Thriller Zone: From the Mental Hospital to the Ghostly World

Chapter 444 [The Train] Exhausted to death!

"He saw it with his own eyes?" Du Tingfeng raised an eyebrow.

To survive witnessing the ghost firsthand is incredibly lucky.

“Yes.” Chen Yuetan nodded. “One night, he was woken up by the urge to urinate and suddenly heard a faint clanging sound.”

"It's like the noise of a sledgehammer striking steel."

"Everyone else in the village said that Zhang Qiang was a hothead, and he really was. He was incredibly bold; he would get out of bed and go outside to take a look."

"However, according to the report from that year, Zhang Qiang himself felt that in the dead of night, in the middle of nowhere, how could someone be repairing something outside?"

He suspected that someone disliked him and his brother and was deliberately causing trouble.

Looking at the report, Han Bing added some background information: "At that time, there was a cadre in their village named Zhang Tiegen. He had a conflict with Zhang Qiang and Zhang Zhu over land issues. The two brothers always felt that Zhang Tiegen was secretly making things difficult for them."

Chen Yuetan hummed in agreement and continued, "Anyway, he picked up a shovel and went out of the house, and sure enough, he saw a faint light shining in the nearby wheat field."

“There was someone squatting on the ground knocking on something. Zhang Qiang thought for a moment and immediately thought of Zhang Tiegen.”

"He's convinced that bastard is the one who destroyed his family's land!"

"The Zhang brothers were poor and relied on their two acres of land to make a living. It was one thing for Zhang Tiegen to cause trouble, but now he wanted to ruin their livelihood. This made Zhang Qiang furious!"

He immediately and quietly went into the field, and the knocking grew louder and louder, but soon Zhang Qiang was about to see the man's face clearly—

"But at that moment, his vision suddenly blurred."

"Looking again, the figure that was just inches away from him suddenly became hundreds of meters away!"

"Just then, a cold wind blew by, chilling Zhang Qiang to the bone. It instantly dawned on him: how could Zhang Tiegen teleport?"

"No, how could a normal person teleport?"

"But just then, he suddenly heard a few strange noises."

"Wow—"

"Wow—"

It's like the sound of a strong wind blowing through wheat ears.

But... it was the height of summer then, and there wasn't that much wind at all.

According to Zhang Qiang, he suddenly woke up from his dream, didn't care about anything, and immediately bent down and hid in the wheat field.

He felt his heart leap into his throat, because in that split second of the crashing sound, Zhang Qiang saw with his own eyes that next to the person striking the hammer...

The wheat ears bowed down to both sides in unison, leaving a gap wide enough for one person in the middle, as if an unseen person was pushing aside the stalks and walking towards them through the wheat ridges!

And the person squatting down was still knocking.

clang.

clang.

It's as if you're not aware of anything at all.

Zhang Qiang didn't dare to move. He didn't know whether the invisible figure was a soul that had left its body, or whether there were two ghosts here all along.

But in any case, he had a premonition that if he were discovered, he would die without a burial place!

Huddled in the wheat field, using the wheat ears as cover, Zhang Qiang was terrified and could only pray that the ghosts wouldn't come this way.

He said he didn't know which Buddha's name he chanted had an effect, but the unseen ghost, although it eventually came toward him, stopped after a short while.

After a while, the rooster kept at home started crowing, and the crowing sound disappeared.

Zhang Qiang peeked out and made sure the two ghostly things were gone before daring to go out and check.

Sure enough, several shallow footprints appeared in the parted wheat field.

What surprised Zhang Qiang even more was that a crooked railway track suddenly appeared in the wheat field!

That ghost is building a railway!

He straightened up and walked back along the railway, only to find that the railway was very long, spanning the entire village, but no one knew when it was built or had ever seen it!

When dawn broke, Zhang Qiang went back to look at it again, but everything from last night felt like a dream.

That long railway line has disappeared.

As far as the eye can see, there are still endless wheat fields.

But every night after that, Zhang Qiang would wake up at the same time and hear a continuous knocking sound outside...

But he never dared to go out again.

“It really is a ghost railway.” After hearing the story, Chen Ji said, “It seems that ghosts only build roads at dawn, and the railways they build cannot be seen during the day.”

"At least we now know part of the routes for the green-skinned trains."

Chen Yuetan nodded slightly: "Yes, but we later discovered that Zhang Qiang may have only encountered one ghost."

"One?" Du Tingfeng's expression shifted slightly. "One of them isn't a ghost?"

"Ah."

Chen Yuetan said, "This is related to another strange thing that happened in their village."

"A few months after Zhang Qiang reported that incident, a woman in the village went mad."

"She was young, only in her early twenties, and had just gotten married, but her husband died a few days ago."

"It is said that when her husband was being buried, the woman lay on the coffin and almost fainted from crying, refusing to let him be buried."

A teammate behind them was stunned: "Why?"

"To be buried in peace, wasn't that the custom back then?"

Chen Yuetan's tone was somewhat somber: "Because she felt that once her husband was buried, he would become a slave to ghosts, never to be reborn!"

The original saying was: "Whether you live or die, you'll still serve the ghosts!"

Chen Ji's eyes flickered slightly, and he vaguely guessed what was going on: "How did her husband die?"

"As she said, she was worked to death."

Chen Yuetan simply said, "But that's the problem. Young and middle-aged people, without illness or disaster, just doing farm work, it's impossible for them to be worked to death."

"Moreover, his family's longevity proves that there are no hereditary diseases."

"According to the woman, her husband started complaining of back pain and body aches about six months ago."

"After that, the situation worsened, and I gradually became thin and haggard; I went to see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor in the county, and they said it was because I was too tired."

"In the end, her husband was bedridden and emaciated."

Chen Yuetan's tone suddenly became more serious: "...he can't even straighten his back."

"In short, he died suddenly not long after that."

"The woman said that there were many times when she woke up in the morning and her husband was not at home, even before he died."

"What's even stranger is that she finally found her unconscious husband in a wheat field more than ten miles away from the village!"

Hearing this, everyone understood.

“The figure Zhang Qiang saw was him,” Han Bing concluded. “It was that unseen ghost that took him away from his home to work on the railway.”

“I did high-intensity physical work every night, without a single day of rest, and I also had close contact with ghosts.”

"If he hadn't been in good health, he probably wouldn't have lived for even six months."