The bus doors slowly opened, and every corpse aboard moved, rising stiffly to their feet.
Holding their own urns and portraits, they formed a line down the aisle and jumped off the bus one after another.
Qi Si followed at the back of the line and got off through the rear door as well.
The moment his toes touched the ground, the dead lined up ahead vanished like mist. Even the other vehicles he had seen earlier had disappeared without a trace, as though they had been nothing more than a mirage.
Before him stood an ancient city draped in colorful prayer flags, grandly nestled at the foot of a snow mountain. Its towering walls, built from white bricks, gleamed brilliantly beneath the unobstructed daylight.
The corpses of animals and humans knelt densely outside the ancient city, their heads bent at ninety-degree angles and hanging toward the ground. Qi Si could not help wondering whether the dead who had just gotten off the bus had also become part of the kneeling multitude.
Lin Chen got off right behind Qi Si. Standing calmly among the corpses, he managed to maintain an air of serene composure for a while.
Lu Li and Xu Yao got off next. One was neither human nor ghost, while the other had been dead for years; at that moment, both looked as relaxed as though they had returned home.
Lu Li looked around and adjusted his glasses. "I once studied folklore for a while and found that the image of the dead marching in a line exists in folk legends around the world. In the East, there are ghost soldiers borrowing the road and corpse driving; in the West, there is the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I wonder if the Ancestral God planted some sort of omen