Chapter 141: Deep Coma

After hanging up the phone, I headed straight for the location Lu Ayao had given me. At the same time, a faint, ominous premonition stirred in my heart because the place he described was an intersection.

By the time I arrived, the scene was already a chaotic mess. The broad lanes were almost completely covered in splatters of blood. Aside from the blood and unrecognizable fragments of organs, there were fallen car parts. The brake marks from the dump truck stretched at least a dozen meters, and the driver was crouching on the curb, clutching his head.

Lu Ayao was standing ahead of me in the road. My gaze slowly shifted downward and fell upon the “person” lying on the ground—or rather, I didn’t know if I should call him a complete “person” anymore, as his lower body had been crushed to pieces.

Seeing me arrive, Lu Ayao took a step back, blocking my view of Liang Zicheng’s face on the ground.

My running footsteps came to a halt at that moment, my brain completely going blank. I could no longer feel the pain in the back of my head. Stiffly, I moved forward to take a look, but Lu Ayao pressed a hand firmly on my shoulder and showed me the ashes of some paper.

“I’ve already called the police. When I chased him here, I saw him get run over by the truck. He must have been dragged for a distance. He’s already stopped breathing. I searched around for the paper he was clutching, but these ashes are all that’s left.”

My brain was completely unable to process any of this. I tried to take another step forward, but Lu Ayao blocked me firmly. He pulled a tissue from his pocket, stuffed it into my hand, and looked at me. “Wipe the blood off your head. When the cops get here, they won’t be easy to fool. Think about what you’re going to say.”

I crumpled the tissue in my hand and looked across the street at the driver responsible for the accident. The man’s state was completely off. Normally, when someone hits a person, their instinctive reaction is panic, but I couldn’t see a trace of that on his face. The driver just crouched there in silence with his head in his hands, not saying a word, as if simply waiting for the police to arrive.

Besides, this was clearly in the city center. At this time of night, even if he hit someone and couldn’t brake in time, it shouldn’t have resulted in dragging the person dozens of meters forward. I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling. For a moment, my thoughts were so scattered that I couldn’t find a single anchor for them.

Although I couldn’t find a particularly solid reason, I still stubbornly believed that Liang Zicheng’s death was no accident.

Lu Ayao probably noticed that my gaze wasn’t very friendly at that moment. He immediately interrupted my thoughts and urged me softly, “Gan Ji, you need to calm down. He’s definitely going to insist that your classmate suddenly rushed into the road and he didn’t see him. You have no evidence. Accusing him without proof will only make the police view you as a suspect. Listen to me.”

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to stay calm, and shook my head at him. “I understand. I won’t say that. But let me see the body. At least let me remember.”

Lu Ayao locked eyes with me for half a minute before stepping aside of his own accord. That was perhaps the first time in my life I had seen a body so utterly mangled. Half of his face had been scraped away while being dragged across the ground, rendering his features almost unrecognizable. All I could see was blood.

A few minutes later, the police arrived. They took photos of the scene and brought us all to the station to give statements. Later, they tried to call Liang Zicheng’s parents, but the line remained busy.

The entire process took about five hours. Throughout it all, I remained unnaturally calm. When the police asked what I was doing out so late, I said we had planned a late-night haunted house exploration, but Liang Zicheng got scared halfway through and ran off alone. We ran after him, but before we could catch up, he was hit by a truck.

The police then asked about my injury. I told them I had been running too fast and banged my head against a wall.

The two officers questioning me clearly didn’t believe my story, so they tried every trick in the book to trip up Lu Ayao and me. But my thoughts remained sharp and clear the entire time, and I didn’t fall for any of their traps. Not only was I able to keep my story airtight, but I even managed to fire back a few sharp responses.

Lu Ayao was a master liar. He spoke only the few lines he needed to, completely bypassing anything outside that scope. In the end, having nothing on us, they had no choice but to let us go.

When Lu Ayao followed me out of the police station, it was already past eight in the morning. The sun hung high in the sky. We hailed a taxi at the curb to head home.

