Please Have a Good Cry

"Nurse, could you please have a good cry?" Su Bai asked the Nurse with a smile, then addressed the driver's seat. "Driver, that should be fine, right?"

"..." This time, even when Su Bai asked, the driver gave no response.

Perhaps this was the second round of the game.

Su Bai did not care what the driver thought anyway and took his silence as consent.

What mattered was...

His smile faded. His eyes, which had been half narrowed with amusement, opened fully as he looked at the perpetually weeping Nurse with a gaze no ordinary high school student could possibly possess.

Having struggled in the Nightmare World for ten years in his previous life, how could Su Bai still have the innocent, uncomprehending eyes of a high school student who had yet to graduate?

Even those skilled at reading the emotions hidden in other people's eyes would most likely only barely glimpse his indifference toward everything in the world when he stopped smiling. Su Bai had to shoulder the Vengeful Ghost Puzzles' wish for him to "live on," but that was all.

Whether in his previous life or this one, perhaps only players and supernatural beings with special "mind-reading" abilities could dig beneath that deeper layer of indifference and uncover the true madness buried within this handsome young man!

Su Bai's madness had not been shaped solely by what happened before he entered the Nightmare World.

His mother's death, his brother's betrayal, the end of his academic prospects, and the crushing pressure of debt could indeed break a person. But for Su Bai, given enough time, he could still have carved out a life of his own, even if he had to start by hauling bricks.

Su Bai's madness came from the shattered real world and the Nightmare World he could almost never escape, even through eternity. His madness came from enduring far, far too much torment to survive in the Nightmare World when he had not yet gained enough strength.

Su Bai always thought he hid his madness well. He did not know that people called him "Monster" not merely because of his strength, but because a few people and supernatural beings could still see the madness in his eyes-the pursuit of destruction and being shattered beyond recognition.

The Nurse meeting his gaze at that moment was one such being.

With her bloody tears dried up, the Nurse tilted her head and looked at Su Bai. Beyond the confusion in her eyes, she seemed to be pondering something. She held his gaze for a long time, as though considering a complicated question.

"Cry, Nurse." No longer smiling, Su Bai leaned toward her. His left hand, bearing the Blood-Colored Bead Necklace, closed around her pale neck. A faint, strangely familiar jingling could be heard around him. "Please make sure you don't stop too easily."

That jingling sounded much like the silver bells on the Ghost Bride's bridal veil.

"Vengeful Ghost Puzzle."

In response to Su Bai's suggestion-or rather, his threat-the Nurse did something he had not expected. She reached out a pale hand, trying to stroke his cheek.

Su Bai avoided the supernatural being's touch. The Nurse did not reach out again. Instead, in a voice tinged with sobs, she asked a baffling question. "Doesn't it hurt?"

"..."

"So many, so many cracks." As though experiencing some unimaginable pain, the Nurse wrapped her arms around herself and buried her head. "It hurts, it hurts. Why don't you cry?"

Su Bai could not understand what the supernatural being before him was saying. But once he realized she could communicate, he tried talking to her. "Since you think I'm in so much pain, could you cry for me?"

The Nurse raised her head to look at Su Bai. The next second, bloody tears poured from her eyes, and an utterly grief-stricken wail instantly filled the bus.

"Waaa-"

Her sobs gradually shifted from suppressed grief to an outpouring of anguish. Laden with a special power, they seemed to unravel strand by strand from the Nurse's soul, spreading through the bus and laying down layers of blood-red sorrow.

"Cover your ears unless you want to lose your minds!" Su Bai stood the instant the Nurse began crying and shouted to the trio.

At the same time, the faint sound of silver bells surrounded Su Bai, and he made a show of covering his own ears.

The mournful crying brought sad memories from the past into everyone's minds. Covering their ears could only ease part of its influence. Still, the Nurse's power was not particularly potent against ordinary people. A child like Zhang Yibu, for instance, would at most recall failing an exam, getting beaten by his parents, and being forbidden to play on his phone.

The sadder their past experiences, the more easily the crying could affect them.

Thus, the ones on the bus who might be affected most deeply were Su Bai, who had struggled in the Nightmare World in his previous life, and the Ghost Bride, A Xi, who was bound to this road by her obsession!

Trapped and devoid of reason or awareness, the Ghost Bride could neither break her shackles nor stop White Qipao.

But if he could use certain methods to awaken the Ghost Bride as he had in his previous life and restore her human heart, then, together with Su Bai's "Vengeful Ghost Puzzle," their chances of clearing the game would improve!

The first way Su Bai thought of awakening the Ghost Bride was to resonate with her through his own fate, just as he had in his previous life. But after being reborn, he could not place absolute confidence in such a chance occurrence. He did not even know whether his current self could still resonate with her.

Then the Nurse, whom Su Bai had never encountered in his previous life, came to his attention. If her crying could make the Ghost Bride remember something, it might well awaken her.

Amid the crying, Su Bai covered both ears and borrowed a little of the Vengeful Ghost Puzzle's power, using the sound of silver bells to divert his attention. His eyes, however, remained fixed on the movements of the two ghosts in the back row, White Qipao and the Ghost Bride.

Just as Su Bai had predicted, White Qipao was unaffected by the crying. Perhaps this was because White Qipao had originally been nothing more than a funeral paper effigy, with no sorrowful human memories to begin with-merely a pure evil ghost that had developed an instinct to devour humans after mutating beneath the Red Moon.

"Jingle-"

Silver bells rang out, much like those around Su Bai. The Ghost Bride, who had sat motionless ever since leaving the Ghost Village, trembled slightly amid the crying. Clearly, the Nurse's cries really were affecting her!

"Waaa, waaa-"

The Nurse's cries grew louder, as though she had found her stride. Even the previously unresponsive White Qipao seemed irritated by the crying. The left hand holding Qin Ge lowered, and the body, now fully three-dimensional, stiffly turned toward Su Bai and the Nurse.

"Clang-jangle-"

The crying grew louder and louder, its influence on the Ghost Bride becoming ever stronger. She struggled increasingly violently in the last row, and blood once again streamed from the gaping hole in her chest!

Not only the Ghost Bride-even Su Bai, with his ears covered and the silver bells helping him, could not stop himself from plunging into maddening memories.

He saw that bastard's retreating back from the last time he had seen Su Xuan.

He saw his mother rushing out of the shop to bring back her son who had gone astray, heard the truck's brakes screech as it struck something heavy, and saw the pool of blood on the road in the Commercial Street...

He saw the players who had died beside him in the Nightmare World, and the kindly veteran who had sworn to keep newcomers like them alive, only to turn around and throw them to an evil ghost.

He saw his supposed best friend cutting wound after wound into his body, just to cover the entire sacrificial altar with his blood.