Jiang Cheng instinctively looked toward the Fatty. It was as though something unseen was drawing him in. He had once seen a handprint on the Fatty's back, a handprint that matched his own perfectly.
The Fatty had also said that, on the road to the underworld, he had seen his own face. That version of him had awakened him, keeping him from taking the road back.
"There's... there's another me inside him, too."
The Newspaper Man didn't answer, but his silence said it all. Jiang Cheng's guess was right. Wu had also told him that he sensed something of himself in the Fatty.
It should have been the power of another door. As a Deep Crimson, the Fatty's door was the most mysterious of them all. Yet Jiang Cheng had never seen its power. Stranger still, for all his suspicion, he had never truly tried to investigate the Fatty's door. He trusted him as much as he trusted himself.
Looking back, his initial suspicions—and the way he'd kept the Fatty close while pretending to let him go—seemed like nothing more than a clumsy act of self-deception. He had never truly doubted the other man.
When they first met in the nightmare, their encounter had felt so natural. It was as though everything had been carved into the compass of fate. As they met in that nightmare, the gears of destiny began to turn, their teeth meshing perfectly. Everything that followed seemed to have been rehearsed in advance.
The more Jiang Cheng thought about it, the more unsettled he became. An invisible hand had been guiding his life. Every path he thought he'd chosen had been laid out for him long ago. He was like a train with no return journey, hurtling along a track that had already been set.
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