Ch. 009| The Passage That Shouldn't Exist

Day 20, 07:00 in the morning. Li Kaichen at his desk.

After he shot two hundred and seven screenshots in the small hours of Day 19, he'd slept another three and a half hours. He'd sat there until dawn, staring at the spot on the wall marked "Xingyun Station"—on the Bannan Line, somewhere between Ximen and Longshan Temple.

He wasn't going out today. He had four things to spend the in-between day on.

First, confirm with Brother Ken that nobody was watching him. He sent it out in two encrypted messages: last week, the Gangxi Street stretch, had any car been tailing him. Brother Ken drove a taxi; his eyes were trained for it. At 16:00 in the afternoon Brother Ken came back—he'd gone through the last five days of dashcam footage, and no plate had shown up behind the car more than once.

Brother Ken added a line: You running into anything over there?

Li Kaichen didn't answer. Answering would turn Brother Ken into the next witness who'd need cleaning up. He thought about it, then sent: "Nothing, just needed to check something."

Brother Ken replied five minutes later: "OK. But whatever you're into over there, watch yourself."

Second, swap the SIM and the EasyCard. He had a prepaid SIM bought two years ago, never used, shoved at the back of a drawer. He put the prepaid SIM into an old phone left over from a handset upgrade the year before last—not logged into his main iCloud, not synced to any account, no location threads. His main SIM and main phone stayed in the drawer, left behind. The EasyCard starting with 02 he bought fresh at a convenience store, loaded with 200 dollars, cash, no account linked.

Third, sort the gear. He went through the checklist from the 008 page again and added one more line: two 500 ml bottles of water (no water source underground), one bar of chocolate (in case he got stuck and had to wait it out). Then he took out, one by one, everything that had to stay home—ID card, credit cards, the light jacket he wore every day, the main phone (SIM and all, nothing that could locate his main number).

Fourth, an external dead-man's switch. He sent Ye Wenjia a LINE message: "Tomorrow 02:00–03:30 I'll be near Ximen Station doing something that might be very stupid. If I haven't messaged you 'home' on my own by 04:30, call the police, give them this message and my home address." Ye Wenjia replied a few minutes later: "Okay. I'll wait until 04:30." Same as that time in 005.

That evening he stayed in, stayed offline, didn't scroll Threads. He went through those 207 screenshots from the small hours of Day 19 one more time, fixing Xingyun Station's place on the Bannan Line in his head until he could draw it without the picture.

22:30, he lay down. He slept badly. He woke once a little past three, watched the ceiling for twenty minutes, then slept again.

---

Day 21, 01:30 in the small hours.

He drove out. He'd put on a grey hoodie he hadn't worn in three years, a mask, a plain baseball cap. He parked at a night-rate lot near Ximen, paid cash, no plate scan on record.

He walked to Ximen Station Exit 6 at 02:02.

At 02:00 in the small hours Ximen Station shouldn't have been open—the Bannan Line's last train was 00:30, the first 05:30. But the roller shutter at Exit 6 was half up, a night-shift guard sitting at the counter inside, scrolling his phone. The whole "late-night version" of Ximen Station was itself an overwrite. What he was going into was that layer of Ximen Station smeared back on under the overwritten state; the real Bannan Line underneath had stopped service early, locked dead, not here.

Li Kaichen didn't go in that way; he didn't want the guard registering his face. He went around to the east side of Ximen Station, Exit 8—no counter there, just the gates, which by rights should have been locked in the small hours—but they were open. The whole entrance, the whole gateline, the whole platform lighting, all of it part of the overwrite.

He tapped through with the 02 EasyCard. Entered at 02:09. The gate read it, a single beep, like a normally running line. But he knew this "normal" was a lie.

Bannan Line platform, lights on, announcements rolling, lightboxes flickering. A scatter of people. He walked to the far end of the platform, near the tunnel mouth, and stood flat against the wall.

He needed an hour of stillness.

---

02:30–03:10.

Three people on the platform in all. A man in a suit standing in the middle, like he'd just gotten off work, scrolling his phone. A young woman at the other end, sitting on a bench, headphones in, eyes shut. The third was himself. Why those two were on the Bannan Line at an hour it wasn't supposed to be running, he didn't know. Maybe they were like him, people who knew about the window; maybe they were part of the overwritten state; maybe one of them was the leftover trace of someone pulled in the night before who hadn't been dealt with yet.

The headways were long in the small hours, one train every ten minutes—but "normal" last train was 00:30, and there being any trains at all was the anomaly. Between 02:14 and 02:34 three came, each stopping thirty seconds, nobody on or off, then gone.

Li Kaichen sat down on a platform bench, not looking at his phone. He wanted to hold the state of "not actively looking"—the trick from 006. He'd practiced it, but only once, the sample too small to be sure it actually worked. He kept using it because it was the only thing he had, not because he believed the rule was settled.

The 02:44 came, went. The man in the suit boarded. At 02:54, the young woman boarded. The 03:00 and 03:04 both passed empty; he didn't board. Before 03:11 he needed to be on the platform, not on a train.

