Page 31
What a vindictive female ghost!!
A red thread suddenly appeared out of thin air and swept swiftly across.
Su Cheng's heart stopped for an instant. Her body reacted before her brain could take control, ducking swiftly as the red thread passed a millimeter from the tip of her nose.
The murderous aura on the red thread brought fine beads of sweat to Su Cheng's forehead.
"Ahhh!"
Qu Yutong wasn't just targeting her, but the other passengers too.
Some passengers failed to dodge the red thread, and a cut appeared across their necks. As others jostled them, their heads fell to the floor... The dead passengers' souls were devoured by the red mist the moment they left their bodies.
Still shaken, Su Cheng backed away repeatedly, watching Qu Yutong's movements closely. She swallowed and asked, "You've already had your revenge. Why are you still killing people?!"
Qu Yutong tilted her head slightly and laughed. "Hehehehe..."
She fixed a vicious stare on Su Cheng. "I'm going to eat everyone..."
Bloodlust filled Qu Yutong's eyes. After she finished devouring He Zhou, her soul body had become more solid, and the red mist swirling around her had grown denser... She seemed even stronger!
She had already lost her human reason...
The red vines inside the carriage kept spreading and growing. A slender root tip pierced an oblivious passenger, and the blood that spilled became nourishment for the vines...
Su Cheng swung her dagger and severed a root tip trying to ambush her!
The dagger's power was far too limited. Su Cheng tried using the iron shovel in her bag, only to discover that an ordinary weapon had little effect on the roots. It couldn't even cut them apart.
She didn't dare take out the boning knife, afraid that seeing one of the tools used to dismember her body would drive Qu Yutong into an even greater frenzy.
Left with no choice, Su Cheng could only use the dagger to deal with the vine tips that occasionally stabbed at her, while also watching out for red threads appearing out of thin air...
Meanwhile, Qu Yutong sat on a seat, quietly watching everything inside the carriage.
It was as though she were watching ants struggle desperately beneath her fingertips while she pressed down hard from on high...
Squelch-
A vine stabbed into Su Cheng's calf!
Su Cheng severed the vine, but even cut in two, its tip writhed and burrowed into her leg!
"Ah..."
The pain pierced her to the core.
Gritting her teeth, Su Cheng quickly dug out the tip that had burrowed inside, then slashed through two more root tips stabbing toward her.
This couldn't go on.
With her strength, she couldn't withstand a vengeful ghost's attacks at all!
Su Cheng remembered the Soul-Suppressing Nails in her pocket!
Why wasn't Qu Yutong wary of them?
Earlier, she had clearly let Xunfang go because of them, switching her target to the bald man beside her...
Was it because she had grown stronger and no longer feared them...?
Su Cheng broke out in a cold sweat.
Seeming tired of playing, Qu Yutong stood up expressionlessly and teleported in front of Su Cheng.
Cold spread from her heels through her entire body, and Su Cheng trembled uncontrollably!
Like a small, weak animal facing a powerful natural predator, she felt fear and terror from the depths of her heart, unable even to make a sound to beg for mercy...
This was the overwhelming pressure of a vengeful ghost!
Qu Yutong reached out her sharp-taloned hand. Just as her blade-like nails touched Su Cheng's neck, she abruptly stopped.
A pale, icy hand had appeared on her shoulder.
It was Mu Ling.
All fifteen passengers and Chen Renping had come!
They stared at Qu Yutong in unison, and the two sides entered a kind of standoff.
The chill around Su Cheng abruptly receded. She hurriedly backed away, escaping the nails at her neck.
Qu Yutong grabbed the hand Mu Ling had clamped onto her shoulder. Wisps of black smoke rose. "I'll eat all of you too..."
Mu Ling's form grew a little fainter.
Her black hair lashed out, tangling and battling with the red mist.
The other passenger ghosts swarmed forward, joining the battle one after another...
Yet even fighting sixteen opponents alone, Qu Yutong showed no fear. The red mist surged, and the two sides traded blows...
Su Cheng didn't relax. Qu Yutong was far too powerful. She had to do something else!
Hunching down, she quietly approached the seat where He Lie's bone fragments remained. She sliced through layer after layer of vines with her dagger and found the suitcase hidden underneath.
The stench of rotting meat rushed into her nose.
Su Cheng held her breath and swiftly peeled away the layers of tightly sealed plastic film.
The more she unwrapped, the stronger the stench became...
Every breath was torture for her nose.
The head was the easiest to find, but there was only half of it...
Whoever had cut it apart had pursued absolute fairness, dividing the head precisely along the center line. The exposed brain matter and tissue had already rotted, and sticky yellow-red fluid smeared onto Su Cheng's hands...
"Urgh..."
So disgusting...
Su Cheng kept retching as she continued unwrapping the film and searching...
"Is this part of the thigh...?"
Su Cheng looked at a lump of blackened, rotten flesh with a section of white bone in the middle. Or was this an arm?
Her fingertips trembled slightly, coated in foul-smelling fluid, as she continued searching without pause.
"This is the left hand!"
Su Cheng took out the left hand.
The severed hand was stiff, its skin covered in livor mortis, and felt especially cold in her grasp...
