Chai Si's logical story

Ever since he had started chasing the subway train, one question had lingered in Chai Si's mind.

Blackmoor City had at least several thousand subway cars in service, and those cars could be separated and coupled into different combinations. Once a train left, it was like a stone sinking into the sea. Running into the same car afterward was as hard as winning the lottery-and people cleaned the trains every day, too.

How could Evan be so sure he would get the Phantasm back?

Only when he watched the subway driver retreat step by step, then turn and run, did the answer suddenly become clear, taking shape in Chai Si's mind.

The target Evan needed to find again was never one of hundreds or thousands of indistinguishable, untraceable subway cars. It was a subway employee with a name and a steady job-finding the train might be impossible, but how hard could finding a person be?

He almost wanted to laugh out loud. He had thought Evan was a clever fool, but he had failed to pinpoint exactly where his stupidity and genius lay.

Evan really had left a priceless Phantasm capable of rewriting his fate on a complete stranger-Chai Si did not know whether that was stupidity or audacity. Perhaps there was no difference between the two in the first place.

Evan's true stroke of genius was that nobody in the world except Evan himself could connect him to this fleeing subway driver-because they were two distant, random individuals in Blackmoor City's vast sea of people. There had never been any connection between them.

Apparently, Evan understood perfectly well that once someone set their sights on him, even the delivery worker who brought him pizza would be dug up and thoroughly dissected, let alone anyone connected to him.

That made a complete stranger who had never had any connection to him the safest place of all.

Once he had left the Phantasm on the driver, he could boldly approach anyone he wanted without worry. In fact, the more people he approached, the more he could mislead his pursuers and waste their time and energy-hadn't Chai Si wasted quite a bit of effort on the pizza delivery worker?

It seemed Evan had not thought of that, though. Otherwise, he would not have stayed shut inside that day.

As Chai Si thought, he reached out one large hand and gently caught the back of the driver's clothes.

When Chai Si gripped the fabric behind the driver's heart and yanked him toward the floor, the man still seemed not to understand what had happened. He fell flat on his back, his face blank, apparently unable to work out when Chai Si had gotten behind him.

Only when the back of his head hit the floor with a thud did the impact bring him to his senses. Hissing with pain, he rolled over and struggled to get up, crying, "Please! Please don't kill me! I haven't done anything!"

That was probably true. Naturally, though, Chai Si did not voice his agreement.

He pressed one large hand against the driver's chest, his five long, white fingers caging it like prison bars.

Chai Si applied no force, but the driver no longer dared to move. His shadow covered the driver's face like the crown of a towering tree.

"W-what are you going to do to me?" the driver asked shakily, propping his elbows against the floor, afraid to sit all the way up or lie all the way down.

That was exactly the right question.

In truth, Chai Si really had not expected to find the most incomprehensible Phantasm of all in this fashion.

He had the man in his grasp, yet, in a rare occurrence, he momentarily had no idea what to do next.

First, Evan had not had the time or opportunity that day to invent a suitable excuse to trick the driver into taking something. The driver could not possibly know he was carrying a Phantasm, and he seemed even less like someone who knew Pathways existed or understood the world of the Nest.

Besides, Evan could not have entrusted the Phantasm to anyone connected to the Nest... after all, he only had a chance of retrieving it if the other person was an ordinary person utterly ignorant of the Nest.

Evan must have attached the Phantasm to him while he was not paying attention.

That line of thought raised plenty of questions.

What exactly was a Phantasm that existed in the form of a "rumor"? How did it attach itself to a person? What did it look like? How could he remove it?

"I-I'm still on duty. If they notice I'm not working properly, someone will definitely come check what's going on..." the driver pleaded quietly. "Please let me go. Please. I have a bit of face blindness. I don't remember what you look like..."

Since reaching adulthood, Chai Si had never met anyone who failed to recognize him after seeing him once.

"No hurry," he said quietly, and thought for a moment.

How could he get the truth out of a target who did not know the truth himself?

He had personally interrogated plenty of people, but he had never encountered a situation like this: the target clearly possessed crucial information, yet still knew nothing.

Judging by Evan's route that day, he had not had any time to interact with anyone. The Phantasm must somehow have changed hands during a brief encounter, and the driver might not even remember him.

There was little hope, but Chai Si decided to try anyway. After a brief description of Evan's appearance, however, all he received was a blank look, just as expected.

"Where did you hear about this 'subway serial killer'?" After some thought, he decided to approach from an angle the driver could actually tell him something about.

The driver darted a glance at him out of the corner of his eye, then hastily fixed his gaze on a distant grab pole.

He paused before speaking tentatively into the air. "...Well, wasn't a woman's body found a few nights ago, after service ended on the C Line? I remember it was on the news."

Chai Si frowned.

That had indeed happened. But a death in Blackmoor City was so commonplace that, had the driver not mentioned it, that news item would have vanished from his memory forever.

"The subway employee thought she'd fallen asleep and forgotten to get off, but no matter how he called to her, she wouldn't wake up. When he pushed her shoulder, she rolled right onto the floor."

As the driver spoke, his gaze slid toward a nearby seat, as though he had personally seen that woman's body roll onto the floor. "The person who found her happened to be a coworker of mine. We play a few hands of poker together sometimes... when he described it to me afterward, his face was as white as paper."

