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 in 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 instant his toes touched the ground, the lined-up corpses ahead vanished like mist. Even the other vehicles he had seen earlier had disappeared without a trace, as if they had been nothing more than a mirage.
Before them stood an ancient city draped in colorful prayer flags, grandly nestled at the foot of the snow-capped mountains. Its towering white-brick walls 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 crowd.
Lin Chen got off right behind Qi Si, standing calmly among the corpses and bones. For the time being, he managed to maintain his composed, unruffled expression.
Lu Li and Xu Yao got off next. One was neither human nor ghost, while the other had been dead for years; at this moment, they were as leisurely as if they had come home.
Lu Li looked around and adjusted his glasses. "I studied folklore for a while before. I found that folk legends around the world all contain the image of the dead lining up in formation. 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 kind of omen in the deepest