging from the wear on the fabric in that area and the degree to which it had faded, it absolutely could not have become that worn without ten or eight years of accumulation.
The problem was that these were clearly a new pair of pants bought at the beginning of the year.
It felt as if someone had deliberately aged the pants around the buttocks.
In contrast, the other areas of the pants were clearly intact. Their color and fabric were still at least ninety percent as new.
The same pair of pants had developed such an eerie contrast!
Jiang Yue remained silent.
Relying on his powerful memory, he began reconstructing everything from that morning until he entered the house.
San Gou's pants had definitely been fine when he left.
There was no doubt about that.
He had left home, ridden in Boss Zhou's car, gotten out, taken a taxi home, gotten out, and walked into the house.
After going over every step, a point of suspicion emerged. Jiang Yue let out a soft exclamation. "That taxi."
A corresponding piece of circumstantial evidence was the strange black line on the taxi driver's palm...
An answer seemed to be faintly surfacing.
Jiang Yue hurriedly grabbed San Gou's hand and examined it closely for a moment, but he saw nothing unusual.
He checked San Gou from head to toe again, but likewise found no abnormalities.
"Second Brother? Was that taxi unclean?"
Jiang Yue mused, "I remember he mentioned that he'd just picked up a passenger from Star City Second Hospital a few dozen minutes earlier."
"Could he have brought some Unclean Things out of the hospital?" San Gou's expression grew somewhat ugly.
"Judging by the timing, that should have been our previous fare."
Then Jiang Yue recalled what the taxi driver had said about the person jumping from the building, and he couldn't help feeling his hair stand on end.
Before, Jiang Yue had listened to the story about the person jumping from the building as nothing more than a tale.
But after what had happened, he believed it by thirty percent instead.
Of course, if the taxi driver hadn't exaggerated and it had truly happened, there would certainly be more to come.
As for whether the jumping incident was connected to the driver's previous fare, Jiang Yue had no solid evidence to deduce it now.
Fortunately, San Gou hadn't directly run into anything unclean. He had only encountered a little of the aftermath. But even that aftermath was exceedingly strange.
Without using any method to artificially age it, what sort of bizarre trick could turn a perfectly good pair of pants into this ghastly state?
This had already gone somewhat beyond Jiang Yue's understanding.
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