102: Chapter 102 Willow Trees Are Not Trees

When Jingling found "Willow Tree," the other party was livestreaming the repair of a street lamp.

To be precise, it wasn't a livestream.

He had hung his phone on the rearview mirror of his electric scooter, and while unscrewing a broken lamp shade, he was cursing the construction crew on the local forum for being lazy.

The wind noise in the video was loud, the footage was shaking violently, and occasionally, the horns of passing electric scooters would blare from the side.

Account name: Willow Tree.

The profile picture was an old willow tree that had been chopped in half.

The bio was written in a very provocative way: "I know every road in Jiangbei, except the ones I don't want to know."

After reading the information, Bai Ya commented, "Doesn't look like an expert."

Zhao Ye glanced at it: "Looks like someone who deserves a beating."

Jingling laughed in the channel: "But he filmed the video of the last week before the demolition of Liu Bridge Old Station, and even posted about the underground drainage outlets, old ticket windows, and temporary road closure signs. If you're looking for a local expert, he's the one."

When the temporary communication was connected, the sound of a boiling kettle came from the other side of the screen.

A man around thirty years old leaned into the camera, his hair as messy as if it had just been blown by the wind, and he was wearing a reflective vest with the words "Road Maintenance" printed on it.

His first sentence wasn't asking who Torch was, but:

"Let's get this straight first, I'm not lending money."

Zhao Ye was silent for a second.

Bai Ya laughed, head bowed.

Shen Qinghe was more polite: "We want to ask about Liu Bridge Old Station."

The playful look on Willow Tree's face instantly faded a little.

He reached out to turn off the kettle and looked towards the door, as if afraid of being overheard by the neighbors.

"Who told you to ask about this?"

"Have you seen the driverless night bus?" Zhao Ye asked directly.

Willow Tree's mouth twitched.

"I have."

The room was quiet for half a second.

He added another sentence: "But I had been drinking that day."

Zhao Ye closed his eyes.

Bai Ya was struggling to hold back his laughter: "How much did you drink?"

"A bottle and a half of beer," Willow Tree immediately defended himself. "That amount wouldn't stop me from seeing a broken bus without a driver driving out from behind the demolition hoarding, right? It even used its turn signal! Have you ever seen a ghost bus follow traffic rules?"

This was said so seriously that even Shen Qinghe paused.

Lin Zhao whispered from the side: "If it hadn't used its lights, would you not have believed it?"

Willow Tree looked at him: "Then I would be even more scared."

Finally, someone in the channel laughed.

After the laughter, the atmosphere was actually less tense.

Willow Tree quickly sent the information over.

Liu Bridge Old Station wasn't originally very big; it was an old passenger transit stop in the Jiangbei Old District. More than a decade ago, it was converted into a bus stop, but later, due to adjustments in urban planning, the station was abandoned and prepared for demolition to build a commercial street.

But the demolition project was halted three times.

The first time, the construction crew dug up an old station sign from underground. The sign was already in ruins, but a fare table was still stuck on the back.

The second time, they dug up a dozen expired bus tickets. The tickets were soaking wet, as if they had just been fished out of water.

The third time, a worker on night duty heard a conductor shouting from inside the hoarding:

"Validate your tickets, those without tickets need to validate."

That worker quit the next day.

Later, the project developers claimed it was due to geological reasons and suspended development.

"Suspended my ass," Willow Tree became more and more agitated as he spoke. "That plot of land has changed hands three times, and whoever takes it is cursed. During the day, machines drive in, and at night, the wheels sink halfway in on their own. There's no one on the surveillance footage, but there's an extra set of footprints on the ground. Tell me, isn't that sinister?"

Shen Qinghe asked Willow Tree to pack up all the original photos and send them over.

While flipping through the photo album, Willow Tree muttered: "I've taken so many photos over the years, don't mind the mess. My phone's storage is all used up by this crappy place; even my mom said I should have just taken two photos for matchmaking instead."

Bai Ya asked: "Why have you been filming Liu Bridge all this time?"

Willow Tree's fingers stopped.

On the screen, the smile on his face slowly faded.

"Because people always come to ask for directions."

"What kind of directions?"

"Asking if Liu Bridge Old Station is still open, asking when the last bus comes, asking if there used to be a person carrying a blue cloth bag who got off here." Willow Tree looked down at his phone. "At first, I thought it was just old people being nostalgic, but later I realized it wasn't. Many of the people asking for directions don't even remember why they needed to ask."

He sent over a video clip.

In the video, a girl wearing a school uniform stood in front of the hoarding, repeatedly asking the same question: "Did my dad get off here?"

At the end of the footage, Willow Tree led her away from the hoarding.

"What happened to her later?" Lin Zhao asked.

Willow Tree was silent for two seconds: "Her family came to pick her up. By the next day, she didn't remember ever coming to Liu Bridge."

After he finished this sentence, no one in the channel thought he was just a chatty street lamp repairman anymore.

Han Yue had been listening from the side.

When he heard the words "validate your tickets," the notebook in his hand dropped onto the table.

Xu Minglan immediately looked at him.

"Han Yue?"

Han Yue opened his mouth, and after several seconds, he said: "I have seen an old lady."

Everyone looked over.

"What old lady?" Shen Qinghe asked.

"Three years ago." Han Yue pressed his temples hard. "Around the time Liu Bridge Old Station was being demolished, an old lady came to the community office to register, saying her son had taken the last bus and never came back. She asked me to help her find him."

When he said this, his voice dropped lower.

"At the time, I only recorded her in the supplementary missing persons log."

"What happened later?" Lin Zhao asked.

Han Yue didn't answer.

He flipped through his notes, his fingers moving faster and faster, the pages rustling loudly.

"I don't remember."

When these words came out, he was the first to be stunned.

He hadn't just forgotten a small matter.

He had forgotten a visit that should have been very important.

It also quieted down on Willow Tree's side.

After a while, he sent a photo.

The photo was very blurry, the angle crooked, as if taken in a hurry through a gap in the hoarding.

Han Yue stared at the video, suddenly covering his forehead.

Xu Minglan immediately told him to move away from the screen.

"It's not a headache." Han Yue's voice was hoarse. "It's that I remembered a detail."

He said that when the old lady came three years ago, she was holding a blue cloth bag. Inside the bag, there wasn't money or identification, but an old umbrella and half a pack of motion sickness medicine.

She said her son had been carsick since he was little and had to carry medicine wherever he went. After her son went missing, every time she went to Liu Bridge Old Station, she brought the medicine, as if, should the bus actually return, the first thing her son would do upon getting off was ask her for water.

These words were too grounded in reality, so grounded that no one could immediately respond.

Willow Tree scratched his hair on the other side of the screen and cursed in a low voice: "This crappy place."

Shen Qinghe entered this detail into the Grey Net.

Often, abnormal traces aren't pieced together by grand clues, but by these small things that shouldn't be forgotten.

An old umbrella.

Half a pack of motion sickness medicine.

An old lady who waited for three years.

And a community worker who had clearly recorded it but had lost himself in the process.

In the image, an old willow tree had been chopped in half, with an iron plate embedded in the middle of its trunk.

The iron plate was rusted, but three characters were still visible.

[Terminal Station]

Willow Tree whispered: "That tree wasn't dug up later either."

"Why?" Zhao Ye asked.

Willow Tree pursed his lips.

"The day they dug up the tree, the excavator operator heard someone knocking on the window while in the cab."

"He turned around and saw a person sitting in the passenger seat."

"Asking him—"

Willow Tree paused, his voice sounding a bit dry.

"Driver, how much is the fare to Liuxia?"