The platform air had that smell stations always have—air-conditioning plus rubber plus the baked enamel of stainless steel. Sitting on the bench, he felt his pulse running fast, maybe ten to fifteen beats over normal. He wasn't panicking, but his body didn't agree with him. He thought: the body knows something's wrong before the mind does.

---

03:09, the platform empty.

03:10—the standard lighting on the Ximen Station platform slowly changed.

It wasn't the lights going out. The color temperature dropped—from white cold light to something yellower, like the incandescent bulbs of the early MRT in the eighties. The shift took maybe forty seconds.

03:11:15—the whole platform settled into that yellow.

The whole space was like someone had turned a volume knob—the hiss of the air-conditioning, the platform announcements, the hum of the lightboxes, all pressed down together toward the background.

Li Kaichen looked up at the platform screen. On the Bannan Line map, the station after Ximen was no longer "Longshan Temple."

It was two block characters.

He'd practiced them on the wall—he "knew" what the two characters meant. Something like "Night-Walkers Alight Here" or "Exit to Transfer," same structure as that set in 006.

It was the name of Xingyun Station.

---

He needed to find the passage.

The platform screen showed the next station as Xingyun Station—if he boarded the next train now, he'd go there. But the two samples in 008 (the 161-second footage of the alley hole, the 435-second app map of Xingyun Station) were on different media scales; he couldn't simply infer "the window's wider." He wasn't assuming this 435 seconds meant a bigger window; he still took 161 seconds as the conservative threshold. And boarding straight to an underground station he didn't know meant a way out he couldn't control.

He wanted a passage he could walk into himself and walk out of himself.

He circled the platform.

At the south end of the platform, near the tunnel mouth, there was an emergency exit door, normally locked, marked "STAFF ONLY · EMERGENCY EXIT." He walked over to it deliberately, reached out, and pressed the handle—

The handle gave. The door opened.

But he didn't push it. First he looked up at the GoPro's LCD. The emergency door on the LCD—same as his own eyes—was open.

The two agreed.

He thought for three seconds. Then he noted in the notebook: 03:13:42, emergency door open, eyes and camera agree. Different from the alley in 004, where "the eye sees a brick wall, the camera sees a hole." This overwrite, he could see.

He pushed the door open 30 centimeters, kept against the wall, made no sound, went in.

---

Behind the door was a stretch of concrete stairs going down.

The stairs weren't wide—narrower than an ordinary MRT maintenance passage, maybe 80 centimeters. Concrete walls on both sides, their surfaces ridged with the marks of concrete formwork, the rough finish of a building's foundation, not the smooth tiling a station was supposed to have.

He raised the Sony α7, 35mm, looked through the viewfinder. The stairs in the viewfinder matched his eyes.

The air was cold. Three degrees colder than the platform. The same "three degrees colder" as in the alley on Day 9.

He went down seven steps. At a half-turn landing, he stopped. Past the landing, further down, was a narrower horizontal passage; overhead ran an old-style concrete conduit, three copper wires bundled along it, their surfaces oxidized black.

That wasn't engineering the Taipei MRT was supposed to have.

The Taipei MRT was built in the late eighties, opened in the nineties; all its cabling was PVC-sheathed copper core, grey-white, running neatly in metal trays. These three bare copper wires in front of him were older—maybe the sixties or seventies, old-style work left over from the colonial industrial period or rebuilt after the war. When the MRT was built, the contractors would tear out the underground foundations of old buildings, or leave an isolation layer. If this passage in front of him existed, it had to be the underground tunnel of some old building, kept, knotted together with the MRT line down here.

At the end of the passage there was an old-style bulb, lit, dim yellow. The same color temperature as the streetlamp in the alley in 005.

He kept going.

---

The horizontal passage was maybe 20 meters.

The floor was concrete, uneven, with a few shallow puddles. He stepped across them; the rubber of his sneaker soles made a small sound between the water and the concrete, thrown back by the walls on both sides, sounding twice as loud as it really was. He slowed, set his heel down first, then his toe, trying to cut the echo.

At 10 meters in, he heard a fan.

It was an old-style industrial fan, mounted in a square hole in the wall on the left of the passage, blades turning slow, as if underpowered. The grille was rust-eaten. A smell of mildew came from behind it, mixed with the smell of damp concrete.

Beside the fan, on the wall, were two block characters.

The same set of characters he'd seen on the platform screen, but this time they spelled out a sentence, not as short as a station name.

He "knew" what it meant—something like "Proceed Slowly" or "Danger, Continue," that sort of warning.

Below the block characters on the wall was an arrow drawn in chalk, fresh, the chalk dust not fully dry, pointing deeper into the passage.

He looked at that arrow for ten seconds.

He hadn't drawn it.

---

He went on.

At the end of the passage, he stopped. The end was a T-junction, a narrower lateral passage running off to either side, vanishing into the dark.

