Step Back! Master is Here! - Chapter 45

Chapter 45: 330

K took off his hood, his hair that was soaked by the rain stuck to his forehead like little curly black snakes. With the help of the rainwater, K cleaned off the cobwebs on himself.

“Any discoveries?” asked Tang Luo.

When he first arrived earlier on, he had seen K charging out of one of the houses.

He looked just like a raging bull with his head down, and his eyes closed. He wasn’t even looking at where he was going.

Thus, Tang Luo had stopped him along the way.

“There’s something wrong with these two houses. There are ghost walls here,” replied K angrily as he turned around and cast a glance at the houses. “Let’s hurry and leave.”

“Oh?” Tang Luo said, “Interesting.”

Upon detecting Tang Luo’s interest, K immediately replied, “Monk, let’s concentrate on clearing the mission instead! If we get ourselves involved with something that we shouldn’t, we won’t even know what hit us when we die.”

K had managed to escape by a stroke of luck. Hence, he wasn’t willing to go back in with the monk in front of him at all.

It wasn’t so much as him being worried about Tang Luo’s safety. Rather, he was worried that Tang Luo might incur the wrath of whatever might be inside and end up implicating him.

K had already gone in once earlier.

Should he go in again… Did they really think that the ‘presence’ inside the houses had such a good temper?

What if it left the house and came after them?

As he spoke, K reached out and grabbed Tang Luo’s arm, stopping him from going over. At the same time, he was stunned for a moment.

Beep, beep, beep!

At that moment, they heard the sound of a vehicle’s blaring horns.

“The bus is here!”

K couldn’t care less about anything else anymore. He let go of Tang Luo and ran toward the bus stop.

Tang Luo glanced at the two lone solitary houses. He didn’t go in. Instead, he turned and followed after K.

Although the two houses were at the end of the path and the vanishing point of one’s vision, since these were winding mountain paths, the houses weren’t actually very far from the bus stop.

Otherwise, K might not even have reached the houses yet at this point.

After running for a while, K spotted a public bus that had stopped at the bus stop.

It was facing the direction where he had come from. The bus had already gone through quite a few years of use and looked rather old and run-down. The body of the bus was an orange-red color. The windows on one side were filthy, while those on the other side where the driver was seated were very clean.

A white rectangular board was attached to the area diagonally above the driver. The words Feng Village were written on it in red.

On the other end of the board was East Station.

In the middle was a bi-directional arrow.

On top of the arrow was the Bus Service Number: 330.

All the text was in red and clearly visible.

Beep, beep, beep!

Upon seeing K standing in the way in front and making no move to board, the driver blared the horns again.

K gestured to the driver and walked to the side of the bus. Lin Zi-ang and the other two stood on the platform. They didn’t board the bus.

When they noticed K and Tang Luo, who was also coming back, their uneasy expressions relaxed at once.

“Where are you going? Are you boarding or not?!”

They heard the driver’s voice coming from the bus.

“Mister, does this bus go to the terminal?” asked Auntie Shufen.

“Yes, it goes to Feng Village, the terminal. This is the last bus for today. If you’re not boarding, then you can walk there by yourselves,” replied the driver.

“We’re boarding, we’re boarding!” shouted Auntie Shufen.

She was the first to hurry on-board the bus.

This wasn’t one of those bright and spacious large buses of the contemporary age. There was only a door that was used for both boarding and alighting at the front of the bus.

There weren’t pivot grab handles or grab bars in the bus. Neither were there side-facing seats perpendicular to the front of the bus.

On one side was a row of single seats, while on the other side was a row of double seats.

The bus conductor’s seat was located slightly behind the door.

To the right of the driver and in front of the window was another seat.

Tang Luo was the last one to board the bus.

He had only just boarded when he noticed the whole group of them standing along the narrow passage.

They weren’t moving forward either.

The conductor glared at them with an unfriendly expression. “Thinking of taking the bus when you don’t even have any money?”

Yes, they didn’t have any money. None of them did!

During the previous mission, why had they been able to stay in a hotel and have a change of clothes?

That was because Master Xuanzang was skilled at begging for alms.

