The endless plum rains had finally stopped, but the air in Old Town District was still so damp it was hard to breathe. Puddles deep in the alleys reflected shattered neon, making the area seem especially desolate.
The atmosphere inside the office was even heavier than outside. Jiang Jianqing had sealed the yellowed train ticket inside a specially made transparent bag, where it lay quietly on the black wooden counter. After Professor Chen Mobai left, the ghostly blue halo of emotion on the ticket's surface had faded slightly, but that bone-chilling cold continued to spread stubbornly outward, condensing into a thin layer of frost across the counter.
Jiang Jianqing leaned against the back of the counter, his face still so pale it was nearly translucent. The lingering pain brought on by the resonance felt like countless fine needles stabbing at his nerves, forcing him to rub his temples again and again. His gaze was deep as he stared at the ticket inside the sealed bag, as if he could see through the yellowed paper to that night forty years ago, when torrential rain had poured from the sky.
Lin Chu was sitting in front of the computer, her fingers flying over the keys as the keyboard rattled with a crisp, rapid clatter. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, her pupils reflecting countless lines of code and complicated tables flashing past at high speed. Although she was an investigator in the field, before that, she had been an exceptional data hunter.
“Boss, I’ve checked every standard 1984 railway timetable, and there really isn’t a single train whose time and location match this ticket.” Lin Chu stopped typing and turned around, her expression grave as she looked at Jiang Jianqing. “The ‘never stops at a station’ marked on this ticket probably isn’t a figure of speech. It may be the train’s actual nature.”
Jiang Jianqing lowered his hand and straightened. He picked up his now-lukewarm mint tea and took a sip. The bitterness of the medicine temporarily suppressed his discomfort. “Go on.”
Lin Chu brought up a virtual map covered in red dots. The dots were spread along a vague, long-abandoned railway line. “I traced its origin using the residual aura from the two-pan scale. On the edge of an encrypted government archive marked ‘historically sealed,’ I found an anomalous data stream. The archive is called Special Dispatch and Nonpublic Transportation Records (1980–1990).”
“Nonpublic transportation…” Jiang Jianqing repeated under his breath.
“Yes. It mentioned a project codenamed ‘Ouroboros.’” Lin Chu’s expression grew even more solemn. “Boss, that circular serpent seal you saw on the ticket is the project’s exclusive emblem. Most of the core files are damaged, but I managed to recover a few key phrases: ‘transportation of high-purity psychic energy,’ ‘memory barrier experiments,’ and, most importantly… ‘unrecorded stops.’”
Lin Chu took a deep breath and looked at Jiang Jianqing. “That means the ‘Seventh Special Express’ written on the ticket probably wasn’t meant to carry ordinary passengers at all. It was meant to transport specific Forgotten Things with powerful obsessions—or certain memory entities that had been forcibly severed. The ‘Ms. Lin Hui’ Professor Chen Mobai mentioned… there’s no way she was put on that train for anything simple.”
The discovery left them both silent for a moment. This had already gone beyond an ordinary Forgotten Thing commission. It directly implicated certain ancient experiments conducted by the Forgotten Realm in the real world, which also explained why the ticket carried such a powerful and aggressive bone-deep emotional backlash.
Just then, the office doorbell suddenly gave a short, piercing ring.
But the person who entered this time was not a visitor in need of help. He was an unwelcome guest.
The door was violently shoved open, and cold air rushed inside. Three figures in dark hoodies filed in, their faces impossible to make out. They carried no rainwater on them, yet they brought with them a strange, pungent odor mingling chemical agents with decay—the smell produced by prolonged contact with the black market for unstable memories.
“Boss Jiang. Long time no see.” The leader was not tall, but his voice was sharp and grating, like metal being scraped, making it deeply unpleasant to hear.
Jiang Jianqing turned and looked at them coldly, his expression utterly unmoved, as if he had expected them all along. “Memory hunters from the black market? Your noses are as sharp as ever.”
