"Have you heard the story Lina told afterward?" I asked the skinny guy.
"The Plague Town? I think I've heard of it," he replied.
The three of us headed toward the fountain. The streets were already empty. We could hear lively cheers and singing up ahead.
"What kind of story?" I asked.
The skinny guy looked at me. "Brother Qi, do you want me to... use my ability again? But the last time I used it, it seemed... to fail..."
He was troubled. It could be said that his ability was exactly what had landed us in our current dangerous predicament. The story had changed, and no one knew whether we could deal with that ghost or make it back safely.
The skinny guy didn't know that the past and the present had changed, too.
I suspected that this change had thrown his ability off. There was nothing wrong with the ability itself. The story in his mind should have been about a tragedy in which abandoned toys gained spirits and took revenge on society. We only had to find Lina's new house here, locate the doll, and destroy it to end everything.
Finding one toy in a small town was much easier than finding one somewhere in the world. The toy people might try to stop us, and the Ghost King who had traveled from the future could disrupt our plans, but overall, those were things we could handle.
Now, things had changed.
Chen Xiaoqiu was concerned, at most, that the ghost might possess one of two things: the doll, which was a decoy, or the corpse, which was the real target. What worried me was where we were now—and the trouble of having to face a Ghost King. The Ghost Kings from the future had lived for who