"Highway Horror": So Xu Xi Stepped In Afterward

"Brother Xu, what do we do?!"

Xu Xi had only just regained consciousness when he heard the anxious question beside him.

Before he had time to think, his hands moved faster than his mind.

After he rolled down the window, the pounding rain struck his face. The slight pain and coolness brought Xu Xi fully to his senses.

He looked at the old woman, whose transformation had stopped because of what he had done. She was staring at him with eager anticipation.

"Young man, are you willing to give this old woman a ride?" she asked earnestly.

Xu Xi shook his head and, just as the old woman was about to change expression again, promptly pulled a stack of joss paper from his pocket.

He held the stack out of the window and said with a smile, "Ma'am, we really do have urgent business to attend to, and it would be terribly inconvenient to give you a ride. Why don't you take this money and wait for the next car that fate sends your way?"

Their vision blurred, and when they could see again, the old woman was already outside Xu Xi's window.

She snatched the joss paper from his hand. Her eyes shone as she counted it, then stuffed it into the cloth bag she held.

The old woman cleared her throat. Not only had the gloom faded from her face, but she even smiled. Her bark-like skin looked more wrinkled than ever in the heavy rain.

Her words, however, made the others secretly grit their teeth.

"How could this old woman possibly accept your money? But since you've given it to me, young man, I'll shamelessly take it. It's just that... I'm afraid this little bit won't be enough for a taxi."

Without a change in expression, Xu Xi took three sticks of incense from inside his clothes. "We're in a hurry, so we didn't bring much money. This incense is all we have left."

"That's enough, enough!" The old woman smiled as she took the incense and held it to her nose, taking a deep sniff with an enraptured expression. "Thank you so much! Then I'll wait for the next car."

Hearing that, Xu Xi gave Tan Xingyun a look.

Tan Xingyun understood and stepped on the accelerator. Before long, they had left the old woman far behind.

Only when she was completely out of sight did everyone relax a little. Li Kang even slumped against his seat cushion.

"Brother Xu, you're amazing! You got rid of that old woman so easily. I thought she was going to transform and eat us the next second."

"Yeah, you're quick-witted, young man. None of us thought we could send that old woman away with joss paper and things like that," Tan Xingyun said with feeling.

Xu Xiuman took out the portion of joss paper and offering incense she had bought and examined it carefully for a while before continuing, "So this is what that old man meant when he said some troublesome things needed more expensive incense to send them away."

"If it weren't for young Xu asking us to buy incense, I'm afraid that old woman wouldn't have been so easy to get rid of. We might have had to pay a heavy price."

At best, they would have lost hands or feet. At worst... it might have cost one or two lives.

[I didn't expect this crisis to be resolved so easily.]

[Easily? Try switching him out for any of those other three players.]

[Yeah, and I only just realized how many uses joss paper has. If they'd stuck to their original plan, there's no way they would've had enough for the whole journey.]

[Thanks to Xu Xi's "foresight," buying loads of joss paper and extra incense, it's already paying off.]

[Also, I don't know if you noticed, but Xu Xi generally doesn't draw much attention to himself. Every time, he only takes charge after that young guy Li Kang asks him what to do.]

[Exactly. I was wondering about that too. Xu Xi must have thought of using joss paper to send that eerie creature away ages ago, so why did he wait until the very last moment, when it was about to transform, to speak up so casually?]

[He probably thought his teammates were capable of handling it. The beer-bellied uncle is levelheaded, and the woman in the denim skirt is thoughtful. Those two would most likely have thought of it.]

[But it looks like they didn't.]

[So Xu Xi stepped in afterward. Everything this newcomer has done from start to finish shows that he's extremely intelligent and thorough. And rather than leading a team, he prefers to observe on his own. But his teammates' performances were all pretty poor, so he had to help to avoid being dragged down with them. If this were a solo instance, apart from the time needed to travel, the rest probably wouldn't hold him up for long.]

[Is this the true strength of someone who cleared it in two minutes and forty-eight seconds? (Attached: one "terrifyingly powerful" meme)]

[Speaking of which, everything that old man hinted at came true. They should have asked him for more information back then.]

[You think that old man's a philanthropist? That he'd point out every danger and let you clear the instance easily?]

[I was just thinking they still had plenty of money. They could've bought more joss paper and incense or other ritual offerings.]

[The person above clearly didn't pay attention to the earlier analysis. Joss paper is useful, but they still don't know whether they'll need money later. What if they need it and don't have enough? They planned it out and left themselves a way out. You're a real gambler, huh?]

[...]

The bullet comments were in heated discussion, while the group in the instance were also reviewing what had just happened.

"It looks like that old man at the funeral shop is a very important key figure." Xu Xiuman sighed softly. "We all paid far too little attention to what he said."

"That's right. We were too wary of him, so we subconsciously doubted what he said and didn't dare trust him completely. That's why we didn't use his hints in time to deal with that eerie old woman." Tan Xingyun nodded in agreement.

If the young man named Xu Xi hadn't been sitting behind him, they might not have remembered those hints until after they had paid a price.

"Very likely, we would have lost someone."

At that, he couldn't help glancing up at the rearview mirror.

The mirror clearly reflected the people sitting in the back.

Li Kang was listening intently to what they were saying, while Xu Xi... met his gaze.

Tan Xingyun didn't know what had startled him, but his heart skipped a beat in that instant.

Xu Xi looked puzzled as the beer-bellied uncle hastily averted his eyes and drove on, staring solemnly ahead.

They had only made eye contact. Was this uncle that shy? He didn't seem like it.

But remembering what Tan Xingyun had just said about losing someone, he silently thought, It was more than that. All four of us were wiped out.

Yes, he had actually been reborn again.

Twice, in fact.

The first time, they hadn't let the old woman into the car. She had transformed into an eerie creature and destroyed both the car and everyone in it.

The second time, he had overruled everyone's objections and let her into the car. But not long after they set off, the old woman had transformed again, plunging her sharp, greenish claws through their bodies.

The reason he had suddenly thought to send her away with joss paper and incense wasn't that he had remembered the funeral shop old man's hint. Rather, before his consciousness faded for the last time on the second attempt, he had seen that after the old woman impaled them, she hadn't eaten them immediately. She had instead taken the joss paper and incense from their pockets first, so he had tried it this time.

After listening to Tan Xingyun and the others' analysis, Xu Xi understood.

So the solution he had stumbled on by chance had matched the hint after all.