Ch. 008| Xingyun Station

Day 16, 06:50 a.m. Li Kaichen at his desk.

Day 15, 18:42, he'd gotten home from Keelung, sorted the footage and notes until 01:00 on Day 16 before sleeping, slept four and a half hours, gotten up at 05:30, made coffee, and sat here ever since.

Two decisions in front of him. First: he wasn't going out. Day 16 through Day 18, three straight days, he wouldn't set foot past his front door. If those two plainclothes men on Keelung's Gangxi Street had caught a glimpse of him, the most dangerous stretch was the next seventy-two hours. He'd make himself vanish off the map for three days.

Second: he'd spend those three days on the one thing he should have done in the past half month and hadn't — nail down those three characters, "Xingyun Station."

The old woman had said it aloud. The pronunciation uncertain, the way you'd read a foreign place name for the first time. She'd said, "Now arriving at Xingyun Station. Passengers, please mind the gap."

After that, on Day 10, the old woman hadn't shown up (reason unknown). He'd never gone back to look into Xingyun Station itself.

He opened Google.

"Xingyun Station."

The results were an old place name, "Xingyun Village," in Xinzhuang District, New Taipei; a plumbing-and-electrical shop in Kaohsiung called Xingyun Technology; some logistics hub in mainland China called Xingyun Station.

There was no Xingyun Station on the Taipei MRT.

He changed keywords. "Xingyun Station Taipei MRT," "Xingyun pre-dawn," "Xingyun Bannan Line," "nonexistent MRT station Taipei."

The last keyword, third page: a short 2024 post on PTT's Marvel board surfaced.

---

Title: "03:00 a.m. on the MRT, saw a station I'd never seen before."

ID: rin5566. Posted 2024-11-08, 04:12 a.m. The gist: pre-dawn, the author was on the Bannan Line, riding from Zhongxiao Fuxing back to Ximen, and halfway through, the station-name display showed an extra station name he'd never seen. The name was up for five seconds, then flipped back to the normal version. Twelve replies below — three of them saying "I've seen it too," five saying "creepypasta, upvote," four saying "OP's sleep-deprived."

Li Kaichen screenshotted the post and dropped it into a newly created folder, "Xingyun."

He ran the same keywords across other PTT boards — Marvel, Gossiping, MRT, TaipeiTrip. Going back a full year, he pulled forty-some related posts. Most were vague; about ten pointed clearly at pre-dawn carriages on the Bannan or Wenhu Line, mentioning "no one there," mentioning the station name "flashing something that wasn't Chinese."

He switched to Plurk, same keywords. Pulled eight posts. Then over to Threads, the Taiwanese Chinese-language sphere, twelve more — three with blurry attached screenshots that looked like in-carriage station-name displays, the characters on them unreadable. Under the most-engaged Threads post, two hundred thirty replies, more than half of them "me too," "same here," the rest mockery.

Li Kaichen screenshotted all of it — the forty-some plus Plurk plus Threads, sixty-some posts total — sorted them by time, and looked for the common thread: pre-dawn. Between 02:30 and 03:30. Mostly on the Bannan Line. "Station name flashed for a second," "empty carriage," "the station I got off at didn't seem to be in its original place" — those three lines, he saw twenty-some times across the forty-some posts.

At the top of his notebook he wrote:

Xingyun Station = PTT folk legend, no official records, no third-party verification, but twenty-some independent posters describe it the same way.
Day 16–18: no going out. Day 16, all online.

---

That afternoon he called Ms. Lin.

"In the past three months, has A-Xiang ridden the MRT?"

Ms. Lin thought a moment. "He gets off work from the convenience store on ◯◯ Road in Xinyi, usually rides his scooter home, ten minutes. But sometimes he goes to the café where he takes UI design jobs to revise drafts. That one time he took the MRT, because the scooter was in for repairs."

"Which line did he take?"

"The Bannan Line. From City Hall to Longshan Temple, then walked over."

"Roughly when?"

"Last month. He finished a job and had to deliver the files, went to the café that night, got home pre-dawn. I remember he didn't get home until after three that night."

"Around what time did he tap in at the gate?"

"I don't know. But he got home after three, and the ride back is about twenty-five minutes."

Li Kaichen did the math. Through the gate before 03:00, out by 03:25.

He paused. The Bannan Line's last train was 00:30, first train 05:30. Pre-dawn, 02:30 to 03:00, the Taipei MRT shouldn't have been carrying passengers at all.

Ms. Lin's account was very specific — he took the MRT home, the ride back was twenty-five minutes, home after 03:00. She wasn't misremembering.

And if she wasn't misremembering, then A-Xiang's train that night was still letting passengers on between 02:30 and 03:00. The Taipei MRT had let a person in during hours it shouldn't have been running. The extra station was only the surface. The thing underneath it was the anomaly.

