With half its mudguard missing and a headlight barely held in place by dozens of rounds of clear tape, this old motorcycle would not have sold even at a secondhand market, yet it carried many memories of Jiang Chen's childhood in this life.
He did not even need to look. The sound alone told him it was that bike.
An old man rode it, his figure slightly stooped, his clothes washed pale. With a cigarette between his lips, he hummed a bawdy little tune, as carefree as an immortal walking the earth.
The familiar scene left Jiang Chen rooted to the spot.
"This is..."
He seemed to have forgotten that he was inside a Restricted Zone.
As the motorcycle drew closer, the old man's face gradually became clearer, and Jiang Chen's expression grew increasingly dazed.
"So it was all a dream. I just took an afternoon nap before coming to pick up Old Zhang."
"I knew it. There aren't any ghosts in this world, or any system or Unusual Persons. It was all a dream..."
He murmured to himself, yet his hand grasped at the air as though closing around something.
But as the old man's features began to come into sharper focus, something strange happened. The air warped like rippling water, and the surrounding scene kept collapsing...
In the end, under Jiang Chen's somewhat astonished gaze,
the motorcycle, the old man, the distant mountains, the stretch of cliffs outside Mubian Town...
All of them vanished.
In their place was the old road from before. Looking at it now, however, it no longer seemed quite the same as the old road in his memories.
The surrounding blood mist thinned a little.
Jiang Chen looked thoughtfully at the Evil Self, the Yin God Hammer, and the other things that had reappeared.