Chen Ge cradled the white cat's little head, wondering if the cat had seen far too many vengeful spirits lately and had grown indifferent to ordinary ghosts.
The white cat clearly didn't understand what Chen Ge was getting at. It shook its head, squirming to break free from his arms.
"Could be I just didn't notice," the taxi driver said after thinking it over. "I took a detour through the industrial park. There's a fork back there — if the truck headed toward the eastern suburbs, I might have just missed it altogether."
The driver was pretty sanguine about the whole thing. The thought of ghosts had never once crossed his mind.
"The moving truck had just come out of the eastern suburbs, so after dropping me off, why would it turn around and go back?" Chen Ge had already memorized the driver's face. "Maybe after he heard me talking to the police on the phone, he got nervous and went back to dispose of whatever he didn't want anyone to find?"
Chen Ge held the white cat closer, afraid it would claw up the taxi's upholstery. "Brother, has anything major happened in the eastern suburbs of Jiujiang recently? Assault cases, murders, that sort of thing?"
The driver glanced at Chen Ge through the rearview mirror, a flicker of alarm crossing his face. He had never picked up a passenger who opened with questions like this. "Haven't heard of anything in the eastern suburbs. The western suburbs are the rough part — several serious cases back to back in the last month or two."
"Western suburbs?" Chen Ge felt the name ring a faint bell. "I actually thought the west side was fairly quiet."
He couldn't get anything more out of the driver, so Chen Ge took out his phone and searched online.
Just as the driver had said, apart from some coverage about the Virtual Future amusement park, nothing of note had happened in Jiujiang's eastern suburbs in recent weeks.
"Calm on the surface, but something's stirring underneath. Once I free up my time, I'll come back here for a proper investigation."
He shifted into a more comfortable position, then opened his video recording app and checked the footage he had captured the night before.
He had started recording before entering the tunnel. In the video, he walked alone, calling out his own name, step by step deeper into the passage.
No sound effects, no atmospheric lighting — the raw, authentic horror of it all already surpassed most horror films.
You could read it plainly on Chen Ge's face: he didn't know what would happen next either. That sense of the unknown was precisely what drew people in.
After a dozen or so steps in the video, the light began to fade and the footage grew a little grainy.
Faintly, from somewhere in the video, you could just barely hear what sounded like a second set of footsteps echoing through the tunnel.
Yet Chen Ge's composure remained utterly unshaken, which stood in stark contrast to the white cat squirming frantically in his arms — an oddly compelling viewing experience.
The cat was clawing wildly, as though closing darkness were pressing in on them from every side, while the very star of the video sat there unmoved.
It was a classic horror-movie scene. If you put yourself in Chen Ge's shoes at that moment, your palms would be slick with sweat for him.
As he pressed deeper into the tunnel, the terror escalated. In the footage, Chen Ge seemed to spot something — his expression turned unnatural, and he kept glancing over his shoulder toward one particular direction.
But the video made it unmistakably clear: there was nothing there.
On his forty-second step, the lights cut out entirely. In the video, Chen Ge cried out for help and the white cat let out a piercing shriek.
A few seconds later the feed recovered, but the Chen Ge on screen looked as though he had been possessed — he stood there talking to empty air, and in the end he bent down, as though lifting something onto his back.
The video concluded with Chen Ge carrying that thing from the depths of the tunnel straight out into the open.