He looked up at the camera LCD; the lateral passages threw back no reflection, and the headlamp couldn't reach into the depths either. The left passage had a faint light maybe 10 meters in, no telling what kind; the right was darker, water dripping somewhere. Straight ahead, past the T-junction, was a concrete wall, an old-style green metal sign nailed to it, two block characters and an arrow, the arrow pointing left.

He "knew" the two characters—a station name. The last two of the three characters of Xingyun Station.

If he went left, he'd reach the platform.

He didn't go.

He thought about it. He had less than a minute of window left now, not enough to walk to the platform and back. This time he'd only come to confirm where the entrance was, not to go onto the platform. And the chalk arrow on the wall was another reason he couldn't just push ahead—someone had gone through before him, and whether that someone had come out, he didn't know.

He raised his wrist to check the time—the backup phone had been off in his pocket since he entered at 02:30, to avoid signal residue, so he was timing now off an old-style mechanical watch—03:18:08.

Twelve seconds left.

He started back.

---

He no longer slowed his steps or controlled the rhythm of his breathing. The sound of soles and water was thrown back off the walls on both sides, three times louder than coming in. He didn't care; staying quiet at this hour had stopped meaning anything. Twenty meters of passage, seven steps of stairs, fifteen seconds by his estimate—that was all he had left.

At the eighth meter he nearly went down, hit a smear of water, caught himself one-handed on the wall and kept running. His pulse was over 140 already; he could feel his carotid jumping. Up the seven steps he took two at a time, and on the top three he nearly tripped. At 03:18:25 he pushed the emergency door open.

And in that second.

From deep in the passage—the direction he'd walked toward, reached the T-junction, and turned back from—came a sound.

A train pulling in.

The sound sat in the low end, muffled, heavy, the engine bouncing off the tunnel walls and swelling, the clatter of metal track mixed in. He'd listened to the Taipei MRT pulling in for over a decade—electrified, streamlined, quiet. This was different. This was like an old diesel-driven car, grinding up from somewhere very deep.

The sound of the train pulling in lasted maybe three seconds in the passage. By then he was already out the emergency door, standing on the platform.

He closed the door behind him; it gave a small sound.

03:18:30—the platform screen jumped back to the normal version. Next station, "Longshan Temple."

The platform's color temperature shifted from yellow slowly back to white cold light.

He walked back to the middle of the platform, found a bench, sat down. His hand was shaking.

He told himself: it isn't just the hand. This time he shook longer than the time he walked into the alley on Day 9—that time it stopped thirty seconds after he got into the car. Today, on the platform bench, he shook for close to four minutes.

He thought: in the alley on Day 9 it was "the eye can't see it, the camera can." Today the passage was visible to both. The overwrite had opened more of itself to him. Opening was a good thing—he could go deeper—but it also meant his position inside this system was moving in some direction. He wasn't sure that direction was where he wanted to go.

---

At 03:32 a train pulled in—again, an hour it shouldn't have been running, but the train came. He boarded. This late-night version of the Bannan Line was itself the overwrite carrying on; he knew this wasn't the real Taipei MRT service—but it was the fastest way out. He rode to Shandao Temple, exited, walked 500 meters, the overwrite already over, the streets sliding into the hour of early taxis and first buses.

Back to the car. The lot gate opened at 03:51 and he drove out. At 03:58 he was home.

He sent Ye Wenjia a LINE message: "Home." A few seconds later she replied: "Got it."

He sat back down at the desk, opened the waterproof notebook, turned to the 009 page. At the top he wrote:

Day 21, went into the passage. Entrance is behind the emergency exit door at the south end of the Ximen Station platform, through a run of 7 concrete steps plus a 20-meter horizontal passage to a T-junction.

Below that:

That passage isn't an MRT maintenance passage—the construction is clearly older than the MRT, bare copper wires, dim yellow bulb, old-style ridges left by the concrete formwork, cabling and fixtures to sixties–seventies spec. On the wall at the T-junction there's an old-style green metal sign nailed up, reading Xingyun Station, arrow pointing left. I didn't go that way. Less than 1 minute left, turned back.

He stopped. Below it he wrote:

03:18:25, the second I turned back, a train pulling in from deep in the passage.
That train sound wasn't the Taipei MRT.
Older. Heavier. Diesel-driven.

He paused. Below that, he added a line:

There's an arrow drawn in chalk on the wall in the passage, fresh, the chalk dust not fully dry.
I didn't draw it.

He stopped, then added one more: the arrow points deeper into the passage, not toward the exit. Whoever drew it was going in, not coming out.

He closed the notebook.

The sky outside wasn't light yet; over toward Xinyi there was a band of pale grey cloud above the horizon. This time he didn't check whether that cloud was flat.

He thought: if that chalk arrow was drawn by someone else, just now, in the small hours today—

where was that someone now. Still in the passage? Or already on the platform, on a train? Or already out, walking down some Taipei street he didn't know?

【Ch. 009 End · Li Kaichen's home in Da'an District → Ximen Station Exit 8 → Bannan Line platform → emergency exit door at the south end of the platform → concrete stairs → horizontal passage → T-junction → exit → Shandao Temple → home】