Chapter 150: Chapter 141: Unresolved Injustice, Slanderous Tongue Kills
"You... you’re back again?" Pei Qiuyu was taken aback, staring wide-eyed at the people before her.
The driver holding a notebook was stunned, "What do you mean ’back again’?"
"Before you guys came, an ambulance had already been here and took the injured person away. It was... it was a vehicle just like yours," said a crew member, pointing at the car.
"Impossible! We only received one emergency call tonight, and it was from you guys!" the driver replied with absolute certainty.
Now everyone was dumbfounded. Seasoned veterans Tang Cui and Lu Ji felt a chill run down their spines. If it wasn’t a hospital ambulance, what had taken Yang Xiao, Chu Xi, and the others away?
And they had taken four people all at once.
This was trouble...
"Make a call! Quick, call them!!" someone cried out desperately, suddenly remembering that Song Yan had his mobile phone on him, urging loudly.
...
On a rainy night, an ambulance sped along the highway. Perhaps because of the poor weather, there were very few other vehicles on the road, reflecting the poverty of the town.
The night wind carried a flyer that landed accurately on the windshield. It was a pink flyer made of the cheapest quality paper. The content was smudged by the rain and illegible, but the headline was shocking.
Injustice unsolved, tongues murder!
These eight characters were written in bright red ink, as if penned with a brush soaked in fresh blood.
A paper on the windshield could obstruct the driver’s view, so the ambulance pulled over to the side of the road. The masked driver got out alone, tore off the flyer, then got back into the vehicle.
Throughout this process, the driver hadn’t said a word. To be precise, he had been mostly silent the whole trip. He maintained the quiet and reserve expected of a medical professional, but there was something else, something indescribable and odd about him.
At that moment, Yang Xiao felt a sudden shiver in his heart. He noticed that the driver seemed to have difficulty with his leg while getting in and out of the vehicle, walking with a slight limp.
A leg injury!
But why would a hospital allow someone with an injured leg to drive an ambulance?
With growing suspicion, more and more doubts surfaced in his mind. Yang Xiao had never been in an ambulance before, but shouldn’t there be more than just a driver on an ambulance? Wasn’t it strange that there was no medical personnel?
To confirm his suspicion, Yang Xiao saw a opened pack of cigarettes in the ambulance and casually grabbed it, which conveniently had a plastic lighter inside.
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Yang Xiao didn’t smoke, just took a puff, then slowly exhaled, observing the driver’s reaction with his peripheral vision.
Director Ding had said that the deceased male teacher hated the smell of smoke.
The driver said nothing and did not make any move to stop him, but the next second, a heart-stopping moment occurred for Yang Xiao. He noticed through his peripheral vision the driver’s right hand, resting on the steering wheel, moved, the thumb and index finger rubbing together gently, almost like an unconscious habit.
"Your character, the Beast Master of the Mountain Village, has some special habits. I’ve set it so that whenever the character is thinking, he would rub his fingers together," echoed Director Ding’s words in Yang Xiao’s mind.
Rubbing fingers!!
His back was instantly soaked with cold sweat. Yang Xiao knew he was in trouble. He took a deep drag from the cigarette, then with a natural motion snuffed out the butt. He couldn’t provoke the driver.
To be precise, he couldn’t provoke this ghost.
He had been careless. He just wanted to take the opportunity to get closer to Xiang Xiaolin and extract key information, but he never expected that the ghost would disguise itself as an emergency responder and come in an ambulance.
The situation was getting worse and worse, the temperature inside the driver’s cab was slowly dropping. Although the driver remained silent, focused intently on the road ahead, Yang Xiao could clearly feel a pair of icy eyes staring at him.
This ghost had set its sights on him, probably sensing that he had grown suspicious. At this point, any further elaborate acting was superfluous; this was destined to be a one-way journey.
What to do?
What could he do... to survive?!
As Yang Xiao agonized over a way to stay alive, Song Yan in the back of the van also realized that something was amiss. Although they couldn’t see the driver’s cab from the rear compartment, there was a small transparent window at the back through which they could see the outside scenery.
Song Yan noticed that the road they were taking became more and more remote; there had been some buildings with lights on both sides of the road just a moment ago, but now, you could hardly even see any other cars on the road.
"Buzz..."
"Buzz..."
Song Yan’s phone in his pocket suddenly vibrated. He took it out and saw that it was a call from someone named Crew Zhao Ge.
Song Yan clicked to answer, but strangely, there was only intermittent static on the other end, no one spoke, as if the signal was poor.
As the call timer ticked on, and after waiting for 10 seconds, Song Yan, sensing something was wrong, decisively hung up.
"What’s wrong?" Yu Mi asked anxiously. At the moment, Xiang Xiaolin was unconscious, so she could only rely on Yang Xiao and Song Yan, who thankfully seemed reliable enough.
Song Yan furrowed his brow, staring at the phone screen, and said cautiously, "I don’t know, Crew Zhao Ge called, but didn’t say anything."
"Then call him back and ask, maybe it’s something urgent?" Yu Mi suggested.
"No, what if the person on the other end isn’t from the crew? Then we’d be in trouble!"
Yu Mi was taken aback for a second, then instinctively hugged herself tighter as she vividly recalled the recent events that Yang Xiao and Song Yan had experienced. Just the night before, they had received a phone call from Luo Zhaoqing, and the crew member who was taken away by "Luo Zhaoqing" was still missing.
"Is it... that thing calling?" Yu Mi grew more and more fearful the more she thought about it.
"I don’t know, but better safe than sorry."
Before Song Yan had finished speaking, his phone vibrated again, this time the caller ID showed Director Ding, and the unease in Song Yan’s heart intensified.
"Here it comes again..."
In her despair, Yu Mi shifted her body, trying to get farther away from the phone, as if doing so would prevent attracting those filthy things.
Director Ding’s call went unanswered, and almost without pause, another call came in, this time from Props Sister Zhou.
Call after call, Yu Mi was scared, but Song Yan smelled something fishy. If their cover was blown, then what was the point of the same old tricks? According to Song Yan’s understanding of those entities, this did not seem like their style.
Changing perspectives, if the person on the other end wasn’t a ghost but a human, why would they call one after another?
It didn’t seem like an emergency at the school; rather, it looked like a warning. Song Yan’s heart skipped a beat. Could it be there was trouble on their end?
Holding the phone, after a brief moment of thought, Song Yan sent a text message to Director Ding, but after waiting for two minutes, there was no reply, not even a phone call.
Song Yan sensed something was wrong. He leaned against the small window at the back of the car door, looking outside. The area alongside the road became increasingly desolate, the buildings with lights fewer and farther between. This was certainly not the way to the hospital.
