Chen Ge's plan was actually quite simple — he would use the special connection between ghosts to retrace the path he had just taken.
Unlike last time, he decided to have Bai Qiulin take his place.
He wanted to see whether a ghost, blindfolded, would experience the same thing he just had.
Bai Qiulin had barely been summoned and hadn't even grasped what Chen Ge wanted when the boss blindfolded him with a sleeve.
"Don't think about anything. Empty your mind, then walk forward." Chen Ge and Xu Yin stood three or four meters away from Bai Qiulin, watching his every move.
If danger arose, they could rescue him in time.
Not knowing what his boss was up to but believing in his heart that his boss was always right, Bai Qiulin didn't ask questions and simply did as Chen Ge instructed.
He walked forward along the tunnel for a long time, but he never encountered what Chen Ge had experienced.
Even after the blindfold was removed, Bai Qiulin was still thoroughly confused, completely unable to understand what his boss was trying to do.
"Blindfolding a ghost doesn't work. So why did it happen before?" Most ghosts were formed from the obsessive will of the dead. The biggest difference between them and the living was that they had no physical body — only a soul.
"The reason I encountered that situation… could it be that when you open your eyes in this tunnel, you see the world of the living, but when you close them, it becomes the soul that travels forward?"
An ordinary person who stumbled upon such a phenomenon would never think along these lines, but Chen Ge was different. In certain respects he possessed extremely rich experience, and his way of reasoning was fundamentally unlike that of the average person. More often than not, he would even consider problems from a ghost's perspective.
"I can't be a hundred percent certain. This is just one possibility. But the experiment does indirectly prove something — only when I am the one blindfolded do those strange things occur." The idea of having a ghost substitute for him to find a way out wouldn't work, and Chen Ge was back where he started.
"Looks like I'll have to go myself. But with my employees protecting me, it should be much safer this time." Chen Ge brought the ghosts back to the taxi, gave Old Zhou and Bai Qiulin a few instructions, then blindfolded himself, placed a hand on the wall, and walked deeper into the tunnel for the third time.
Darkness swallowed Chen Ge whole, but this time he knew his employees were right beside him, so he wasn't too worried.
He walked straight ahead for a full ten minutes before stopping.
The fork he had expected to appear never materialized. The tunnel had only one path — straight ahead, with no end in sight.
"Why did I fail this time too? Where exactly is the problem?" Comparing the first and third attempts, the only difference was that the first time Chen Ge had been alone, while the third time he was accompanied by all his ghost employees.
"Could there be a limit on the number of people? No — it's more likely that the presence of my employees scared away whatever was supposed to approach me." When the taxi driver had vanished, he'd mentioned that something strange had appeared on the left side of Chen Ge's face. Thinking back, the reason things went wrong in the tunnel might have been connected to that thing.
"The driver vanishing mid-sentence — that was probably the work of that thing too." Chen Ge stared into the pitch-black tunnel, uncertain. If he brought his employees along, the creature wouldn't dare show itself, but if he sent them away, he couldn't guarantee his own safety.
He glanced down at his phone screen, intending to check how much time he had left before the mission deadline, only to discover that the time on his phone was running backward — as if it weren't a clock, but a countdown.
"Why is my phone malfunctioning? Why is the time going in reverse? I've been in this tunnel for at least half an hour, yet the time still shows when I first entered."
Something was definitely wrong. Chen Ge leaned his back against the wall, furrowed his brows, and sank into thought.