Ghost Says - Chapter 7.2

As the two were playfully roughhousing, Lin Xian suddenly received a phone call asking him to go to the suburbs.

Because he might drink, Lin Xian didn’t drive. After finishing his business, it was already past 10 PM. He declined his friend’s offer to drive him back and hailed a taxi at the roadside to return to the city.

The driver had an ordinary appearance, dark skin, and looked a bit simple when he smiled. Lin Xian looked at him and suddenly felt familiar, but couldn’t remember where he had seen him before.

Hearing this, the driver laughed and said maybe he had taken his taxi before. Lin Xian smiled slightly, neither confirming nor denying.

The drive from the suburbs back to the city took about an hour. Lin Xian sat in the car, looking out the window bored.

If it were daytime, he could have enjoyed the lush scenery along the road, but at night, he could only see the pebbles illuminated by the car lights.

Perhaps because it was too quiet in the car, the driver started to make conversation with Lin Xian.

First, they chatted about the weather, then road conditions, followed by various entertainment news and domestic and international events. Finally, the driver mysteriously began to talk about ghost stories rumored to have happened on this highway.

“This highway is haunted?” Lin Xian seemed to show some interest.

“It’s been a rumor for over a year now. They say a year ago, a truck ran over a girl, and the driver fled the scene. Since then, people often encounter a girl asking for a ride on this road. But once you let that girl into the car…”

The driver paused here to build suspense. Lin Xian played along and asked, “What happens?”

“Any car that girl rides in will experience a ghostly loop, always returning to the place where they picked up the girl. If you look at the girl again at this point, you’ll see her face as it was when she died in the accident, a face mangled with blood and flesh…”

“…Is that all? It’s not very scary.”

Stories about picking up female ghosts at night were a dime a dozen; this one was too common.

“Haha, I can’t believe you’re not scared.”

“Made up like that, I guess that story is fake after all?”

“No, it’s true,” the driver’s voice suddenly became unusually serious. He turned his head, no longer smiling, and said very earnestly, “This story is real.”

Lin Xian stopped talking, and silence enveloped them once again.

The car sped along the highway, with almost no other vehicles in sight.

Suddenly, a girl in a white dress appeared on the roadside ahead, waving at the car.

The driver said nothing and showed no signs of slowing down.

“Stop the car,” Lin Xian called out.

The driver didn’t listen and kept driving straight ahead. The car quickly passed the girl, and Lin Xian saw her figure getting smaller in the rearview mirror.

“Why didn’t you stop just now?”

The driver said coldly, “It’s a rule when driving at night, never let a woman hitchhike.”

“Why?”

Leaving a girl alone on the road at midnight was a dangerous thing.

“Remember the story I just told you? Because the one getting in the car might not be human.”

“…” Lin Xian wanted to say something but ultimately turned his head towards the window.

The car drove on for a long time, with only the sound of the engine audible inside.

Suddenly, a figure darted out from the roadside ahead. The driver frantically slammed on the brakes, and the piercing sound of braking shattered the quiet night. After a chaotic collision, the car came to a stop.

Both men in the car were breathing heavily. Lin Xian wanted to get out to check on the person’s condition, but the driver held him back.

“No… don’t go out.”

“Let go, that person might still be saved!”

Lin Xian felt the driver’s hand trembling.

“You… didn’t you notice that the person we hit was the woman who was trying to flag us down earlier?”

Lin Xian stopped trying to break free from his grip and after a moment said, “… Are you sure it was her?”

“I saw… very clearly.”

Lin Xian felt his hand shaking even more violently.

If it was the girl who tried to flag them down earlier, how could she have run in front of them so quickly and let them hit her?

“I’ll go check first… if you’re scared, stay in the car.”

No matter what, he had to get out and look. If they had really hit a person, every minute delayed in treatment reduced their chances of survival.

Opening the door and walking to the front of the car, Lin Xian didn’t see anyone at all. There was nothing on this road except the car.