He wrote: A-Xiang, about twelve days before going missing on Day 1, Bannan Line, Longshan Temple → City Hall, entered the station pre-dawn in the 02:30–03:00 window (last train 00:30, first train 05:30, the MRT shouldn't be running in this window — the window itself is the anomaly).

---

Day 17, 07:00 a.m.

Li Kaichen started going through police missing-persons bulletins. He used the Taipei City Police public search-assistance page, added New Taipei, then added the nearby areas beyond — Taoyuan, Keelung. He downloaded every missing-persons request from the past three months. Most had the name and basic details public, with three digits of the family contact number masked.

Three hundred twenty-one records.

He filtered by criteria: age 18–50, last seen between 02:00 and 04:00 pre-dawn, last location an MRT station name or within a 500-meter radius of one.

Twenty-eight left.

He went through each one's detail page. Three were traffic-accident searches, didn't count. Two had already been found.

Twenty-three.

Of the twenty-three, eleven had family contact info public. He tried calling. Seven picked up; the rest went to voicemail.

For the seven, he ran the same script: the last time they left home before vanishing, were they hurrying somewhere? Had they tapped in at an MRT gate? Which line?

How the families knew the entry time — four had been told after police reported the disappearance (police had pulled the EasyCard records while checking leads and notified the family), two had checked it themselves through the missing person's Taipei MRT app account or EasyCard statement, one only remembered "the last time he went out was roughly around then," which counted as family memory, and he flagged it low-reliability in his notes.

Once he'd gathered it, he drew a table in his notebook. Headers: missing person's name, age, occupation, last tap-in time, station in, station out, line, source.

Of the seven, five were the Bannan Line. One the Wenhu Line. One the Songshan–Xindian Line.

The five Bannan Line tap-in points were scattered across both ends of the line, between Jiangzicui and Houshanpi — five people, five stations, no repeats.

All five tapped in. None of the five had a same-day tap-out record.

Add A-Xiang — Ms. Lin's case, even though it wasn't in the police search bulletins (A-Xiang was logged under "missing person, not yet past 72 hours") — he folded that one in himself.

Six Bannan Line missing persons. None of them tapped out that day.

---

At midday he used the same method on another group — a Facebook private group called the Late-Nighters, made up of people working night shifts. He wasn't a member and couldn't post, but he had Brother Ken, a taxi driver he'd met on an earlier story, post an inquiry for him.

"Quick question, everyone — in the past year, anyone been on the Bannan Line between 02:00 and 04:00 pre-dawn and run into anything strange?"

Before 18:00, eight DMs came back. Seven said they'd run into something.

Most versions were: the carriage completely empty, the station-name display flashing characters that weren't Chinese, or the spot they got off at feeling wrong even though Google Maps looked normal. "I was tired" was the word four of the seven reached for to explain it to themselves.

The eighth was different. He said when he got off, another train was stopped across the platform, and the people on it weren't looking at him. He finished and hung up. Li Kaichen didn't call back.

He typed all eight conversations into his notebook, each with the call date attached.

---

Day 18, 14:00.

Li Kaichen refreshed PTT's Marvel board a third time, looking for new posts.

One posted five hours earlier, title: "An extra screenshot from the Taipei MRT app just showed up in my photo roll."

ID: linluna_27. The gist: pre-dawn around 03:00, couldn't sleep, scrolling her phone, the author found an extra screenshot in her photo roll, timestamped 02:51, of the MRT map in the Taipei MRT app — but the map had an extra station, the name not in Chinese. She said she'd never taken it, didn't remember opening the app. She posted the screenshot.

Li Kaichen downloaded it and zoomed in on his computer.

On a stretch of the Bannan Line on that map, between Ximen and Longshan Temple, there was an extra station.

The name was two block characters. The line was thick, like it had been machine-printed.

Li Kaichen pulled up the four block characters from 006. Set them side by side.

Not the same characters. But the same writing system — the same orange-yellow coloring couldn't be coincidence, and the structure of the glyphs was one system. Circle plus horizontal, triangles stacked. The center of gravity sat flat — Ye Wenjia's line, he remembered it.

He "knew" what these two characters meant. They were something like "alighting point for night travelers," "exit and transfer."

He shut his eyes and tried to picture the shapes. Blurry. Tried to draw them. What came out was wrong.

He checked the PTT timeline on the post — posted 09:01, deleted 09:18, seven replies in between. Seventeen minutes from the original post.

Deleted by the author herself.

Li Kaichen had the screenshot.

---

Day 18, 21:00.

He put what he'd organized up on the wall.

The wall already held: the four block characters (006), the circular logo from the crate (007). Today he added five new items — the core ones being linluna_27's block-character version of the MRT map, the Bannan Line missing-persons table, and the Late-Nighters reply screenshots. The other two were the PTT-legend chronology and the MRT return-trip time A-Xiang's mother had given him.