Sitting in the car, sensation slowly returned to my limbs. Only then did I realize my body was ice-cold from head to toe. Yet I couldn’t put into words what I was grieving for. My relationship with Liang Zicheng had always been terrible; he had even managed to set me up one last time right before he died.

Through this entire ordeal, I felt an inexplicable, profound agony for the first time—a pain far exceeding any physical hurt. Perhaps from the moment I saw his body, my mind had automatically added Liang Zicheng to the list of people who had died because of me.

I did not kill Boren, yet Boren died because of me^[1]. Suddenly, I truly understood what Bai Shenxian had told me before: your fate is cursed, so anyone who stays around you will end up either dead or maimed.

“I want to go back to Xinchang Bank,” I said.

Lu Ayao said to me, “You don’t look good. Go home and rest first. You mentioned yesterday that you have classes this afternoon.”

I insisted stubbornly, “We’re going back.”

A person set in their ways can be relentless. Lu Ayao couldn’t win against me and had the taxi change direction. We returned to the former site of the Xinchang Bank vault, but this time I didn’t go to the second floor. Instead, I chose an unremarkable washroom located directly beneath the archive room.

This washroom was in the exact same position as the archive room, sitting right below it. This space had originally been used to store banknotes. Judging by the list from before, the size of the courtyard’s vault couldn’t possibly hold that much volume. I suspected there was another, far larger vault hidden here for storing important VIP items.

The washroom was tiny, so narrow that only one person could pass through at a time. I gripped the sink that stood out awkwardly in the middle of the path and gave it a push. As I did, I heard a sharp click from the base.

Lu Ayao heard it too. He stepped over to help me push. Once the sink was moved aside, a wooden panel was revealed behind it—it was a hidden door.

Lu Ayao stepped forward and pushed the door open. I saw a set of stone stairs extending downward behind it. He pulled out a flashlight, turned it on, and walked ahead to clear the path for me.

Following the light down, I realized the stone stairs weren’t actually that long, only a dozen steps or so. At the bottom was a hand-carved chamber, and directly facing the stairs was a “door” of remarkably complex construction.

Calling it a door wasn’t quite accurate. In fact, it looked more like a traditional bank vault. It was completely circular, with a lock core set into a particularly complex pattern. Built on a large scale, the pattern alone was about the size of my hand. The carved lines on the door were ancient and refined; this was a purely handcrafted mechanism door.

Where could such specialized craftsmanship have come from?

I reached out to feel the patterns on the door, my gaze finally landing on the lock core. “Without a key, this door won’t open, and we won’t be able to get inside,” I said.

If He Yu were here, he would certainly ask why we couldn’t just use explosives to force it open. But he wasn’t, and Lu Ayao and I shared a tacit understanding not to bring up that idea. We both knew full well that the foundation here was already quite unstable. Using explosives underground would cause the building above to collapse completely, burying us right alongside this door.

“The booklet Liang Zicheng snatched from me at the end had my grandfather’s name on it,” I said.

Lu Ayao looked at me, and I continued, “The booklet records that my grandfather kept depositing things here. By my rough estimate, he stored at least forty items, but I don’t know what they actually are. We’ll only find out once we open this door.”

Lu Ayao also stepped forward to touch the door, frowning. “This door is very thick.”

He looked at me then, shifting the flashlight beam slightly as he changed the subject. “Regardless, we should head back for now.”

Exhausted from being up all night, I couldn’t process Lu Ayao’s words right away. Before I could react, he pushed me back up the stone stairs.

I walked in front, and as I bent down to crawl out of the former site of Xinchang Bank, I was instantly hit by the scorching sunlight. Suddenly, my footsteps began to feel incredibly unsteady. A massive crowd surged in front of me, but their faces were already turning into a blur.

A second later, my foot caught on something and I tripped, pitching forward toward the ground. At the same time, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a familiar figure sprint out from the crowd and rush over to catch me.

In that instant, a din of voices and footsteps filled my ears, but I no longer had the awareness to distinguish who they belonged to.