The breakthrough in the research did not lie with Gao Ming himself, but with his fathers and mothers.
Xuan Wen discovered that after she took Gao Ming home, his parents would come to his door looking for him, over and over, time after time.
But what terrified Xuan Wen most was that she had returned to Xinhu in reality and investigated through multiple channels. Gao Ming really was an orphan, and the person closest to him throughout his life had been his girlfriend, Liu Yi. She could find no information whatsoever about his parents. Yet on those rainy nights in Hanhai, after Xuan Wen took Gao Ming back to his apartment, a man and a woman claiming to be his parents really did come to his door. Stranger still, Gao Ming also believed they were his parents.
At this point in her investigation, Xuan Wen formed a terrifying hypothesis. An orphan's identity records were the easiest to forge. Could Gao Ming not be from Xinhu at all? Had he lived in Hanhai all along?
On the Bus during the Ghost Festival, many children remembered being saved by Gao Ming, and the school also had records of his employment. Yet closer examination revealed that everyone's descriptions of him were vague and general. None of them knew him well. Perhaps his withdrawn personality could explain that, but Xuan Wen thought of another possibility: an unspeakable entity had altered those living people's perceptions.
She had no direct evidence to prove it, so she shifted her investigation back to Hanhai, hoping to uncover Gao Ming's origins there. Yet every clue she found indicated that Gao Ming was not a ghost imprisoned in Hanhai at all, but an utterly ordinary person.
It was seamless, airtight. Xuan Wen felt as though she could see something terrifying