The two returned to first class one after the other, only to see Qiu Shuang leap to her feet and rush over, grabbing Xie Chun Ye before she had even begun speaking.
“Brother Xie, we found a clue! We found a clue!”
Qiu Shuang was holding Ning Si Si’s hand. She came in so fast she nearly sent Xie Chun Ye’s glasses flying. She glanced repeatedly toward economy class, made sure none of the flight attendants were nearby, then hurriedly drew the curtain shut.
“What happened?”
Xie Chun Ye guarded his glasses warily and took a step to the side.
“Si Si mentioned her parents just now, and something didn’t sound right,” Qiu Shuang whispered. “She said her mother used to be a very gentle, loving mom. But after her father came home one day, her mother suddenly started screaming all the time.”
“Screaming?”
“Yeah. She kept shouting ‘Si Si’ over and over. She would suddenly start crying and yelling in the middle of the night, often scaring Si Si awake.” Qiu Shuang rubbed the goose bumps on her arms. “Si Si wanted her mother to stop frightening her, but Jiang Ming Yue acted as though she couldn’t see her. She often ignored Si Si, kept shouting to herself, and ran all over the village…”
Xie Chun Ye looked at the bewildered Ning Si Si and said quietly, “The night Ning Feng came home, he probably did something terrible to both mother and daughter.”
“Brother Xie, you’ve been glued to Si Si for ages. How did you fail to ask her about any of this?” Xiao Li Li suddenly complained. “We only chatted with her for a little while, and she told us everything. The girl clearly needs an adult to comfort her right now.”
That silenced Xie Chun Ye for a full ten seconds. Adjusting his glasses, he said, “I thought my poor social skills were obvious.”
“…Huh?”
“I have social anxiety. I’m not good at talking to people. Wasn’t that obvious?” Xie Chun Ye looked slightly embarrassed as everyone stared at him with wide eyes.
Qiu Shuang shook her head in horror. “We genuinely couldn’t tell. We just thought you were aloof.”
“Fine. Have you asked everything you needed to ask?” Xie Chun Ye swiftly changed the subject. “I’m the type who focuses on staying alive and clearing the instance. I’m genuinely bad at communicating, so I’ll leave this part to you.”
Qiu Shuang sat up straighter. “Well, her father rarely came home before, and whenever he did, he always smelled terrible—like he’d been slaughtering pigs.”
“What does slaughtering pigs smell like?”
“I don’t know either,” Ning Si Si said in her soft, childish voice, lifting her head. “But every time Daddy came home, he killed a pig. After he killed it, he smelled really bad.”
“Was that ‘pig’… actually a pig?” Xiao Li Li muttered.
Looking thoughtful, Lin Wen Jing gently asked, “Si Si, did the pork your father killed taste good?”
“He wouldn’t let me eat it. Only Mommy could.” Ning Si Si pouted and tried hard to remember. “He said… he said Mommy had to eat pork to cure her illness. Mommy came from somewhere else, and her heart wasn’t with our family. Only after she ate the pork would she truly become one of the family…”
“Oh my god. That was definitely not pork!”
A chill swept over Qiu Shuang. She immediately burrowed into Lin Wen Jing’s arms for comfort, but when she looked up and met Lin Wen Jing’s calm gaze, she became frightened and quickly drew back again.
“What’s wrong?” Lin Wen Jing tilted her head.
“Jing Jing, you don’t seriously want to eat me, do you?” Qiu Shuang asked carefully.
“A little, perhaps.” Lin Wen Jing smiled, giving an evasive answer.
Xiao Li Li, long accustomed to the two of them, ignored the exchange and continued questioning the girl. “Si Si, how many times did your mother eat the pork?”
Ning Si Si tilted her head and counted on her fingers. “One, two, three…”
When she reached ten, she ran out of fingers and said unhappily, “More than ten times!”
Everyone exchanged glances. Whatever lay behind this was becoming darker by the minute. Xiao Li Li cleared her throat and continued, “Did your mother like eating pork?”
“Not at first. She would scold Daddy and say… say he bought the wrong meat because it tasted sour.”
“What happened later?”