Money was necessary even in the world of the dead!

Presently, they needed money as well to take the bus.

Now, this was very awkward.

The mighty Employees of Gods and Demons had actually sunk to a point where they couldn’t even afford to take the public bus.

Was this because of the distortion of humanity or the degradation of morals?

Perhaps it was because humanity wasn’t sufficiently distorted, and morals hadn’t sufficiently degraded yet.

K, who was already in a foul mood because of the ghost walls earlier, was close to flaring up.

So what if they had no money? He was going to take the bus today, money or not!

Fortunately, the driver spoke up at this point. “Forget it, forget it. This is already the last bus for today. This place is so remote and out of the way, and it’s even raining. Just take a seat, just take a seat.”

As he spoke, he shut the doors.

The birth of people doing a board-and-run was successfully prevented.

The conductor gave them a vicious glare and didn’t speak any further.

Auntie Shufen paid her no mind and spoke joyfully. “Oh, thank you.”

“Sit tight, we’ve got a lot of mountain roads ahead,” said the driver.

The bus with its engine still running started to slowly inch forward.

Clouds of black smoke could be seen through the filthy rear windows. This was practically no different from a tractor.

Apart from Tang Luo’s group of five, the driver and the conductor, there were five other people on the bus.

One of them was an old lady with a head of white hair. Although her hair was all white, she didn’t have many wrinkles.

A young man was seated beside her.

Both of them were very quiet.

The other three were dressed in long white tunics resembling traditional clothing. They even had long hair. Their heads were down and didn’t look up.

They gave off a strange feeling.

If Tang Luo joined them, they could form a traditional clothing squad.

These five people were seated at the front.

Naturally, Tang Luo’s group sat at the back.

Auntie Shufen and Mico sat next to each other. Behind them was the Fake Breasts Appraiser, Lin Zi-ang, who was more bluster than anything else.

Behind Lin Zi-ang was Tang Luo.

K sat in the middle of the very last row, which was slightly higher than the other seats on the bus.

From there, he could observe the situation on the whole bus.

The moment he saw that trio in traditional clothing when he boarded the bus earlier, an inexplicable sense of unease had risen up in him.

His heart ultimately couldn’t settle back down at ease after running into ghost walls. Like what the driver said, there were many mountain roads there, and it was raining heavily.

The bus moved at a slow speed the entire time.

The sky, on the other hand, swiftly darkened. It was almost night now.

“Mister, how long more to go before we reach the terminal?” asked Auntie Shufen.

“It’s pretty far, about an hour, I’d say,” replied the driver.

The interior of the bus quietened again.

Before long, soft snoring was heard. It came from those three men in traditional clothing with their heads down. They had already fallen asleep.

No wonder their heads were down.

“Hisssss.”

The male student in front of Tang Luo suddenly gasped. He looked around in front before doing the same to the back.

After hesitating for a couple of seconds, he lowered his voice and asked Tang Luo, “Monk, have you heard of the Tianjing Bus No. 330 incident?”

“What?”

Tang Luo shook his head.

At the back, K looked at Lin Zi-ang. It was evident that he had heard him.

Mico and Auntie Shufen in front also turned to the back.

The Tianjing Bus No. 330 incident?

“It’s… you know…”

Lin Zi-ang lowered his voice and gave them a simple recount of the incident.

Simply put, this was an unsolved case in the real world.

Compared to Jack the Ripper, this incident seemed more like a supernatural incident.

“Back in 1995, there was a huge supernatural incident that took place at a bus stop in Tianjing. A bus No. 330 mysteriously disappeared. The next day, a series of shocking and strange phenomena was discovered on the bus.

“To put it simply, this was a case of a bus gone missing.

“In the end, it was discovered near a reservoir more than 100 kilometers away. In addition, three heavily decomposed corpses were found on the bus.

“There were several questionable points in the case, which formed the elements of a supernatural case.

“Firstly, it was impossible for the bus that was discovered to travel for another 100-odd kilometer after operating for a day. In addition, what was found inside the petrol tanks wasn’t petrol but blood.

“Secondly, the corpses that were found had already heavily decomposed in less than two days. This is impossible even in summer. But according to the autopsies, this wasn’t caused by human factors.

