Sorrow as a Cage

Su Bai saw many supposedly sorrowful moments from his past, but his emotions barely stirred.

They were certainly sad, but those memories were not a cage Su Bai could never escape. Or rather, for the past ten years, he had spent every moment fighting his way out, then kept moving forward until he became the Su Bai he was now.

In the Nightmare World, deception and betrayal were always more terrifying than evil ghosts. They were even more common than powerful evil ghosts, occurring far more frequently. So as long as someone survived in the Nightmare World long enough, a day would eventually come when they grew accustomed to them.

Once he was used to them, they no longer hurt.

But later, amid that weeping...

Su Bai saw Su Xuan severely injure his arm saving him when, as a child, he had climbed out a window and nearly fallen from the building. Su Xuan had even lost the little finger on his right hand.

Su Bai saw his childhood self celebrating a birthday with the young Su Xuan and their mother.

Then Su Bai saw the first and last friend he had made in the Nightmare World in his previous life...

Sometimes, what truly brought sorrow was not those painful memories, but the warmth and happiness one had once possessed before everything was shattered beyond recognition. The more fleeting that happiness, the deeper the sorrow it left behind.

"Ding-"

"Clang-jingle-"

The ringing right beside his ear, together with the increasingly loud bells and clanking chains from the rear of the bus, jolted Su Bai out of his memories. The weeping beside him also grew fainter.

Su Bai snapped his eyes open and saw that the Ghost Bride had almost risen from her seat in the last row. Besides the clanking of the invisible chains binding her hands and feet, he could faintly hear metal cracking.

The Ghost Bride was also letting out a continuous series of mindless, bestial growls.

Unlike the bewildered trio, Su Bai could sense the power around the Ghost Bride running wild. Like an overwhelming pressure unleashed, it instantly suppressed White Qipao, who had been about to act, along with the nurse who kept weeping.

Perhaps because she had promised Su Bai earlier that she would keep crying, the nurse beside him continued to weep softly even after sensing the Ghost Bride's rampage. Her crying simply no longer had much effect on either the Ghost Bride or Su Bai.

As the Ghost Bride's power ran wild aboard the bus, Su Bai instinctively glanced at the driver's seat of the Route 444 Last Bus. Although her power was already raging through the passenger compartment, it did not approach the cab. Clearly, the Driver had something special about him that had allowed him to remain unaffected by the crying earlier and by the Ghost Bride now.

"Look outside!" Qin Ge's voice suddenly came from beside him.

Though Wan Shasha was young, she seemed to have been through some unpleasant experiences. Zhang Yibu had not, but someone raised in comfort was all the more prone to obsessing over trivial matters. So even with their ears covered and the crying fading, both remained immersed in their own sorrow.

Qin Ge, on the other hand, had shaken off the crying early and even noticed something wrong outside the windows.

Following his voice, Su Bai looked out and discovered that the scenery had changed. The last time they had headed toward the Community Hospital Stop, they had been traveling along a broad city road, with the silhouettes of various high-rise buildings faintly visible through the fog.

Now, however, a dirt road much like the one in the Ghost Village lay outside, surrounded by farmland and irrigation ditches. Unlike the Ghost Village, it was not filled with moving scarecrows and deathly pale hands reaching out of the water. It looked more like an ordinary rural night.

If one ignored the Red Moon in the sky, the tranquil scenery outside could almost call to mind birdsong and the chirping of cicadas.

Then Su Bai saw several figures appear outside. A man without facial features shoved the girl beside him toward a group of dark figures resembling the Ghost Village's villagers. The man received some coins from them, then walked away in satisfaction.

The dark figures kept pushing the girl forward. An older woman stumbled after them from behind, ignoring their attempts to stop her as she embraced the girl and wept. Presumably, she was the girl's mother.

The mother seemed unable to stop her daughter from being taken away. All she could do was stuff a cloth bag filled with steamed buns and flatbread into her daughter's arms, then watch tearfully as the dark figures led her onward. At the last moment, however, after some unknowable inner struggle, the mother recklessly charged at them again, trying to reclaim her daughter. In the end, they shoved her brutally aside, and she fell to the ground, unconscious.

A bank of fog suddenly obscured the figures outside. When the bus emerged from it, the mother and daughter had vanished, replaced by an... ox cart.

A driver wearing a woven hat urged an old ox onward, pulling a roughly made wooden cart. Seated upright on it was a bride in an elaborate wedding gown. The Wedding Veil over her head concealed her expression, but her body kept trembling slightly, and both hands clutched a small cloth bundle. The bundle's fabric and stitching were coarse, completely at odds with her exquisite wedding gown, yet it seemed to be a treasure of utmost importance to her.

"..."

Su Bai knew that the Ghost Bride's life was playing out beyond the windows.

The bus entered another bank of fog, but this time it did not immediately disperse. Several enormous red candles bearing the Double Happiness Character even appeared within it, floating up and down in midair.