Lin Chu quickly moved to Jiang Jianqing’s side, one hand already wrapped around the brass baton beneath the counter. Her eyes remained fixed warily on the three men. “You’re not welcome here. Get out.”
“No need to be so fierce, little sister Lin Chu.” The leader smiled unpleasantly, his gaze locking onto the sealed bag on the counter. “We were hired by someone, too. Someone paid a high price for us to take that ticket back and ‘destroy’ it. Boss Jiang, you know the rules. A Forgotten Thing of the ‘Ouroboros’ level would have too great an impact on the real world once it was reclaimed. We’re just saving you the trouble.”
“Rules?” Jiang Jianqing smiled, but there wasn’t a trace of warmth in it. “The Echo Office has only one rule: once a commission is accepted, unless the client voluntarily gives up, there are only two possible outcomes—redemption or complete destruction. The black market’s rules don’t apply here.”
“So there’s nothing left to discuss?” The leader’s voice turned cold at once. As his words fell, dark-red psychic energy gathered in his palm and took the shape of a long, thorn-covered whip. His two companions also assumed fighting stances, violent and chaotic emotional fluctuations erupting from their bodies.
“Lin Chu, protect the scale.” Jiang Jianqing spoke in a low voice as he slowly raised his right hand. A cool blue light began to gather at the fingertips of his white glove.
The air inside the office froze in an instant, then was torn apart by violent energy.
The lead hunter snapped his whip. Dark-red thorns whistled through the air as they swept viciously toward Jiang Jianqing’s ankle, attempting to restrict his movements. At the same time, his two companions launched their attacks. One transformed both hands into corrosive black gas and sent it surging toward the counter where Lin Chu stood. The other let out a piercing psychic shriek, attempting to shatter Jiang Jianqing’s sea of consciousness outright.
“Know your place.”
Jiang Jianqing stood where he was without moving an inch. His right hand, still covered by the white glove, drew a gentle line through the air.
Hummm—
Vast, pure, and intensely cold blue energy exploded from his fingertips, forming a transparent glasslike barrier in front of him. The psychic shriek struck the barrier with a crisp cracking sound but failed to shake it in the slightest. The dark-red whip lashed against the barrier and was instantly frozen by the power of forgetting embedded within it; the thorns shattered one after another and turned to dust. When the corrosive black gas touched the glasslike barrier, it hissed as if it had encountered its natural enemy, then rapidly dissipated.
That clear, brutally lucid light appeared once more in the depths of Jiang Jianqing’s eyes.
“You toy with memories on the black market, yet you’ve forgotten the most basic principle: memories have weight.”
He clenched his fist. The glasslike barrier instantly transformed into countless tiny blades of light and shot back toward the three hunters at astonishing speed. The blades moved too quickly for the hunters to react. All they could do was watch helplessly as the light pierced their bodies.
The blades left no external wounds, but all three hunters let out desperate screams at once. The violent psychic fluctuations within them were forcibly “forgotten” the moment they came into contact with the blades. They forgot how to control energy. They forgot how to attack. For one brief instant, they even forgot why they were there and why they were wearing those clothes.
The lead hunter collapsed to the floor, his eyes blank. The energy whip in his hand had already vanished, and cloudy fluid dribbled from the corner of his mouth. “Who… who am I? What am I doing?”
“Get out.” Jiang Jianqing’s voice was ice. With a sweep of his hand, a gentle yet irresistible force lifted the three men and flung them straight out the office door, where they landed heavily on the damp street. The door slammed shut behind them. The wind chime rang once more with a clear chime, as if proclaiming that the rules here could not be violated.
Lin Chu came out from behind the counter, her baton already put away. She looked at Jiang Jianqing, wariness in her eyes now joined by a trace of barely perceptible awe. “Boss, what you just used… was that the power of repayment?”