“Later, Mommy loved eating it.” Ning Si Si looked even more aggrieved. “But she wouldn’t give me any. When I wanted some, she smacked my bottom really hard and said children weren’t allowed to fight adults for food.”
At this point, Ning Si Si could not help rubbing her eyes. “Mommy started acting strange after that…”
A child her age could not explain things very clearly, so Qiu Shuang took the opportunity to emerge from Lin Wen Jing’s arms and elaborate. “Her mother became increasingly unstable later on. The more she ate, the worse she became. The only time she wasn’t frightening was immediately after eating the pork. But after Ning Feng came home for the final time, she completely lost her mind.”
“Where did Ning Feng go after Jiang Ming Yue went insane?” Xie Chun Ye frowned slightly.
“No idea. Si Si said she kept following her mother and had no time to pay attention to Ning Feng.”
“She kept following her?”
Qiu Shuang nodded. “Yes. Isn’t that strange? How could a five- or six-year-old child have the stamina to chase a deranged adult across mountains and fields without stopping? And even after they became separated, she somehow knew to take a bus to find her mother.”
Xie Chun Ye adjusted his glasses. “You’ve identified the key issue. I brought Si Si along from the beginning because I realized I had to keep an eye on her.”
“As for why I needed to watch her…” Xie Chun Ye sighed. “Naturally, it’s because she isn’t human at all…”
The instant those words fell, the plane began shaking violently, drowning out the end of his sentence beneath the deafening noise.
A powerful sensation of weightlessness dragged everyone downward.
Ding-dong—
“Ladies and gentlemen, the aircraft has encountered turbulence. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts. The restrooms are temporarily closed.”
The familiar voice came over the announcement system. The plane stabilized slightly afterward, but it continued dropping from time to time, keeping everyone’s nerves stretched tight.
Song Zang had already obediently curled up in his seat and pulled his seat belt as tight as it would go.
After hearing the announcement, he clenched the hem of his shirt. His face gradually turned pale as he whispered to Xie Chun Ye, “Brother Xie, s-she’s still alive?”
Xie Chun Ye remained seated steadily, undisturbed by the sudden drops. He gave Song Zang a reassuring look before fixing a sharp gaze on Ning Si Si.
The voice over the announcement system was identical to that of the dead flight attendant, but he had no time to explain that anomaly now.
While everyone else was being tossed from side to side, the true danger was silently revealing itself right before their eyes.
Ning Si Si had changed.
She held the illustrated safety card in her hands. Sensing Xie Chun Ye staring at her, she asked blankly, “Big Brother, what’s wrong?”
No one answered.
The sounds of turbulence and objects colliding echoed around them, yet the silence among the group somehow made everything feel deathly still.
None of them could make out her face.
She looked like a faceless figure with twin ponytails. As the aircraft shook, her features gradually distorted and twisted counterclockwise into an eerie spiral, becoming increasingly blurred.
“Big Brother?”
A slit opened within the discolored, twisting vortex, and her young, bewildered voice seeped through it.
Still, no one spoke. Ning Si Si raised a hand and touched her own face.
“Big Brother, my face… My face is gone…”
Her frightened voice gradually rose into a shrill, furious scream. She sat in her seat crying and throwing a tantrum like an ordinary child, but the words coming from her mouth were terrifying.
Xie Chun Ye did not move, and no one else dared speak without being prompted. They feared accidentally enraging her and causing another disaster.
“Give me back my face! Give me back my face!”
Before long, the source of Ning Si Si’s anger became clear.
“I don’t have a face! Daddy said he would find me a new one! Which bad person stole my face?!”
Song Zang froze.
Her father had promised to find her a new face…?
Song Zang suddenly remembered the thin black thread on the bus that had tried to drag him into the darkness.
Had he been unable to resist and been strangled or dragged away, what would have awaited him?
Would they have peeled the skin from his face and put it on Ning Si Si so that she would not suddenly lose control?
Well, damn. This game had one hell of a sadistic streak.
“Your face isn’t here. We’ll take you to find it.”
After considering the situation for a moment, Xie Chun Ye spoke calmly.
Ning Si Si’s head snapped toward him. “Find my face! Find my face!”