Beyond those floating red candles, a wooden bed hung with red curtains appeared eerily in the fog. Dressed in her wedding gown, the Ghost Bride, A Xi, sat upright on its edge, her posture exactly the same as when she sat in the back row of the bus.

Compared with her appearance on the ox cart, silver bells had been attached along the edge of her Wedding Veil. Thick chains and shackles bound both her hands and feet, their other ends nailed firmly into the ground.

The bride on the edge of the bed could no longer hold herself steady and swayed, making the bells on her Wedding Veil ring. Their silver chimes passed through the windows with perfect clarity, reaching everyone's ears. Then the dark figures representing the Ghost Village's villagers suddenly emerged from the fog, raising wooden clubs and farming tools to strike the bride who had made the sound.

Those delicate silver bells had never been decorations. From the very beginning, they had been a cruel restraint.

The bride collapsed beneath the dark figures' blows, and a second later, the Route 444 Last Bus left the fog.

"Aaaaaah-!!"

Inside the bus, the Ghost Bride's piercing scream seemed about to shatter everything. But amid that terrifying cry and the weeping mixed into it, the bestial growls were gone. Instead, she sounded more like the helpless younger sister and despairing daughter from the memories outside the windows.

"Next stop! Final stop! Ghost Village!" The driver suddenly shouted the announcement from his seat. Although there had not been so much as a glimpse of the Community Hospital Stop, he stepped on the accelerator and drove straight toward the Ghost Village.

Not only had the driver's announcement carried urgency and excitement, but afterward, the Driver spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. "I've waited far too long for this day!"

Both the Driver and Su Bai knew that the Ghost Bride, who had previously been a mindless beast without reason or memories, was recovering her memories and the humanity she had gradually lost after becoming a vengeful ghost.

Having found herself again, the Ghost Bride also had to put an end to this journey that had repeated countless times and write the proper ending to this story!

Ever since Su Bai had risen from his seat and moved beside the disheveled nurse, Wan Shasha had been unable to understand what was happening.

Wan Shasha had wanted to get up and ask Su Bai about it, but the sudden sound of weeping interrupted her thoughts.

Amid that sorrowful song, Wan Shasha saw the dilapidated tiled-roof house in the countryside where she had lived as a child. She saw her mother, unable to endure their impoverished life, abandon her and her father and leave for somewhere far away.

As a child, Wan Shasha had understood nothing. She only knew that her mother had gone to a beautiful, bustling city, and believed she had been left in the countryside because the quiet father raising her was too useless. So, despite her excellent grades, Wan Shasha left her father behind before even finishing middle school and ran off alone to the city to find her mother, firmly believing that her mother there would give her a life everyone would envy.

Wan Shasha found her mother, but she had already started a family with another man and even had a son.

When Wan Shasha's mother and father had married, her father had been too young to marry legally, so they had only held a wedding feast without registering the marriage. Thus, when her mother learned that her daughter had found and recognized her, she wept and even knelt to beg Wan Shasha to return to the countryside and not ruin her life.

Wan Shasha did not ruin her mother's life, but her own had already been shattered at that tender age. She chose not to return to the countryside, staying in the city instead. She occasionally received some money from her mother and found jobs without age requirements, drifting through her days in a daze ever since.

"..." For some reason, amid the weeping, Wan Shasha suddenly began to miss her quiet father. She missed sitting in their rural courtyard with him, counting stars. She missed the sight of his back as he cycled her to school every day. She missed how muddy he would be when he brought home fish he had caught for her.

She wanted to go home.

She wanted to hurry home! Yet now she was trapped in this godforsaken place!

As Wan Shasha emerged from her sorrow, she realized that what had awakened her was the Ghost Bride beginning to struggle wildly aboard the bus! And their next stop was the Ghost Village?!

"Wouldn't it be better if we got off at the Ghost Village?" In her panic, Wan Shasha spoke without giving it much thought. "The Ghost Village only wants its bride. If we stay on the bus, the bride will kill us!"

"Don't be stupid." Su Bai left the nurse, rose, and walked over beside Zhang Yibu and Wan Shasha, then turned to look at the Ghost Bride, whose power continued to rage. "Do you remember what the people there said the last time we reached the Ghost Village?"

"Huh?"

"They said, 'We're just waiting for the bride and the feast to begin,' not, 'The feast will begin when the bride arrives.' In other words, even if they received the bride, the feast still wouldn't be ready. Guess why?" As Su Bai watched White Qipao and the Ghost Bride, he asked another question. "Who waits that long for a bride without having the feast ready?"

"The only reason is..." Su Bai paused. "They don't have the ingredients yet!"

"You idiots, if you get off at the Ghost Village, you'll be the ingredients for the feast!"

After putting a swift, straightforward stop to the trio's thoughts of getting off, Su Bai strode toward the Ghost Bride in the last row.

The eyes of every person and uncanny being on the bus fell on Su Bai. But if anyone had glanced toward the windows at that moment, they would have discovered that, at some unknown point, Su Bai's reflection in the glass had become the Ghost Bride, dressed in a wedding gown with a Wedding Veil covering her head.

Vengeful Ghost Puzzle!