Chen Ge nodded and didn't refuse. "Then drive."
"Thank you." Huang Ling was drenched from head to toe as she settled into the driver's seat. "My place isn't far from here. We'll be there in about ten minutes or so."
The headlights flickered on, and Huang Ling drove the others through the curtain of rain, heading down the highway toward the distance.
No one spoke the entire way. Everyone was lost in their own thoughts.
At one in the morning, the car arrived at the residential complex where Huang Ling rented her apartment. The location was quite remote, very close to Liwan Town.
"A few years ago, the city had plans to heavily develop the eastern suburbs. For reasons nobody really knows, the project fell through, and all that was left was this massive stretch of half-finished buildings. The people who used to live here gradually moved away because of the lack of transportation, amenities, and everything else." Huang Ling drove the taxi straight into the complex. Not a single light was on in the entire sprawling community — it felt like stepping into a ghost town. "A few years back, when they were talking about building a new district in Jiujiang's eastern suburbs, property prices were frighteningly high. Now all that's left is a mess, and people like us who got scammed."
Through their conversation, Chen Ge finally learned this woman's backstory. She and her husband had scraped together every last penny of their savings a few years ago to buy a place in Jiujiang's eastern suburbs.
At first, the couple had been overjoyed at snatching up an apartment in the east side, eagerly waiting for the new district to be established and the property value to soar.
But before long, the developer ran into funding shortfalls, debt disputes, and delayed the handover indefinitely.
To buy that apartment, the young couple had drained their family's savings and racked up a pile of debt. They joined forces with the other owners to demand answers from the developer, but the developer kept stalling and stalling — all the way up to the present.
The project was inexplicably halted. The home they'd spent their life savings on turned into an unfinished shell they could never move into. The couple had no choice but to scrape by on rented apartments.
Life was hard enough as it was, and during all of this, her husband had been in a car accident. Now the burden fell almost entirely on Huang Ling's shoulders.
"We're here. This is it." Huang Ling parked the car, grabbed her bag, and hurried upstairs. Chen Ge and Xiao Gu followed behind.
Only the ground-floor lights in the residential building still worked. The walls had gone black, likely from moisture damage, and a faint musty smell drifted through the stairwell.
"Jia Ming!" Huang Ling reached the fourth floor, fumbling her keys into the lock while shouting toward the inside of the apartment. She was terrified, dreading that what she feared most had already come true.
Watching the panicked and anxious Huang Ling, neither Chen Ge nor Xiao Gu said a word. In their minds, if Huang Ling's husband had called at that hour and knew the bus was full of ghosts, it meant he was most likely dead himself — another ghost.
The key wouldn't go into the lock no matter how hard she tried, and Huang Ling's hands were shaking with desperation. But just then, a man's voice came from inside the apartment.
"What took you so long? Where did you go in the middle of the night? I already called your company's supervisor—" The door swung open from the inside, and a gaunt, haggard man with a limp appeared in front of Huang Ling.
"Jia Ming?!"
Huang Ling was overcome with emotion at the sight of the middle-aged man. She reached out to embrace him, but he sidestepped her gesture with practiced subtlety. "Your clothes are completely soaked. What on earth were you doing out there?"
"I'll explain later. I'm just glad you're okay. You really scared me today." Huang Ling's voice cracked. "I'm going to change first. These two are the ones who saved my life. I'll drive them home in a bit."
Huang Ling went inside. The limping man planted himself in the doorway, making no move to invite Chen Ge and Xiao Gu in to sit down.
Standing outside, Chen Ge and Xiao Gu exchanged glances at the man. He was very much alive — so how could he possibly have called Huang Ling back then? And how had he known the Bus 104 was full of ghosts?
"Your wife ran into some dangerous people. The two of us stepped in and saved her." Chen Ge glanced past the man into the apartment. The rooms were neat and tidy — this man was a textbook househusband, with nothing out of the ordinary about him.