The ground was also very clean.

But he had seen with his own eyes a person suddenly run out, and the feeling of impact had been very clear. How could there be no one? Lin Xian even carefully looked under the car, but there was nowhere a person could hide.

Had both of them been seeing things?

Or was it possible that what they hit… really wasn’t human?

A chill slowly rose from the soles of his feet, and Lin Xian thought it best to get back in the car quickly.

As Lin Xian walked back to the car, he noticed the driver’s expression was not normal, his face pale as he stared at him.

Lin Xian was very confused. Just as he was about to open the car door, he saw his own reflection in the window glass and vaguely noticed… something was clinging to his back, with a corner visible over his shoulder.

Lin Xian stiffly turned his head, slowly looking behind him.

A pale, bloodless face with gray, pupil-less eyes stared back at him.

Lin Xian drew in a sharp breath and stepped back several paces. After steadying himself, he looked behind him again, but there was nothing there.

They couldn’t stay here any longer. He opened the car door and got in. The driver immediately started the car, even nervously trying to start it several times before succeeding.

“I… I told you that woman wasn’t right. She must be the vengeful spirit of someone who died wrongfully on this road, now looking for people to claim their lives.”

The driver spoke frantically while Lin Xian remained silent, lips pressed together.

The car sped along, like a ghost racing down the highway in the dead of night. Their only desire now was to quickly reach the city.

Time ticked by slowly, but they still couldn’t see the city lights. By all accounts, they should have arrived long ago.

“It’s a ghost wall… We must have encountered a ghost wall,” the driver suddenly said, wiping sweat from his face. “Look, we’ve passed this billboard for the third time now.”

He was right. Lin Xian had noticed it too but hadn’t mentioned it for fear of panicking the driver further.

“Calm down. Is it possible we took a wrong turn and came back around?”

The driver laughed bitterly, “To be honest with you, I drive this route at least once a week and have never made a mistake. This is the first time I’ve encountered something like this. This isn’t a circular road, it’s impossible to loop back.”

Lin Xian thought for a moment and said in a low voice, “Keep driving.”

Along the way, he carefully observed the road conditions and noticed that after passing the fourth intersection, the car would always return to the starting point. This repeated several times.

In this seemingly endless predicament, one’s mood can become extremely agitated. The driver kept smoking cigarettes.

Lin Xian suggested taking a different turn at the next intersection, deviating from their original route to see if they could find a way out.

But the result was the same. No matter which way they went, they always ended up back on the original road after the fourth intersection.

It was now 1 AM. They should have returned to the city around midnight.

They hadn’t seen any other vehicles on the road. They tried using their phones, but there was no signal at all.

“That… that woman!”

Suddenly, the driver pointed ahead, extremely nervous. Lin Xian saw a woman standing under a streetlight ahead. She was still wearing white, just like before, standing there waving at them.

Of course, Lin Xian and the driver had no intention of stopping. Instead, they accelerated, trying to leave. But the woman in front suddenly rushed towards them. After a violent collision, the car stopped, and Lin Xian and the driver looked at each other.

“Damn it! To hell with this!” Finally, the driver gritted his teeth, stepped on the gas, and drove off.

They felt the vibration of running over something beneath the car, sending chills down their spines.

After the car drove steadily away, both of them let out a sigh of relief.

But after driving for a while, the same scene played out again…

That woman was always standing in the same place, as if waiting specifically for their arrival. No matter how the driver tried to avoid her, they would hit her again and then run over her body.

Like a scene from a bizarre ghost movie, it kept happening over and over. The oppression and tension weighing on their hearts was almost suffocating, and even fear seemed to have become numb.

If this continued, someone was bound to go insane. Worst of all, the car was almost out of gas.

With no other choice, they pulled over to the side of the road.

The driver took a deep drag on his cigarette and said, “How about I go to the gas station ahead and buy a can? I remember that gas station is only about two kilometers from here.”

