Volume One, Chapter One: Bus Route Four

Amid the blood-red mist...

A battered Number Four bus crawled along the jarring road. Inside, there were eight people—five men and three women—their faces ghostly pale as they stared out the window, each wearing a different expression: terror, confusion, bewilderment, stupor... It was as if they had just endured some unspeakable ordeal.

Not far ahead, a bus stop sign slowly materialized at the roadside, as if heralding their destination.

Inside the bus...

The shattered, ink-colored display panel that once showed the dim red "Number Four Bus" had long since been overwritten by a line of blood-red text, the origin of which no one could recall.

As the bus came to a stop, the passengers jerked back to themselves, their eyes drawn to the screen.

Destination: Calamity Inn.

Task: Stay at Calamity Inn for five days.

Participants: Nine.

Before anyone could react, the bus's exit door abruptly hissed open...

At the same time, blood the exact shade of the text oozed from the broken display, trickling downward.

Lin Xi, seated in the front row, was first to rise. The grotesque blood flowed with unnatural speed, snaking across the carriage floor to pool at his feet. Seeing this, Lin Xi hesitated no longer. He stepped onto a plastic seat and, using the momentum, vaulted through the air, landing several meters from the blood, right at the bus's open door.

The other seven passengers in the back, seeing Lin Xi act, hesitated only a moment before dashing toward the exit. Those farther away, seeing the others escape, gritted their teeth and, as the blood spread through the aisle, clambered out the bus windows.

“Damn, that was close! I almost couldn’t get off in time. God knows what would’ve happened if that stuff touched me,” gasped a skinny, yellow-haired youth in tight pants.

After all the passengers had disembarked, the blood-smeared bus slowly pulled away from the stop.

Among those who’d just leapt from the windows, a petite girl hesitated, pointing to a dark red building looming six stories high not far ahead. “Is that the inn the screen mentioned? It doesn’t look like a good place...”

“Let’s go. We don’t have any other choice. We’ll see what’s inside,” said a weary-faced, middle-aged man with rimless glasses.

“Are we really going?” the yellow-haired youth asked, his voice trembling as he caught his breath. He looked genuinely frail, already drenched in sweat from simply fleeing the bus, and wiped his brow with his sleeve.

“What if it’s not safe in there?”

Everyone fell silent, staring at the distant building.

At first, nearly all of them had assumed it was some tasteless reality prank show being filmed...

But when they discovered the bus had no driver, panic set in.

Driverless technology was nothing new, but they knew full well—no one would install it on a decrepit bus like that.

Almost instinctively, each reached for their pockets, hoping to call for help.

But—

Their phones, which never left their sides, were all gone.

This unfathomable detail left them dumbstruck.

“The bus has already left. Are you planning to brave the blood mist?” the man with glasses asked the yellow-haired youth.

Lin Xi, quiet all this while, struggled to calm his racing heart and maintain a semblance of composure.

From the moment he’d received that strange bus card, to being woken by those eerie whispers, to finding himself here—barely half an hour had passed.

But what had transpired in that half hour had utterly shattered his sense of reality.

“Have you forgotten about the fat man who jumped earlier?” the bespectacled man pressed.

At the mention of the fat man, sweat beaded anew on the yellow-haired youth’s brow. His Adam’s apple bobbed, teeth chattering, as if recalling something unspeakably horrific.

Earlier—

There had been nine of them on the bus. Each had suddenly felt drowsy, and upon waking, found themselves aboard.

One fat man, upon realizing his situation, had immediately begun cursing, insisting they’d been kidnapped.

A driverless bus, blood mist made from dry ice and dye—he claimed it was all to spike their adrenaline, so their organs could be harvested...

The more he ranted, the more disturbing his theories became. At last, unable to bear it, he wrenched open a window and jumped out.

The bus moved so slowly that he wasn’t hurt. He merely tumbled to the ground, rolled twice, and then staggered into the bloody fog.

But as the others watched him leave, terror gripped them all. Lin Xi, nearest the window, quickly shut it, blocking the mist.

Because they’d all seen it clearly—the fat man, after rolling, had stood up, but his skin was left behind on the ground where he’d fallen.

His peeled skin lay spread across the earth...

At the mention of the fat man, all faces turned ashen once more. The petite girl doubled over, retching.

Lin Xi plugged his ears, forcing himself not to picture the skinless figure, barely suppressing his own nausea.

After swallowing hard several times, Lin Xi forced his attention back to the six-story building in the distance.

“Since there’s no other way, we have no choice but to go in. Don’t forget the instructions on the bus display,” he said, picking up where the man with glasses had left off.

He too felt fear and disgust.

Yet, for reasons he could not explain, whether faced with the staggering skinless man or the blood oozing toward him on the bus, he hadn’t lost his composure as the others had.

Moreover, a phrase whispered to him in his half-awake state kept echoing in his mind: “Walk not by day, sleep not by night, speak no trust, heed no words.”

The voice was at once utterly strange and deeply familiar.

What was this warning trying to tell him?

Lin Xi’s words snapped the others from their grisly memories. As he led the way toward the inn, the rest followed close behind, their thoughts consumed by the task that had appeared on the shattered bus display.