Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Liang Jianzhang was Liang Yan’s uncle.

His biological uncle.

Liang Yan told me this after he woke up in the hospital.

After he came back from Jiugang Station, his high fever wouldn’t go down, and my mom insisted on taking him to the hospital.

The doctor said he was severely dehydrated, hypothermic, malnourished, and had many old injuries.

I asked the doctor why he looked as if he had suddenly aged so much.

The doctor was silent for a few seconds, then tactfully suggested that we see a psychiatrist.

When Liang Yan woke up, my mom had gone to buy porridge.

Only he and I were left in the ward.

He opened his eyes, and the first thing he said was still, “Senior.”

I set the fruit knife down on the bedside cabinet.

“Call me that again, and I’ll carve you up.”

He shut up.

Very obediently.

It made me feel a little unused to it.

Three years ago, on that stormy night, he had clearly been covered in blood, yet still dared to grab me and refuse to let go.

Now he was more like a student who had done something wrong.

I asked, “What exactly did you go through?”

He looked at the ceiling and only spoke after a while. “I stayed on that vehicle for twenty years.”

But for me, only three years had passed.

After he was trapped in the Jiugang Line, he met my future self.

At that time, I was already forty-nine years old, an Echo Station Volunteer.

The so-called Echo Station wasn’t a time machine from a sci-fi movie.

It was more like an accident-residue containment point.

Some deaths are too sudden, and a person’s final thought will get stuck in a certain place, repeatedly calling out to the person they most want to see.

The Jiugang Line was exactly that kind of place.

Back then, before Liang Jianzhang drove off, he changed the route on his own.

He heard the voice of his dead wife, saying she was waiting for him at Jiugang North Station.

He knew perfectly well that the roads were closed because of the storm, but he still drove there.

All the passengers on the vehicle also heard the people they each missed.

They didn’t realize they were being drawn in by the voices.

After the vehicle plunged into the river, the last thoughts of seventeen people were locked onto that line.

They couldn’t accept that only they had died.

They began searching for Substitute Passengers.

Twenty years ago, my mom almost became one of them.

My dad noticed something was wrong and dragged her off the vehicle, and he also used the sentence I had written-“Mom didn’t get on the vehicle”-to nail her back to reality.

I asked, “Then why does your uncle hate me?”

Liang Yan fell silent.

“Because he thinks that if your mom had gotten on the vehicle, the Jiugang Line would have been full, and they would have been able to leave.”

I almost laughed from anger.

“The person who got an entire vehicle of people killed is blaming someone who didn’t get on?”

“When people are trapped for too long, they push the blame onto whoever is easiest to hate.”

Liang Yan’s voice was very flat when he said this.

But I heard something else in it.

“He hated you too?”

He lowered his eyes.

“My parents died early. My uncle was the one who raised me. After the Jiugang Accident, he disappeared, and everyone said he was the driver responsible. After I grew up, I kept wanting to prove he hadn’t done it on purpose.”

“So you got on the vehicle?”

“Mm.”

At twenty-six, Liang Yan tracked down the rumors about the Jiugang Line and went to the abandoned station alone.

He thought he could find evidence proving his uncle was innocent.

But the moment he got on the vehicle, he was trapped for twenty years.

He stopped there.

I continued for him. “And then you met my future self.”

“She saved me many times.”

Liang Yan looked at me.

“She taught me how not to respond when the dead called my name, taught me how to tell echoes apart from the voices of the living, and taught me how to use anchors to bring people off the vehicle.”

“So that’s why you call me Senior.”

“Mm.”

I felt a little strange inside.

He was talking about my future self.

But when he looked at the current me, his gaze was still very serious.

I turned my face away.

“Don’t treat me as her.”

“I know.”

He said,

“She has a slightly better temper than you.”

I turned back and glared at him.

At last, there was a faint hint of a smile in his eyes.

Very faint.

But it was better than his constant lifelessness.

I asked, “Where is she now?”

Liang Yan’s smile faded.

The ward fell quiet.

I had a bad feeling.

He didn’t answer right away.

At the door came the faint rustle of a plastic bag.

My mom stood outside the door, carrying porridge in her hand, her face pale.

Liang Yan said in a low voice, “She stayed on the vehicle.”

“To trade for me getting off.”