In the center of the wall he wrote a name: Xingyun Station.

Beneath it:

Bannan Line. Between Ximen and Longshan Temple. Appears 02:30–03:30 pre-dawn. On certain versions of the MRT map, station name written in block characters. People who see it get off; some who get off never come back.

He looked at that line and sat for a minute. Then added a line:

I'm going to take the Taipei MRT app screenshot at 03:11 pre-dawn myself. Independent source, reproducible, quantifiable.

---

Day 19, 02:38 a.m.

He set his phone on the desk, the Taipei MRT app open, frozen on that stretch of the Bannan Line. The screen lit, auto-lock off. He sat in the chair, hands on his knees, not scrolling.

He didn't want to "look on purpose" — that trick from 006, he'd learned it. But he needed the screenshot, so he used a second phone on a stand, aimed at the main phone's screen, set to auto-shoot at fifteen-second intervals.

He sat for fifty minutes. Every fifteen seconds the second phone clicked, like a metronome running in the background. He didn't lift his head to the main screen, only listened. Whether anything changed in between, he didn't know; he wouldn't look.

03:30 — he raised his head to the main phone. The Bannan Line, normal.

He picked up the second phone and checked the photo roll. From 02:38 to 03:30, it had auto-shot 207 frames.

He started going through them one at a time from 03:00.

03:00, 03:00:15, 03:00:30, 03:00:45 — all normal. The 03:01 series, normal. 03:02–03:10 all normal.

The 03:11:15 frame, zoomed in, on the Bannan Line between Ximen and Longshan Temple — an extra station.

The name was two block characters. Same structure as the two characters in linluna_27's screenshot — possibly the same station name.

He paged down through the later screenshots one at a time — 03:11:30, 03:11:45, 03:12:00, all the way to 03:18:30 — the station still there. In the 03:18:45 frame, the station was gone.

Seven minutes fifteen seconds.

He compared it against the gap in the middle of the brick wall pre-dawn on Day 7, 03:15:40 to 03:18:20, 161 seconds total. Tonight's Xingyun Station, 03:11:15 to 03:18:30, 435 seconds total. Much longer.

Two windows, both ending in the 03:18–03:19 range.

He wrote:

Between 03:18:20 and 03:18:45, possibly the common point where the overwrite flips back to the original version.
Alley gap: 161 seconds, 1 meter wide, middle of a brick wall (footage observation).
Xingyun Station: 435 seconds, 1 station, underground (app-map observation).
Two samples, two media, two scales — can't be compared directly. Can't derive from this any rule that "longer duration = bigger anomaly = wider entry window" — too few samples, observation methods inconsistent, need more independent observations to verify.
Day 21 pre-dawn won't loosen risk management over this unverified hypothesis. Still count down, still control time strictly, still treat it as only 161 seconds available. Better conservative than speculative.
The alley had a physical entrance at ground level; Xingyun Station doesn't — it's underground, mid-stretch on a running MRT line, and where its entrance is, he doesn't know yet.

---

He transferred those screenshots across platforms to an encrypted drive, three backups.

He sat back down at the desk and looked at the three characters on the wall — "Xingyun Station."

He had two things he could do now.

One: he could wait for the next pre-dawn and pull screenshots again, to see whether the window was a stable "03:11–03:18."

Two: he could go physical — between Ximen and Longshan Temple, beneath the MRT line, there should be a stretch of underground space. On Google Maps, that straight segment at ground level was the foundation of an old building. The MRT ran under that building. If Xingyun Station really existed, it should be deeper than that spot.

He didn't plan to go tonight. Those two plainclothes men on Keelung Gangxi — that thread, he'd wait another forty-eight hours on it.

He flipped through the calendar and checked off Day 21 pre-dawn — the first pre-dawn after the seventy-two-hour observation period ended.

On a fresh page near the bottom of the notebook he wrote, "Day 21, entering the underground from Ximen to Longshan Temple, checklist."

He listed what to bring — Sony α7, 35mm, two SD cards (after 004, never just one), GoPro chest mount, headlamp, voice recorder, waterproof notebook. One EasyCard starting with 02, not registered to his name.

What to leave home he wrote underneath: phone and anything tied to his identity. The phone's GPS might still get located underground; ID card and credit cards would leave a registered-name trail. The thin jacket he'd worn on Keelung Gangxi too — it had distinguishing features.

He flipped back, dimmed the phone screen, lay back in the chair, shut his eyes.

No scooters passed outside the window. The whole alley was very quiet.

One thing came to him — of the seven Late-Nighters replies, the last one, the one who said "the people on the train weren't looking at me" and hung up — he ought to call back. That ID was in the notebook, sent over by Brother Ken. But not tonight.

【Ch. 008 End · Li Kaichen's place, Da'an District (four straight days of online investigation)】