In the '80s and '90s, public safety was poor, so drivers had to be especially careful. Many taxi drivers would install metal grilles in their cars to separate the driver's seat from the rest of the vehicle.
Maybe because many older drivers carried those habits into the 2000s, they still liked to keep a few useful tools in their cars for self-defense.
"Phew..." Zhang Anzai picked up the hammer, closed the trunk, then turned and climbed into the driver's seat.
He opened the glove compartment and put the drinks inside. He tucked the notebook behind his waist and placed the claw hammer in the storage slot beneath the door.
"Got everything you needed?"
Zhang Anzai silently inserted the key, started the car, and pulled out. "Got it all."
An odd silence settled over the car. After driving for a short while, Zhang Anzai still didn't know how to start a conversation. He didn't even turn on the radio; he just kept driving.
As the road stretched ahead and the familiar surroundings came back into view, a chill slowly spread through his body.
"Who the fuck are you?!"
Zhang Anzai regretted buying the energy drinks. How could he possibly sleep in a situation like this?
Someone was sitting in the passenger seat beside him—a seat that had been completely empty before. At some point, a young man about his size had appeared there.
The car was dim, and the bizarre situation had him so frightened that Zhang Anzai couldn't make out the man's face.
The most troublesome part was that although Zhang Anzai had quickly realized something was wrong, he hadn't felt anything amiss at first, when he'd gotten into the car and driven away from the gas station.
Perhaps because the player's body and the company's real body shared the same consciousness, he hadn't even thought that there should only be one person in the car.
"Is something wrong with my mind?" Zhang Anzai finally confirmed what was happening.
He thought it over carefully, and some things came back to him.
So he asked, "Chen Xing, how long did you say Highway 44 was?"
Chen Xing, sitting beside him, answered in a perfectly ordinary young man's voice, "I don't know."
After hearing that, Zhang Anzai held his breath for a moment, then began breathing deeply.
"Chen Xing, my childhood friend... But this is a fucking scenario. Where would a childhood friend suddenly come from in the middle of nowhere?!"
He realized that the knowledge that he had such a friend had somehow been implanted in his mind. That was why he hadn't found the person beside him strange; instead, he'd felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity and affection.
But not long after driving off, he'd subconsciously shifted his thoughts back to his real body and glanced at the screen. Only then had he suddenly realized that he was inside a scenario.
Once his usual train of thought had been disrupted, he'd noticed something was wrong.
"Unless it's a multiplayer battle scenario, any other players in the scenario should be under my control. But the screen didn't show anyone. So he isn't a player—he's an NPC? Was this NPC here from the start?"
With just those few simple thoughts, Zhang Anzai realized something was off.
Where had this Chen Xing come from?
He immediately concluded that this so-called Chen Xing beside him was definitely suspicious, whether he was a ghost or a human. He was the kind of monster that could tamper with one's perceptions, something Zhang Anzai rarely encountered even in scenarios.
"Luckily... I was the one matched to this scenario." Zhang Anzai understood that he'd been able to figure it out because his consciousness had briefly returned to his real body.
He'd gone straight from an immersive experience to an observer's perspective, which was how he'd noticed something was wrong.
An ordinary player probably wouldn't have found anything strange about this situation. Even a prompt from an item might not have been enough to wake them up.
"So now the question is: what next?" Zhang Anzai watched the road stretch ahead. The Chen Xing beside him, who made him feel so uneasy, didn't seem to be doing anything in particular.
If things stayed this way, he might be able to drive all the way out of here without trouble.
But if someone put a person—or ghost—beside him without warning, could he really believe nothing else was going to happen? He'd stake his whole career as an administrator on that being impossible.
The trouble was that he hadn't noticed anything wrong at first. By the time he'd reacted and thought things through, he'd already driven for quite a while.
This monster beside him could tamper with his consciousness. Zhang Anzai didn't think it lacked the ability to kill him instantly. And they were already out in the middle of nowhere, a particularly unsafe place to make a move.
Worse, the monster was sitting so close. Zhang Anzai didn't dare test it recklessly, and he couldn't spare a hand to use the True-Form Scissors.
"The main problem is that I don't know what's going on."
It wasn't entirely true that he knew nothing about the guy beside him.
Zhang Anzai knew exactly where the name Chen Xing came from. It belonged to the childhood friend of the protagonist in the Jinan Ghost Stories tale he'd just read—the one who'd run into something supernatural.
Thinking about it, the monster had probably used that story as a template and implanted those memories into his mind.
But there were countless inconsistencies. Aside from that childhood encounter with a ghost, he couldn't remember anything he and this so-called childhood friend had done together.
Zhang Anzai drove carefully for a while. When he saw that Chen Xing wasn't doing anything strange, he decisively pulled his consciousness back to his real body, then moved the keyboard and mouse to search the files.
"[Ghost · Endless Night Road], no information available..." Zhang Anzai knew this wasn't all that unusual. At least half the scenarios they encountered each day were new, but that was hardly good news.
His consciousness returned to the scenario.
The road was still empty and straight, and Zhang Anzai had developed a bit of muscle memory from driving. The car was running smoothly.
But he still had no way to deal with the situation. He kept racking his brain. Is there any way to break out of this?
The atmosphere inside the car was far more oppressive than before. Zhang Anzai didn't dare make a move, afraid that the so-called friend beside him might suddenly reveal his true form and go, "Friend... delicious."
Fortunately, Chen Xing behaved himself. He even occasionally picked up some water to drink or looked at his phone.
But who told you that you can drink water without opening the cap, or look at your phone without leaving the home screen...? Zhang Anzai couldn't see his face, but he could catch those details out of the corner of his eye.
Those strange little behaviors made him even more certain that Chen Xing wasn't human.
Without meaning to, he'd started driving much faster than before. Zhang Anzai wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
But the road stretched on without end. He drove through that eerie atmosphere for nearly an hour before finally seeing a sign for Highway 45 up ahead.
"Made it!?" Zhang Anzai could tell something was clearly wrong, but, caught between a glimmer of hope and a strong sense of foreboding, he turned onto Highway 45.
Then he looked behind him in the rearview mirror.
Just as he'd expected, both sides of the road were empty.
"The sign... is gone."
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