Chapter 40

The upper right corner—that white seemed especially harsh.
Jiang Shan stared without thinking. On the monitor it looked like the image had frozen—she didn’t even blink.
Zhao Qisheng grew nervous. Had another monitor failed? At a time like this?
Then he saw her slowly blink once.
Like a dragonfly touching water—enough to show the image wasn’t frozen. She had really been motionless, staring at an “empty” ceiling for so long? Wait—Zhao Qisheng’s eyes widened. Had she actually noticed something?
But he couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.
The radio in Jiang Shan’s arms kept crackling. Her hand turned the knob from time to time—it had become a habit. And she had begun to hear a pattern in the static: a number that kept appearing. 3, 5, 7, or 1—that was the limit of what she could make out. The rest was lost in the hiss.
Usually the radio would play news. But if it was news why would the same words repeat every day? It wasn’t a recording.
Before she could work out what the numbers meant, she suddenly saw why that corner of the ceiling looked different—as if it had been repainted?
Her hand on the radio stopped.
That corner was the one where she had seen the “black floating dust.”
And now it was white again because… it had been repainted?
Something clicked. Her whole body went slightly numb—as if the pieces were falling into place.
The possible discovery made her uneasy.
The monitor soon caught the change in her expression: confusion, then understanding, then slight shock.
Zhao Qisheng stood up from his chair. “What is she looking at? Change the camera angle!”
The assistant moved quickly. The angle switched to that corner of the ceiling.
Nothing. The assistant rubbed his eyes. They could see nothing there. What had Jiang Shan seen to look so shocked?
Zhao Qisheng stared at the corner. He couldn’t see anything either—just a white wall.
On the monitor Jiang Shan’s expression was still shifting. Unlike on the barren mountain, this time she could vaguely grasp what they were afraid of.
Dust?
No—black “dust”?
Her mind raced. The metal nozzle at the gas station turning to dust flashed through her head again. The shock of it was still there.
She looked down at her white socks, at all the white around her. So—all this white was to spot abnormal “dust” as soon as it appeared?
Yes. That black dust stood out. So much that the single speck on Zhang Wanqiu’s sole when she lifted her foot had been impossible to miss.
A normal person would go mad here.