After listening to the burn doctor, Chen Ge finally understood that every passenger on the ghost bus had an unspeakable past. Secrets were buried deep in their hearts, and they rode the bus to the terminal station in the dead of night for that sliver of hope.
They were a pitiful bunch, and Chen Ge debated whether or not to tell them the truth.
If he didn't tell them, they might still cling to a shred of hope and keep fighting to survive.
If he did, these passengers would very likely collapse upon losing their last anchor.
"The ghost bus's terminal is Liwan Town — a place influenced by the world beyond the Door, filled with despair and evil. All their efforts are doomed to be in vain. I can't just watch them sink deeper and deeper. People who have sacrificed so much deserve to be treated kindly by life."
Simply telling them the truth would only crush them. But if he gave them new hope at the same time, that would be an entirely different story.
After mulling it over for a long time, Chen Ge decided to help them in his own way.
"What are you thinking about?" The burn doctor noticed Chen Ge zoning out and asked softly.
Chen Ge didn't answer. His mind was racing, and in a matter of seconds, the stories of Wang Qi, Xu Yin, Doctor Gao, and others flashed through his head. Any one of their experiences, plugged into his own situation, would be enough to pull the deception off.
"If it's inconvenient to talk about, that's fine. Maybe we'll meet on this bus again someday." The man swept his gaze over Chen Ge, his lips moving slightly. "This is your first time riding this bus, isn't it?"
"Yes." Chen Ge nodded.
The burn doctor scooted a little closer to Chen Ge, lowering his voice to a whisper. "When we get there, if someone asks you to choose between giving and bearing, remember — always choose to bear."
"What do you mean?" Chen Ge picked up on the wrongness immediately. "I just want to find my friend. Do I really need to give or bear certain things? Brother, what exactly is at the terminal?"
The doctor slowly turned his head, glanced around at the other passengers, and only then spoke. "There's a Nether Building in that town. Inside it, you can hear the voices of the people you want to see. If you want to find them, you have to pay a price."
Chen Ge filed the doctor's words away. The man had revealed a very important clue — there was a Nether Building in Liwan Town.
He likewise lowered his voice. "Brother, I just want to see my friend. Does even a single meeting require paying some kind of price?"
"There's no such thing as a one-sided gain in this world. If you want to see your friend, you have to bear something, or pay a price." The doctor seemed to harbor no ill will. He took off his gloves and gently rolled up his sleeve, revealing strips of red thread tied around his thin, gaunt arm. "This is for warding off evil. Every time I enter the Nether Building, I choose to bear. When I come out, my shoulders always feel heavy — like something climbed onto my back and followed me out."
Chchen Ge now understood what the man meant by bearing. No wonder the doctor gave off such a chill and looked so frail. The mastermind behind the scenes was using these desperate, pitiful people to nurture ghosts, treating them as vessels for the spirits.
It was essentially the same as what the members of the Ghost Story Association did, though with one key difference — these passengers didn't know their bodies had become homes for ghosts, that their emotions had become food for spirits. They had no ability to control ghosts and could only bear passively, which made them far easier to manipulate.
"Then what does giving mean? Why don't you want me to choose that?"
"The fool sitting next to me chose giving. At first, you only have to give up fingernails, hair. But the further you go, the more horrifying what you give becomes — teeth, fingers, your conscience, and even the beautiful parts of your humanity." The doctor's voice was so quiet that without Chen Ge's Ghost Ear ability giving him sharp hearing, he wouldn't have been able to make it out at all.
"You can give up your conscience?"
"It makes you do things in the town — stealing, robbing, even killing certain things. Once you choose giving, you'll find yourself becoming less and less like yourself." The doctor saw that Chen Ge still looked curious rather than frightened, so he didn't bother explaining further. "Just remember this: everyone who chose giving, after they gave up everything, never walked out of that building again."
"So they gave away themselves entirely?" Without conscience, humanity, or memory, they had long since lost themselves in the process of continual sacrifice.
Chen Ge felt these people sounded a lot like the killers in his game — brimming with malice, extremely aggressive, and highly dangerous.
"If that town in the game represents the world beyond Liwan Town's Door, then those who chose giving were most likely sent through the Door in the end."
Those who chose to entrust became vessels for the ghosts beyond the Door, slowly devoured. Those who chose to give became monsters within that world.
Chen Ge compared the Ghost Story Association's methods with those of the mastermind behind the East District. The Ghost Story Association had people control ghosts and studied how to master the Door. But the situation in the East District was completely inverted — the person behind it all seemed to be letting ghosts control people, continuously feeding "nourishment" to the Door, making it even harder to close a Door that had already spiraled out of control.
If Doctor Gao was a person who had taken both rationality and madness to their absolute extremes, then the mastermind behind the East District was a ghost gone completely hysterical. It didn't treat humans as humans at all, trampling recklessly on everything beautiful, utterly twisted and depraved.
"Now that's a terrifying opponent." Through his conversation with the doctor, Chen Ge had figured out a great many things, and he was slowly calming down. "A single shadow in the water treatment plant could fight Zhang Ya when she hadn't even fully recovered. Could that shadow's true form really be something above a Red Jacket?"
Chen Ge used to run the moment he saw a Red Jacket, without a second word. Now, thanks to Xu Yin and Bai Qiulin growing stronger step by step, he had finally overcome his fear of Red Jackets — only for something even more bizarre to appear right after.
He couldn't gauge the other party's strength. Considering his parents had gone missing in the East District, Chen Ge suddenly felt uneasy. He looked at the electric scooter sitting right in the middle of the bus aisle and muttered under his breath, "Have I been a bit too flashy lately?"
The Red Raincoat was a Red Jacket herself, yet even knowing her child might be on the bus, she still didn't dare set foot on the ghost bus. That alone spoke volumes about how terrifying the mastermind was.
"If someone can scare a Red Jacket like that, I need to recalculate just how strong they are."
Chen Ge sat muttering to himself. The burn doctor beside him assumed he'd been frightened by what he'd heard and offered gentle reassurance. "As long as you choose to bear, you'll be fine. Before it becomes too much to bear, you might even have a chance to see her."
The doctor's wish was so simple. Chen Ge couldn't stand watching the man walk step by step into the abyss like this. He decided to save these people in his own way. "Actually, I know another way to see them — one that doesn't require paying such a terrible price."
"What way?" The doctor's eyebrows lifted slightly, clearly intrigued by what Chen Ge had said.
Chen Ge turned to look the doctor straight in the eye. "Have you heard of the Ghost Story Association?"