“Of course we’re going to find it. That means Si Si needs to sit nicely and take the plane with us,” Lin Wen Jing soothed her in an exceptionally gentle voice, not forgetting to add a threat at the end. “If the plane crashes, you’ll never get your face back.”
“Really?”
Ning Si Si tilted her head. The spiral covering her face spun faster, giving off a dizzying sensation that made it impossible to stare directly at her. “If you can’t find it, you have to give me your face instead.”
“We’re going to Liuhe City now. Your father hid your face there. Until we arrive, Si Si mustn’t scream or make a fuss again. Bad children get thrown off airplanes,” Lin Wen Jing continued threatening her in the gentlest voice imaginable, completely unafraid.
“All right, Big Sister.” The threat seemed remarkably effective on the girl. Her distorted, blurred face turned toward Lin Wen Jing and stared directly at her. “You look a little like my mommy. Like Mommy before she became sick.”
“Mm. Mommy is waiting for you at home. You don’t want to frighten her, do you? Once we find your face, we can go home and visit Mommy. All right?”
“All right, Big Sister.”
Just like that, Ning Si Si became eerily calm. She lowered her head and continued flipping through the safety card, softly humming the melody of “Two Tigers.” Aside from her missing face and her thoroughly unsettling appearance, she behaved no differently from an ordinary little girl.
Xie Chun Ye lowered his voice. “We should be close to clearing the instance. We only need to deal with the remaining Yak Emissary.”
“What’s the Yak Emissary?”
“One of the Earth Mother Goddess’s guardian deities.” Xie Chun Ye did not explain the concept further and continued, “The time loop appeared because the woman who lost her son sacrificed to the Earth Mother Goddess. She failed to resurrect him, but she summoned several unclean things with motives of their own. And… although time rewound, the emissaries she summoned did not rewind with it. They’ve remained aboard this plane the entire time.”
Realization dawned on Qiu Shuang. “The lesson here is that we should reject feudal superstition.”
Xie Chun Ye paused, then said flatly, “A little superstition is fine, actually. If we hadn’t killed that woman and she had performed a second sacrifice after leaving the subway, her son might genuinely have been resurrected. She successfully summoned emissaries who walk among humans, and the Earth Mother Goddess generously grants Her believers countless rewards.”
“Brother Xie, how do you know so much?”
“I used your phone to research Tianhai City’s records and documents. You’re the one who never checked your browser history,” Xie Chun Ye said speechlessly.
Qiu Shuang: …!
“Fine. Then where is this Yak Emissary?”
Xie Chun Ye glanced toward the front of the cabin. “The voice from the announcement just now came from its human vessel.”
As though responding to his answer, the aircraft began shaking even more violently, and the oxygen masks dropped from above their seats.
Following Xie Chun Ye’s gaze, everyone saw a flight attendant answer the cabin phone, then walk toward the cockpit with steps that were unnaturally steady.
Her heels sank into the cashmere carpet, squeezing out faint traces of blood hidden beneath it and releasing thin wisps of a metallic stench.
From behind, she looked poised and elegant, but when Xie Chun Ye adjusted his glasses, all he could see was an enormous cloud of filthy darkness that made his eyes sting.
“So you have a way to kill it, right, Brother Xie? Do you need our help?”
Xiao Li Li pulled out the emergency hammer, looking remarkably eager.
Xie Chun Ye nodded slightly. After thinking for a moment, he turned toward Ning Si Si. “Si Si, we truly want to help you find your face, but the bad uncles and aunties on this plane won’t allow us to. What should we do?”
“No! No! I want my face!” Ning Si Si, who had only just calmed down and returned to her book, immediately became agitated again.
Lin Wen Jing instantly understood Xie Chun Ye’s intention. Using her gentlest voice, she coaxed, “Then, Si Si, shall we beat up the bad people together? Once they’re dead, no one will be able to bully us anymore.”
“Okay! Let’s beat up the bad people!”
Her childish yet piercing cry echoed through the air.
Xie Chun Ye coughed lightly and unfastened his seat belt. “Good. Then let me explain how we’re going to hijack this plane.”
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