After being stared at by
"Have we met before?"
His voice was cold and weathered, as though he couldn't care less about anything in the outside world.
Chen Ge hadn't expected the man to suddenly speak. He paused briefly before picking up along the man's thread: "You look a lot like a friend of mine. Almost the same aura. Have we met somewhere before?"
The man turned his head, a trace of fatigue hidden deep in his eyes. "You've probably mistaken me for someone else."
"No, I've definitely seen you somewhere before." This was Chen Ge's first time meeting the man, but he said it purely to keep the conversation going and extract more useful information.
The man fell silent for a while. Seeing that Chen Ge didn't seem to be lying, he hesitated several times before raising his hand and pulling the mask off his face.
High bridge of the nose, pale skin, blue-purple lips. After removing the mask, the man coughed violently several times. "You've made a mistake. I'm not the person you're looking for."
After saying this, he put the mask back on, his gaze carrying an emotion that was hard for anyone else to understand. "I don't have any friends."
This man wasn't afraid of Chen Ge. He was a passenger who had boarded later, and he was alive. He had no idea what was hiding in Chen Ge's shadow — in his eyes, Chen Ge probably wasn't all that different from the other passengers.
Chen Ge wanted to figure out what was happening in the eastern suburbs, and he wanted to bring every ghost on this spirit bus back to the haunted house. But what he hadn't expected was that tonight's spirit bus actually had two living passengers.
He didn't want to expose his secret, and it would be inconvenient to do anything out of the ordinary in front of two living people, so he changed his plans on the spot. He would keep a low profile for now. Once they reached Liwan Town and the two living passengers got off, he could have a proper chat with the rest.
Chen Ge sat obediently in his seat, shifting his gaze from the man to the window.
Rain struck the glass. The buildings on either side could no longer be seen clearly. Everything around was pitch black, and the Route 104 spirit bus they were riding felt like a small island drifting on a black ocean.
The bus had gone suddenly quiet. The man noticed that Chen Ge hadn't said a word since their exchange and assumed he had said something wrong.
He placed both hands on his knees and suddenly asked Chen Ge in a low voice: "Did you get on this bus looking for your friend?"
Chen Ge's gaze gradually sharpened, and the expression on his face began to shift, as if the man had guessed the secret buried in his heart — uneasy, pained, and tinged with guilt.
He nodded slowly and looked at the man beside him. "How did you know?"
"Every passenger on this bus has their own story and their own secrets. Otherwise, no one would be riding this bus past midnight."
"From the way you talk, this isn't your first time on this route?" The corner of Chen Ge's mouth twitched into the same smile he'd had when he boarded, but in his eyes there was a deeply suppressed pain that made anyone who saw it feel a pang of heartache.
"I used to take Route 104 to work. Rode it for nearly twenty years." The man spoke as if it had been a long time since he'd had a conversation with anyone, his words slow and measured. "The department was always busy back then, short-staffed, so I worked overtime constantly and always took the last bus home. At first I actually liked riding the last run — very few people, nice and quiet. But after a while, staring at those dark buildings on both sides, I started to feel a certain loneliness."
"A department? What did you do before?"
"Doctor. A burn unit doctor." The man emphasized the words "burn unit" in particular. A ripple passed through his eyes, as though something had been stirred in his memory.
"A burn unit?" Chen Ge had only ever dealt with psychiatrists before and didn't know much about burn units.
"Surgeries, skin grafts, rehabilitation — that was our work." The man spoke lightly, but Chen Ge could hear the weight behind every one of those words.
The man had also noticed the deeply suppressed pain in Chen Ge's eyes. As if he were seeing his own reflection in Chen Ge, he instinctively treated him as someone like himself.
After a brief exchange, the two lapsed into silence again. It was a long time before Chen Ge spoke. "Are you riding this bus to find someone too?"
The man gave a slight nod, pressing his gloved hand against his scarf.
"Did your wife knit that scarf for you?" Chen Ge seized the moment, asking with practiced nonchalance.
Hearing Chen Ge's words, the man froze for a moment. He removed his hand from the scarf and slowly shook his head.
"It wasn't from your wife?" The answer didn't match Chen Ge's earlier guess, and he grew curious. "Could you tell me your story?"
The rain grew heavier, drops hammering against the window in a steady drumbeat.
The man deliberated for a moment, then took off his mask and drew a deep breath. "Burn unit patients aren't like those in other departments. Skin ravaged beyond recognition, faces disfigured beyond recognition, heads scorched, flesh torn open — in our ward, you see it all every single day. When I was an intern, I honestly thought I'd descended into hell, until I gradually grew accustomed to the sight of blood and mangled flesh, accustomed to the stench and every manner of awful smell."
"There came a time when I thought I would never be emotionally shaken by my patients again."
"Until I was thirty, and I met a fourteen-year-old patient."
"She was still just a child. Her back had been severely scalded by boiling water. It took me half an hour to separate her clothes from her skin."
"That girl was very quiet. She didn't cry, didn't scream."
"To avoid affecting the child's neurological development, I didn't use full anesthesia. When I was peeling her clothes away from her skin, the child just lay there with her eyes open, watching me."
"Her back and her face were two completely opposite extremes. I comforted her the way I comforted all my other patients."
"After treating the wounds, I tracked down the adult who had brought her to the hospital, intending to go over some care instructions. But after asking around, I found out that it was a neighbor who had brought her in — and the injuries on her body weren't accidental. They had been inflicted by her own parents."
"I called the police." The man coughed several times as he spoke. His physical condition was clearly very poor.
"The girl's father had severe violent tendencies. Her mother was deaf and mute, meek and submissive."
"The police detained and educated her father for a month. After that, it was her mother who ran to the station on her own to plead for leniency — the whole family depended on him to make a living, after all."
"During the girl's treatment, I stayed by her side the whole time. That child was like a little white wildflower growing by the roadside. Being with her — for someone who had grown used to cruelty and inured to the stench — gave me, after so long, a fleeting taste of happiness again."