Lin Xian rejected his proposal. “No, we’ve been going in circles here. Who knows if we’ll be able to find that gas station later?”

In the end, they could only sit silently in the car. Perhaps the best solution now was to sit in the car and wait for daybreak.

The driver lit another cigarette. There was a purple mark on the back of his hand holding the cigarette. Lin Xian glanced at it a couple of times. Blue-gray smoke wafted through the car. Lin Xian had never been a smoker, but he didn’t say anything, just slightly furrowed his brow.

“Ah, sorry, you don’t smoke, do you?”

Lin Xian shook his head, saying it was nothing.

The driver took another big puff, “By the way, sir, where are you from?”

“I’m from this city.”

“Heh, it’s good to be local. For outsiders like us, making a living here isn’t easy. We work ourselves to death every day and still can’t earn much. You probably don’t know, but I used to be a car mechanic. I’ve seen plenty of nice cars, but no matter how many I saw, they were never mine. At most, I could only touch them.”

Lin Xian’s mind suddenly stirred when he heard the driver mention he used to be a mechanic, vaguely recalling something.

“Is that so? As it happens, I have a friend who’s also a mechanic. Which garage did you work at before?”

“It was Ruixin. You probably don’t know it, but it’s one of the larger garages in the city.”

“…What a coincidence, my friend worked there too.”

“Haha, what’s his name? I’m sure I know him. Speaking of which, I had a bit of a conflict with some colleagues there before. Thinking about it now, I feel quite embarrassed.”

Lin Xian, who had found the driver’s face familiar from the start, said in a deep voice, “…Wen Dayong?”

The driver’s eyes widened in surprise, “How do you know my name?”

Seeing Lin Xian’s clearly guarded expression, he slowly dropped his previously honest and simple demeanor.

“I thought you didn’t recognize me, Officer.”

He smiled at Lin Xian, his eyes gleaming with malice.

Lin Xian understood now why the driver had seemed familiar from the beginning. The victim from before hadn’t been his focus, and with the dim lighting and subsequent events distracting him, he hadn’t realized that the driver before him was actually the deceased Wen Dayong.

The mark he had noticed on the driver’s hand earlier was actually a postmortem lividity.

He had wondered why a taxi would appear so conveniently in this suburban area where they were rare, as if waiting specifically for him. Now he realized it had all been arranged beforehand.

“Were you scared by what happened earlier? Hehe, was the script I wrote terrifying? Unfortunately, you weren’t as frightened as I had imagined.”

Wen Dayong had shed his disguise.

In the light, his greenish-black skin emitted a putrid stench of decay, with maggots slowly writhing underneath. Moreover, with each word he spoke, dark red blood oozed from his mouth and nose.

What appeared before Lin Xian was a decomposing corpse.

“I had wanted to play with you a bit longer, but time is running short. I’ll have to send you on your way earlier.”

As Wen Dayong spoke, his swollen hand, twice the size of a normal person’s, reached for Lin Xian’s neck.

Lin Xian, who had already been secretly reaching for the car door, tried desperately to open it, but found it had been locked at some point.

“I told you… you can’t escape,” it said in a hoarse voice. “If you beg me, I might let you die more comfortably.”

Wen Dayong laughed maliciously, his fingernails, half fallen off, about to touch Lin Xian’s neck.

Wen Dayong’s smile was one of enjoyment, always relishing the feeling of bullying the weak, a trait that hadn’t changed even after his death.

With nowhere to run, Lin Xian prepared for a desperate struggle, ready to strike as soon as the other’s hand touched him!

But when the moment truly came, he found he couldn’t move at all!

The nauseating stench of decay filled his nostrils, a dull pain in his neck accompanied by a sense of suffocation…

Was he about to die?

Just as his consciousness began to blur, he heard the sound of shattering jade…

Then came a sharp scream of agony. Suddenly, everything became very bright, so bright it hurt his eyes…

Finally, his consciousness slipped into darkness.