Chapter 194 Brainwave

"How was it?" Fatty trotted over, looking at Jiang Cheng and asking, "Everything go smoothly?"

Jiang Cheng was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly asked, "How long was I gone this time, approximately?"

Fatty thought for a moment. "Twenty minutes?" He added, "Anyway, it wasn't long, because it gets so cold here at night. I just changed into something warmer, and then... I heard a noise downstairs, and when I came down, you were back."

Hearing Fatty's answer, Jiang Cheng had a clearer understanding of the nightmare.

The time he spent in the nightmare was definitely not twenty minutes. The twenty minutes Fatty mentioned should have been calculated from the moment he entered the bedroom.

But he didn't account for the time it took him to fall asleep.

Excluding that time, Jiang Cheng figured the actual time he spent in the nightmare was only a few minutes, maybe even less.

Yet, he had spent several days in the nightmare world.

Clearly, time flowed differently there than in the real world, and the passage connecting the two worlds was that black iron door.

Fatty stood beside Jiang Cheng, noticing that he seemed different from when he had come out before. He seemed down, and even spoke less.

"Doctor," Fatty swallowed, saying as calmly as possible, "Are... are you okay?"

"During the time I was gone, did anything unusual happen?"

Fatty thought for a moment, and said seriously, "No."

"After you went back to your bedroom to sleep, I stayed outside the whole time, and I didn't see anything," he continued. "I didn't see you come out of the bedroom, and then you reappeared here."

Jiang Cheng picked up his cup and took another sip of water. "What about sounds?"

"That..." Fatty seemed hesitant.

Jiang Cheng turned to look at him. Fatty's expression didn't seem like he was hiding something, but rather that he wasn't sure about it, so he didn't know how to express it.

"Just tell me what you experienced," Jiang Cheng said.

"Doctor, actually... actually, I had a premonition that you were about to come out," Fatty stammered.

Jiang Cheng frowned sharply, his hand pausing with the water cup. "Go on."

"I don't know how to describe the feeling, like a jolt of electricity suddenly flashed through my head. It was... it was a very strange feeling. Anyway, after that feeling came, I knew something must have happened. Connecting it to you entering the nightmare, I guessed you were back."

Jiang Cheng narrowed his eyes.

Fatty seemed to think of something, and quickly continued, but involuntarily lowered his voice. "Doctor," he said, his throat bobbing, "Before, when I was driving trucks long distances at night, I often got sleepy in the late hours. One night, I suddenly found a radio station that specialized in telling paranormal stories."

"I thought I'd listen to it to keep me awake. The theme that night was about ways to see ghosts, specifically, how to see ghosts."

"They even connected with several guests who said they had experiences seeing ghosts."

"I remember the first person said she was a student. She said she had seen a ghost using a spirit board, and then one of her friends broke her leg the next day. She believed it was related to playing with the spirit board."

"But I didn't really believe that," Fatty explained. "This person said she was a high school student, but her voice sounded like she was in her thirties, almost forty. I guessed she was a plant from the show."

Jiang Cheng didn't respond, he just listened quietly the whole time. He knew that Fatty wouldn't say so much unless he had discovered something.

"The second person's method was to knock on a bowl filled with half-cooked rice at a crossroads. Half-cooked rice is the kind that's not fully cooked."

He swallowed, continuing, "That person said he saw more than a dozen emaciated black figures through this method. They appeared suddenly, and all of them had starved to death."

"He also emphasized that the chopsticks used to knock on the bowl must not stop, otherwise you would be discovered by the ghosts."

Next, Fatty mentioned a series of other methods claimed to allow people to see ghosts, such as opening an umbrella indoors, bending over and looking backwards between your legs, closing your eyes and silently repeating your name in front of a mirror at midnight, combing your hair in the middle of the night, and using a red pen to draw eyebrows on a dead person's portrait.

Jiang Cheng frowned slightly, showing that his patience was running out.

He wasn't sitting here to listen to Fatty tell these stories.

"Doctor," Fatty pursed his lips, "Let me finish."

Jiang Cheng looked into Fatty's eyes, and didn't say what he was about to say. He rarely saw such a look in Fatty's eyes.

He was afraid, Jiang Cheng was sure.

Fatty took a deep breath and said slowly, "Until they connected with the last person."

"That was a very old person. I could feel that his health wasn't very good, and his voice was panting."

"The method he introduced was..." Fatty looked up at Jiang Cheng, his lips trembling slightly, "Brainwaves."

"But I looked up something similar later, and I think what he wanted to say was brainwaves, but..." Fatty didn't continue.

He seemed to be lost in some memory, and his logic became muddled. "He... no, I still don't know if that person was a man or a woman. He probably had a damaged throat."

"That person's speech was very, very slow, but it was very difficult for me to understand what he was saying. I only clearly heard his last few sentences."

"He said that if you want to see a ghost, your brainwaves need to match the ghost's brainwaves."

"In other words..." Fatty looked up, "When you're thinking about seeing it, the ghost is also thinking about you at the same time."

Fatty still clearly remembered that when that person finished speaking, the guests and host, who had been laughing at him for deliberately acting mysterious and creating a scary atmosphere, immediately fell silent.

Because... their show was about how to see ghosts.

According to this person's logic, right now, at this very moment!

A ghost might already be appearing near them.

"Doctor," the expression on Fatty's face was hard to describe. He looked at Jiang Cheng and said slowly in an unusually heavy voice, "It wasn't until much later that I realized something."

"That night, it might not have been the person's slurred speech that made it difficult for me to understand what he was saying," he paused for a few seconds, his body trembling slightly with fear, "But... but something was next to him, and because the brainwave frequencies of the two were close, it..."

"Caused interference," Jiang Cheng said coldly, "Like electromagnetic waves."

"Exactly!" Fatty nodded heavily, his face contorted with fear.

But what Fatty didn't expect was that Jiang Cheng's face suddenly turned strange a few seconds later, his pupils shrinking sharply.

Jiang Cheng suddenly remembered something.

In the recording made by Hu Yan, who came to him for help for the first time, there were long stretches of static.