What connection did one death have to a Phantasm-especially to a "rumor"? And how had this rumor about a "subway serial killer" come into being?

The driver, however, seemed to mistake Chai Si's subtle expression for some other emotion and hurried to explain. "Of course, thinking about it again, I'm sure I got it wrong. You're so good-looking, so tall and distinguished. How could you possibly be a serial killer? Ahem, it's just that I've been scared lately, and I get a little paranoid when I'm alone on the subway. As soon as I saw that pole in your hand, I jumped to the wrong conclusion... that woman's body had been slumped against the wall, so you couldn't see anything. It wasn't until she rolled onto the floor that my coworker saw an impact wound on her head..."

When some people panicked, their mouths ran out of control. They talked more and more, faster and faster, as if trying to build themselves solid footing out of words-the driver probably belonged to that category.

Chai Si decided to stoke his fear a little higher and burn an even blacker hole in his reason.

He lowered his head to look at the driver and slowly split his face into a grin.

When Chai Si smiled, his lips became very thin. His teeth were white, not a bright, lustrous white, but an oppressive, sinister white like cement. Those teeth, devoid of any living warmth, stood tightly packed between his thin lips. When he smiled, they were all exposed, as though someone had unzipped the lower half of his face.

"You see, making up a logically consistent story takes skill," Chai Si said softly. "And you don't have it."

"Huh? Me?" Sure enough, the driver startled. "I'm not lying. That news story was real. Look it up if you don't believe me! I misunderstood because I'd seen the news. It really was rude of me..."

The news was real, but it did not explain his behavior.

"How can someone be a serial killer if they've only killed one person?" Like a conscientious editor, Chai Si searched for inconsistencies in the story. "Or rather, why do you think that one person who died was killed by a serial killer?"

The driver's mouth opened slightly, as though he had been asked a question that had never occurred to him.

A bulge abruptly rose in one cheek, slid along it, and disappeared-as though he had pressed his tongue against it.

"I... you've misunderstood. I haven't told you about the second incident yet. It's because public safety in the Blue Lan District has been bad lately. After they found the woman's body, there was another assault. Someone had just finished a night shift and was coming out of the subway station. The moment their head appeared, someone hit them over the head with a pole-I mean, a club..."

He swallowed.

"The detectives investigating it questioned quite a few people at the subway company. They didn't say so outright, but from the sound of it, they suspected someone was committing a series of crimes..." The driver pressed his tongue against his cheek again before continuing. "That's how the rumor spread. I'm not lying to you. One of the detectives was really pretty, too. She and her partner looked like such a handsome couple. There was something going on between them... all of that spread together. Everyone knows about it."

Chai Si fell silent for a second or two.

Plenty of people lost their verbal filter when nervous, but the sudden appearance of gossip like this still took him aback. "...What?"

"There was something going on between them."

In his nervous terror, the driver's torrent of words was practically verbal diarrhea. He answered at once, "They kept going back and forth, and nobody else could get a word in. The man apparently wasn't a cop. He was a criminology professor brought in from a university as a consultant. I heard he'd been divorced once, or something. Anyway..."

Chai Si lifted the hand pinning him down and took his phone from his pocket.

Life really was a strange, unpredictable thing.

For instance, his morning self could never have anticipated that his midday self would drive recklessly across Blackmoor City. And his self driving recklessly across Blackmoor City could never have anticipated that, thirty minutes later, he would take out his phone on a subway train, open the App Store, and start downloading Netflix.

"What are you doing?" From his angle, the driver could see the phone screen, but not clearly.

"You have an account." Chai Si was not asking a question. He was making a statement. "...Log in."

"W-why?" The driver was utterly bewildered, but plainly did not dare argue. As he quickly entered his password, he asked, "If I give you my account, can I go?"

Without a word, Chai Si took the phone back.

Several previously watched films and shows were lined up under "Continue watching" on the home screen. He swiped through them, and within seconds, he had found his target.

He looked at the screen, then at the driver.

The man had no idea what he was doing and still looked up blankly, a fine sheen of sweat glistening on his face, his mouth hanging half-open like a little cave.

Unless the subway driver moonlighted as an Oscar-winning actor after work, he clearly had no idea that everything he had just said about "a female detective and a male consultant investigating a serial killer case together" was the plot of the first season of a Netflix crime drama-even though he had watched it.

Chai Si could no longer say his story did not hold together.

Hello, friends. I have another flight today, and I don't know whether I'll have time to write and post an update after landing, so take this chapter for now. Dig in, dig in, and order more if it isn't enough. (Though after you order, who knows when the food will arrive.)

Although Chai Si's part of the plot isn't as complicated as Jin Xueli's, I actually spent the most time researching it... something you might skim past while reading is something I have to take seriously when writing. For example, does a service running at the same time on the same day use the same train? Countless searches got me nowhere. In the end, I found a New York subway enthusiast community on Reddit (there really are people with a hobby that niche) and posted a question... only then did I get an answer: it isn't the same train. Once a train leaves, it's like a stone sinking into the sea.

There was also the layout of subway stations, reserve trains turning around, and this and that. Anyway, I researched quite a lot and used very little.

Blackmoor City is fictional, but I want the other background details to be as realistic as possible. The experience is better when it feels fully real.

I'm finally going home! My cat's about to forget what I look like. I wonder how many socks have been saved up for me to eat during this month away.