Su Cheng quickly set it down and found the left foot among the plastic-wrapped body parts...
What about the right side?
Where was the right half of the body?
Dagger in hand, Su Cheng sliced through the vines on the luggage rack, recalling He Zhou's expression when she had touched these suitcases earlier...
In a flash, she chose the white suitcase.
She dragged it down and hacked open the lock. Sure enough, it contained the other half of the body. Half a head lay in the middle, with the other limbs piled together.
These two brothers really had taken one half each, one black suitcase and one white.
Su Cheng quickly found the other hand and foot in the pile of body parts and unwrapped the film around them.
She glanced back. The passenger ghosts were clinging to Qu Yutong, biting her, and the red mist had already stained them half red...
Su Cheng joined the two halves of Qu Yutong's head together. The corpse's previously closed eyes snapped open, their murky, shadowed eyeballs utterly motionless!
A chill ran down Su Cheng's back. She hurriedly took the Soul-Suppressing Nails and Soul-Suppressing Hammer from her pocket. Not daring to look at the corpse's eyes any longer, she positioned an iron nail between its eyebrows.
"Clang, clang..."
Su Cheng steadied the iron nail with one hand and struck it with the hammer in the other.
The Soul-Fixing Nail drove into the corpse's brow with remarkable ease, meeting no resistance at all.
"Ah-!"
Su Cheng heard Qu Yutong's shrill scream!
Without turning to check the battle, Su Cheng continued hammering the iron nails into the corpse's palms and soles, one after another... Last came the rotting heart!
"Ahhhhhh!"
Qu Yutong howled in even greater agony.
Inside the suitcase, her shattered corpse moved and pieced itself together, assembling into a complete body.
Resentment and hatred filled the corpse's formerly vacant eyes. She roared at Su Cheng, but seemed trapped by something, unable to spring up!
The corpse was locked into the white suitcase in a twisted posture. "No!-"
Click.
A jade pendant popped out of the suitcase.
The suitcase's broken lock actually fastened itself, and the white suitcase turned blood red.
There was no more movement.
Su Cheng let out a breath and collapsed into a sitting position on the floor.
Her hand was still trembling slightly when she picked up the jade pendant...
It was the other half of the Twin Fish Jade Pendant.
It had been inside Qu Yutong's soul all along.
The two halves fused together and were placed in the storage slot:
[Twin Fish Jade Pendant: Classification: supernatural weapon. Effects: wearing it long-term can nourish the body. Has a deterrent effect on vengeful ghosts and below, and can neutralize mental attacks from vengeful ghosts and below. Weight: 0.04 kg]
Su Cheng marveled inwardly. Good stuff.
[Ding~ Side quest "The Extra One" completed. Reward: 800 points. Settlement will take place upon leaving the instance.]
Finally, it was over.
Su Cheng closed her eyes briefly, rejecting that thought.
No, it wasn't over until she got off the train.
She looked up at the ghost passengers, who had already faded to the point of being translucent. "Thank you."
If they hadn't intervened, Su Cheng would never have had the chance to drive the Soul-Suppressing Nails into Qu Yutong's corpse, even with the nails in hand.
Chen Renping stepped forward and shook his head. "Helping you was helping ourselves."
He continued explaining, "Only after I died did I learn that, in the three years since the passengers died, there hadn't been a single fatal ghost attack. They hadn't harmed ordinary people. They were waiting for a chance to take revenge."
"Until He Lie brought the red-mist ghost aboard, and her resentment affected the other souls on the train. But she wasn't as strong when she boarded as she is now. That was all because she ate living souls.
"After killing every living person in the carriage, her next targets would have been all the ghost passengers..."
"She wanted to take complete control of the carriage, then go on to hurt more people..."
Su Cheng recalled Qu Yutong's savage appearance. She had already been corrupted by resentment, becoming a vengeful ghost devoid of reason.
The red mist infecting the passenger ghosts was her resentment...
Chen Renping sighed. "And Mu Ling wasn't trying to hurt you. She just couldn't control herself."
Su Cheng looked up at Mu Ling, who was still huddled at the very back with her head lowered. She seemed the most badly injured, her translucent body looking as though it might dissipate at any moment...
"...Thank you for earlier."
Mu Ling tilted her head. Once she understood that Su Cheng was speaking to her, she gently shook her head.
Chen Renping pointed at the door that had appeared on the right. "Get ready to leave the train."
His gaze fell on the red suitcase. "We'll guard this suitcase until we dissipate."
Su Cheng looked at Chen Renping, who no longer had any trace of life about him, and hesitated. "You..."
Chen Renping seemed to know what she wanted to say. He smiled faintly. "After my wife died, I no longer had any attachments. Because of the mistake I made back then, I've always felt guilty and indebted. Staying here is my fate, to atone."
[Dun-dun-dun~ Attention, passengers. Your train has arrived at the station. Please gather your luggage and personal belongings...]
The long-awaited announcement finally sounded.
Carrying the headphone girl, who had fainted from fright, over her shoulder, Su Cheng walked toward the open doors. All the other living passengers had died at the red-mist ghost's hands, body and soul... They were the only two survivors of this journey.