The pitch-black night sky looked like an enormous curtain, blotting out every trace of light.
Chen Ge sat on his electric scooter, palm open. Raindrops fell into his hand, carrying a faint chill.
"Looks like it's going to pour."
The buildings lining both sides of the road looked blurry. It wasn't even past midnight yet, but there wasn't a single light to be seen in the residential area.
"Do people in the eastern suburbs all go to sleep early?"
Chen Ge had already noticed something off. He parked the scooter at the bus stop, took out his phone, and checked the time.
"It's not even midnight. Normally, those things only start getting active after twelve." Chen Ge hadn't brought a raincoat or an umbrella, and he was worried Yan Danian's manga would get wet. "Do I wait here, or push on before the rain gets worse?"
After a moment's thought, Chen Ge decided to keep moving. "Once it starts raining hard, I'll find shelter. I can't spend the whole night waiting for the ghost bus to show up. Getting to the old house where Jiang Long is holding Xiaobu's mom captive — that's the top priority tonight."
Chen Ge was an extremely decisive person. Once he made up his mind, he acted immediately.
Right now, he was the only vehicle on the entire road, but he wasn't flustered in the slightest.
"Bus Route 104 is the longest route in Jiujiang with the most stops, and it's the only bus that runs directly from the western suburbs to the eastern suburbs. When the city first opened that route, it was meant to strengthen the connection between east and west."
"Now that I think about it, out of all the routes, it just had to be the last bus on Route 104 that caused trouble. Whoever's behind this probably wants to use this bus to transport ghosts and lingering obsessions from the western suburbs to the eastern suburbs — or maybe to smuggle something from the east to the west in secret."
Chen Ge wasn't sure what the mastermind behind the eastern suburbs was really after, but from his previous encounters, it seemed like they were turning the eastern suburbs into a playground for ghosts. They had even built an entire residential complex outside of Liwan Town specifically for spirits.
"The eastern suburbs are far more dangerous than the western. I can't let my guard down."
The deeper he ventured into the eastern suburbs, the dimmer the streetlights on both sides became. Their distorted glow offered no warmth or sense of security — if anything, it only deepened the unease in his heart.
The buildings along the road were all perfectly ordinary structures you'd see in everyday life, yet at this moment they gave off an inexplicable wrongness, as though what lived inside wasn't human at all, but something else entirely.
When he reached a T-intersection, Chen Ge stopped.
He stood beneath a Route 104 bus stop sign, staring down the two roads branching left and right, racking his brain — but he simply couldn't remember which way to go.
Having completed numerous trial missions on the Black Phone, and with survival always on his mind, he had cultivated the habit of memorizing nearby roads wherever he went. After visiting Liwan Town several times, he'd already committed the route to memory, yet when he tried to follow it, the road before him now held paths that didn't match his recollection at all.
"Did I remember wrong — or have I already entered the range of that out-of-control door?"
He took out his phone and opened the map app, but it couldn't lock onto his position for a long time.
"So this is what Doctor Pei was talking about."
The same situation, but Chen Ge handled it nothing like that patient. He parked the scooter by the roadside, grabbed his backpack, walked up to the nearest storefront, and pounded hard on the already-shut rolling metal door.
"Midnight, and I'm knocking like a madman — and not a single person in the whole building comes out to check?"
Chen Ge looked back. The buildings in his field of vision were blurry. Darkness surged from the distance like a stampeding herd of beasts, ready to swallow everything in its path — Chen Ge included.
"When a door stays open for too long, the world inside — full of despair and the uncanny — overlaps with the world outside." Chen Ge had only heard Men Nan mention this. He had never witnessed it himself, so he couldn't be certain.