Steel steam and flame

When he returned to his seat, Cassia found Taranto by the window looking at him. "Just a small favor." Cassia said with a smile.

Taranto smiled, and Cassia didn't know what the smile meant. His round glasses were completely white under the lights inside the train. Every time Cassia wanted to look at Taranto's eyes, he was always blocked by the reflection on the two glasses, and could not see anything real. Although I thought it was a dispensable thing, now it seems that it is still somewhat useful.

After more than a minute, the train accelerated to a steady speed, Taranto closed the windows, and the air circulation system began to operate. Julien's breathing became much calmer, and in such a short period of time, he had fallen asleep. And Taranto leaned against the window. As soon as he closed his eyes, his whole body and his small space became very quiet.

Cassia also wanted to rest, and the atmosphere in the train was strong. But he was extremely excited and had no intention of sleeping now. I was in a hurry on the way here, so there was no possibility of buying a few books to read.

It seemed like the whole trip was going to be boring. Cassia also wanted to spend this time closing her eyes like Julien and the others, but her eyes moved around in her eyelids uncontrollably. In the end, Cassia could only turn her head and keep looking at the unchanging scenery outside to pass the time. The train quickly left the station and left the city. The buildings in one area decreased sharply, and finally only an overgrown wasteland of hills remained.

The nights are coming quickly and the days of summer are slowly getting shorter.

But when Cassia was looking at the scenery outside the train, he didn't feel a gaze staring at him from behind at all. This is something he has never encountered before. His keen perception seems to have formed a fatal blind spot in that direction, but Cassia, as the person involved, is completely unaware of it. Everything in his perception was as normal as usual.

That gaze was also intermittent, coming from the girl diagonally opposite behind Cassia's seat.

He is not very old, his windbreaker is very long, and his sitting posture is so standard that it could be written into a textbook, which is remarkable. The body shrunk into the windbreaker was very tired, and her face looked sleepy and reluctant, but she still cheered up and sat up straight with her back. It seems like he is born with this habit, or has been trained in this way since he was a child.

She looked through the windbreaker at Cassia's half profile, which was higher than the seat. She could also see the clear eyes on Cassia's face. There was faint excitement in her eyes, and her little body couldn't help but tremble, and she didn't know why. But this state did not last long, maybe she was too tired. The girl blinked a few times, leaned on the seat and fell asleep completely.

Cassia felt her eyes became dull as she looked at the increasingly blurry scenery under the night sky. After looking at it for a long time, Taranto also fell asleep, and he himself felt that his head was becoming a little drowsy. So she was finally able to close her eyes. Cassia rubbed her forehead, just thinking about passing the time and taking a rest, but she never expected to fall asleep completely.

It may be the last person to sleep in the entire carriage, or in the entire long passenger train. It was very quiet in the connected carriages. The sound of friction on the rails was heard far away in the lonely wilderness, and the sound of insects was completely covered up. Dim lights crawled on the ground. It seemed as if something was invisibly wrapping around the entire train. Except for the sound of people breathing rapidly, the inside of the carriage was eerily quiet.

It lasted until late at night. The temperature outside dropped a lot, the air circulation system was not regulated by people, and the air inside the car even became a little cold.

At this time, Cassia shivered. She was in a state of falling asleep in a daze, and she didn't want to rest. The keen sense in his body caused him to have a strong reaction, and he seemed to be resisting something mentally.

Cassia regained a little consciousness, only to feel that her eyelids were very heavy. Her originally excited spirit became sluggish for unknown reasons at this moment, and her insides turned into a ball of paste. He felt as if there was a bottomless abyss under his body, and countless iron chains were pulling his body down. The darkness inside turned into a thick and energetic sludge, and began to swallow every inch of his own body.

Instinctively, she wanted to struggle, but Cassia suddenly found that she had no strength all over her body. The bones and countless tangled muscle fibers in the body seemed to have completely disappeared from the body. He turned into a soft rubber puppet that left the puppeteer, and could only be forced to sink down little by little. The rotten smell in the mud became clearly audible, and Cassia felt that half of her body was completely trapped in the mud.

what's going on? Cassia's confused consciousness didn't allow him to think about anything more. Like a drowning person falling into the sea in the middle of the night, there is nothing around to put his hands on, there is no visible light in his eyes, and the stars in the sky are completely covered by dark clouds. Apart from the sound of waves that kept ringing in my ears, there was only the throat-choking seawater that poured into my stomach.

The mud submerged Cassia's neck a moment later, and her mouth completely sank shortly after. Her nose and ears were completely wrapped in the mud. The moment she was wrapped in the mud, her breathing, smell, and hearing were completely lost. The silt has a strange power that seems to block anything caught in it.

The air in her lungs was being rapidly consumed by her body. Cassia thought she could hold her breath for a long time. But here, all functions of the body seem to have regressed. Within a few seconds, Cassia couldn't hold on and opened her mouth to take a big breath of fresh air. But all that was poured into his mouth was a pile of putrid sludge. His stomach suddenly swelled, but he couldn't spit out anything at all. The mud was almost up to the bridge of his nose. Cassia continued to struggle feebly. Perhaps the discomfort caused by the silt pouring into his body suddenly stimulated his body. When the silt was about to flood his eyes, he finally had the strength to open his eyelids.

Cassia wants to see clearly where this is.

But inside the slits of his eyes, there was only endless darkness. This was darkness he had never seen before, and it was a shocking color. And in this darkness, right on Cassia's body that was about to be submerged, there was a gaze looking directly at him.

Feeling this gaze, Cassia turned her eyes and looked in the direction of that gaze at the moment before she was about to be completely swallowed by the mud.

There is something important there, Cassia had this hunch in her heart.

Then the scene there was reflected in his pupils. It was a golden skull, with two empty eye holes staring silently at him.

Immediately, the silt flooded Cassia, and the world turned dark again.