The white cat blinked its eyes, letting Chen Ge pick it up without resistance, as though it still hadn't figured out what was going on.
This time Chen Ge didn't even bring his backpack. He stuffed some loose change into his pockets and headed straight out the door.
"When I was little, my parents never let me go to the east suburb alone. Looking back on it now, there must be something dangerous hidden out there."
"My parents knew about those things, and those things probably knew something about my parents as well."
"The person who understands you best might not be a friend but an enemy. Maybe I can force some answers out of whatever's lurking in the east suburb — squeeze some clues about my parents out of them."
Chen Ge looked at the message on the black phone: "Pass through the tunnel, and it will let you see the secrets your heart has forgotten." This nightmare-level task should be able to point him in the right direction.
Every nightmare task was extremely important to Chen Ge — not only because they could change him, but more importantly, because nightmare tasks seemed to be connected to his parents' disappearance.
Chen Ge carried the cat out of New Century Paradise and waited by the roadside for a long time before he finally flagged down a taxi.
"Driver, take me to the White Dragon Cave tunnel." Chen Ge pulled open the door and climbed straight in.
"White Dragon Cave?" The driver turned around and looked at Chen Ge, his expression one of shock. "What are you doing heading there this late at night?"
"I'm working with a friend. We're going to film something there." Chen Ge set the white cat on his lap and pulled out his phone. "Just drive, I'm in a hurry."
"You really ought to think this through. That place isn't clean. A few years back, one of my fellow drivers got into an accident right there." The driver still hadn't started the car. From his tone, he was clearly reluctant to go.
"What do you mean 'not clean'? It's fine — just drop me off nearby and I'll make my own way." Chen Ge didn't want to give the driver a hard time, and it was exactly for this reason that he'd left so early.
"Why won't you listen to reason, young man? It's not like incidents at White Dragon Cave happen just once or twice. Search it online and think it over properly." The driver started the engine and pulled forward. "Back in the day, none of us night-shift taxi drivers would head toward White Dragon Cave. We'd rather take the long way around. It's really not about ripping you off — that place is genuinely unsettling."
Chen Ge figured the driver was a decent person, so he struck up a conversation. "Can you tell me more about what happened to that colleague of yours? I'm genuinely curious."
"He was the type who loved cutting corners. Overcharged passengers, pretty nasty character."
"The night it happened, he'd just dropped someone off and wanted to save time, so he cut through White Dragon Cave at two thirty in the morning."
"He had the car's walkie-talkie on and was chatting with us when suddenly a woman's voice came through on his end."
"We figured he had a passenger in the car, so none of us thought much of it."
"Later we realized something was wrong. He didn't seem to know there was anyone else in his car at all — he was still bragging about how many students he'd overcharged that day, how much money he'd made, and so on."
"I was on the channel at the time and warned him over the walkie-talkie, but after waiting a good while he never responded."
"The next afternoon, we got a notice from the company requiring all drivers to attend a safety briefing. When we asked around, we found out he'd been in an accident inside the tunnel the night before."
"There was only his car in the tunnel. The vehicle had no mechanical issues whatsoever, yet the accident happened under the strangest circumstances. He was trapped in the crushed driver's cabin the entire night, and they had to use a cutting tool to extract his body."
"The official investigation blamed driver fatigue, but those of us who'd spoken to him in the minutes before the crash all knew he had been wide awake and excited — there was no fatigue involved."