“I only temporarily sealed their memories of how to use their abilities.” Jiang Jianqing removed his white glove. His face looked worse than before, and his fingers were trembling slightly. The backlash from forcibly stripping away memories had left him intensely dizzy. He took a deep breath and walked back to the counter. “Lin Chu, recalibrate the scale. The fact that the black market is so desperate to destroy it means that the Seventh Special Express was carrying some truth even they were afraid of.”
Although they had driven off the black-market hunters, Jiang Jianqing and Lin Chu both knew this was only the beginning.
Jiang Jianqing sat down behind the counter again. Lin Chu poured him a fresh cup of mint tea and added several drops of golden liquid.
“Boss, although the fighting didn’t cause any physical damage, the chaotic emotional aura those three hunters left behind will affect the scale’s precision.” Lin Chu looked worriedly at the brass scale on the counter. At that moment, it was swaying faintly.
Jiang Jianqing took a sip of tea and felt the medicine spread through his body. “It’s fine. What concerns me more is who hired the black market. Anyone who knows about Project Ouroboros and was able to set up this Forgotten Thing scheme thirty years ago is no ordinary person.”
Just then, the office doorbell rang again.
This time, the figure pushing open the door was someone they hadn’t expected—the elderly Professor Chen Mobai, who had only left the previous night.
But this time, Chen Mobai’s expression was no longer clouded by the confusion and fear of the night before. Instead, it held a rare, resolute clarity. Though illness still made his eyes somewhat murky, that obsession burned like a never-extinguishing flame, supporting his thin, frail body.
“Professor Chen?” Lin Chu climbed down from her tall stool in surprise.
Chen Mobai trembled as he walked to the counter. This time, he didn’t take out an object. He simply looked straight at Jiang Jianqing, a desperate, all-or-nothing light rising in his cloudy eyes.
“Boss Jiang, I remembered some things.” Chen Mobai’s voice was still hoarse, but it held more strength now. “After I went home last night, I still couldn’t remember the specific images, but the hollow place inside me began to speak. I know now that it was my soul refusing to forget.”
He drew a deep breath and stared fixedly at Jiang Jianqing. “I remember now… back then, on the platform, I pushed Lin Hui onto the train for more than just the reason that I had to stay behind and care for my mother. It was also because… someone told me that train was the only way to survive.”
“The only way to survive?” Jiang Jianqing’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Yes.” Chen Mobai closed his eyes and recalled the past in agony, his body trembling violently with emotion. “We were being watched back then… because of our family backgrounds. If Huihui didn’t leave, she would die. I would die too. That mysterious person gave me this ticket and said that as long as Huihui boarded the train, she would be sent somewhere safe. The price was that she would forget me, and I would forget her. We would never see each other again in this life.”
The old man opened his eyes. Tears had already broken free, streaming down the wrinkles on his face and striking the bluestone floor. “I lied to her. I lied to myself for forty years. To keep her alive, I forcibly severed the only connection between us. Boss Jiang, the people from the black market came to see me last night… I can’t remember what they looked like, but I could feel their malice.”
Chen Mobai suddenly dropped to both knees and slammed his forehead against the floor before Jiang Jianqing with a heavy thud.
“I’m not here to ask you to help me get my memories back. Boss Jiang, I know my mind can’t hold on much longer. But I can’t let Huihui’s life become meaningless because of my cowardice. My second commission is to ask you to protect that memory… to protect that train that never stops at a station. If the black market wants to destroy it, they’ll have to step over my corpse to do it!” Chen Mobai raised his head. His forehead was already red and swollen, but his eyes were utterly determined. In the last moment of clarity granted to a man with Alzheimer’s, this was his final declaration of war against fate.
Jiang Jianqing looked at the old man before him. After a long silence, he slowly extended his right hand and helped Chen Mobai to his feet. “The Echo Office accepts your second commission, Professor Chen. This time, we won’t charge a fee. We’ll only take the truth.”