“Thirdly, all the traffic cameras on the streets leading to Miyun that day were checked, but nothing out of the ordinary was discovered.

“Fourthly, before the bus had gone missing, some passengers had made a police report saying that there were ghosts on the bus.

“And the so-called ghosts were precisely three long-haired people dressed in traditional clothing!

“At that time, they were said to be actors who were filming nearby and had gotten drunk, so they were taking the bus back home.

“But an old lady among the passengers realized that these people didn’t have feet[1], so she dragged the young man next to her off the bus.

“It was said that the truth of the case was revealed later on and that it was actually just an ordinary case which got circulated around with increasingly incorrect details.”

Of course, Lin Zi-ang wasn’t very sure of the concrete details of what exactly had happened either.

He merely happened to have heard of this supernatural story. The more he observed the bus’s situation, the more it resembled the story he had heard.

Coupled with the heavy rain and winding road that was obviously headed to a village in the mountains, he got severely creeped out, and so, he brought up the incident.

“Damn!”

K cursed under his breath. The signs of the survival mission were already very obvious by now.

This mission didn’t require too much brainpower to think about and analyze what was going on.

However, it was also a relatively dangerous mission.

Struggling to stay alive was suffocating, as a slight moment of carelessness would lead straight to death.

‘Should I alight and just abandon the mission? I’ve only failed once anyway, so I still have chances left,’ thought K.

Upon looking at the forests passing him by outside the window, he didn’t dare to take his chances.

Even before he reached the terminal, he had already run into ghost walls in the houses by the roadside, though he had managed to rush out of the house safely in the end.

If he were to alight from the bus and stay in these remote mountains instead of going to the terminal, who knew if he would meet with other forms of danger?

It wasn’t as if one would definitely be able to find a safe corner and wait it out if they abandoned the mission.

In the mission world, some crises existed outside of the mission. Sometimes, they were even more dangerous than the mission itself.

‘No, I can’t.’ A dim light flashed across K’s eyes. ‘If I make a wrong bet, it’ll be too dangerous for me to alight by myself. I should stay with these people. That monk looks pretty strong hand I can also use the others as cannon fodder.’

Since he would meet with danger either way, it was better to go for an option where he had companions.

At least, there was a clear objective in the mission.

“How about we alight?” Mico suggested softly after hearing what Lin Zi-ang said.

“We’ll die if we don’t do the mission, right?” asked Lin Zi-ang.

“Possibly,” replied Tang Luo. “But not for your first mission.”

He gave them a simple introduction of the penalty system in the Game of Gods And Demons.

At that point, the bus suddenly jerked.

Everyone was almost thrown off their seats.

“It’s going to be relatively shakier from now on, probably for ten minutes or so. For some reason, this section of the road just doesn’t get repaired even after a few years of fixing,” said the driver.

During the next few minutes that followed, the bus shook, swayed, jerked, and jolted.

Lin Zi-ang and Mico’s faces were green one moment and white the next. They were close to throwing up.

Auntie Shufen, on the other hand, looked unaffected.

In her own words, she had taken a tractor through the mountain roads in the past. Now, that was what one called shaky.

“Wait, this isn’t right!”

K’s expression turned awful. It had nothing to do with the lurching bus, however.

At the very least, he was still physically strong enough to deal with something like this.

Although he hadn’t cleared six missions and received an all-rounded stat upgrade yet, he was already an Employee of Gods and Demons.

Anyone would know that they needed to train themselves desperately.

“Those three people are still asleep?”

K stared hard at the three passengers in traditional clothing in front of them.

In a situation like this where the bus was lurching so badly and even bucking up and down, those three were already jerking left and right. Yet they were still deep asleep with their heads down?

Faint snoring, mixed among the sounds of the bus jerking, reached K’s ears.

K couldn’t help shouting, “Something’s wrong with those three!”

Everyone suddenly lurched forward violently.

After K’s shout, the brakes of the bus were pulled, and it stopped moving.

The conductor turned around and looked at K strangely.

[1] It is sometimes said among the Chinese that ghosts don’t have feet