The early autumn sky was as clear as if it had been washed, high and cool, with warm sunlight generously spreading its light and heat, enveloping the travelers in a layer of light gauze.
Several days of clear weather brought a bit of vitality to this usually dull and uninteresting city.
Xiao Muyu pulled open the curtains and looked out from the balcony on the fifteenth floor at the scenery where the lake met the sky. After a moment, she withdrew her gaze, her expression remaining unchanged, her beautiful dark eyes filled with an unruffled indifference.
After standing for a while, Xiao Muyu turned to look at the phone on the table. The latest message was from Liu Yongqiang, the company’s deputy director.
“Your resignation has been approved. I had your things packed up. If you don’t come to get them today, they’ll probably end up in the trash.”
“And I’ll apply for the remaining bonus. Please cooperate with the handover; it’s in everyone’s best interest.”
After glancing at the message, Xiao Muyu turned off the phone. It was just a small program with many bugs, but they had gone to great lengths to get rid of her so eagerly.
She shifted her gaze to the open laptop on the table. Her slender fingers swiftly typed on the keyboard, adding a few more lines of code to the already full screen. After a moment, she pressed the enter key.
A blue progress bar appeared on the screen, loading quickly as the code executed.
Xiao Muyu ignored it, shouldered a small bag from the sofa, put on a black baseball cap, and left the room.
As the door closed, the progress bar, which had reached sixty percent, flickered. The code stopped abruptly, replaced by red frames switching rapidly. Lines of code began to automatically replace and generate new ones. Finally, with a metallic beep, the code was entirely replaced, and the progress bar shot to one hundred percent!
With the sound of keystrokes, the screen displayed lines of text: “Target detected… Downloading file… Unpacking… Locking target!”
The next moment, the keystrokes stopped abruptly, and two lines of blood-red text appeared on the screen: “Countdown…”
“30:00 minutes…”
And the countdown timer started.
The blood-red numbers on the screen ticked down, looking like fresh blood about to spill out, a sight that was deeply unsettling.
Xiao Muyu was oblivious to all this.
She only knew that in fifteen minutes, the forcibly occupied program would completely collapse. As for the company’s belongings, she didn’t need them anymore.
Today was Friday. Normally, she would be at work at this time, but now she didn’t have to be.
So, she could go to the place she usually went after six on Fridays, ahead of time.
Xiao Muyu had taken this route countless times, so she timed her arrival perfectly as the 520 bus pulled into the station.
On a weekday morning at 9:30, there weren’t many people on the bus. Xiao Muyu stood at the back, maintaining a distance of about 1.5 meters from the person in front. After they boarded, she took large strides to follow, catching the driver’s eye.
There were fewer than ten people on the bus, and since it was close to the final stop, there were plenty of empty seats, more than enough for each person to have a row to themselves.
Xiao Muyu glanced around, lowered her hat, and quietly walked to the back, sitting alone in the corner. She turned her head to look out the window, her face expressionless and cold.
The route of this romantically themed bus, with its dramatically arranged stops, seemed to encapsulate a life full of joys and sorrows.
The 520 bus route started at the city’s maternal and child health hospital, passing by kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, and a nursing home, with the final stop at a cemetery. Riding this bus felt like traversing through a person’s entire life.
Xiao Muyu had long lost the common sentiments of sighing over such things. She stared silently out the window, her eyes empty, just waiting for the final stop to arrive.
The bus route was familiar to Xiao Muyu, and the passing scenes outside were ones she had seen countless times, unchanging and unremarkable.
At the next intersection, they would pass a fast-food restaurant, with a trash can always placed between two camphor trees at the entrance, never missing its spot…
As the bus passed by a billboard featuring a giant image of a smiling female celebrity, Xiao Muyu noticed that nothing had changed, just like a programmed scene. She frowned, feeling an inexplicable sense of déjà vu. At that moment, the bus stopped.
Turning her attention to the front door, she saw three people boarding the bus—two men and a woman. The driver was ready to close the door, but Xiao Muyu’s expression showed a flash of pain. She closed her eyes and murmured, “There are still two more people, one holding a child. They will argue with the driver and try to grab the steering wheel.”
Images flashed through her mind, making her dizzy. She grasped the nearby handrail to steady herself. Her whispered words went unnoticed. As the bus doors closed and started moving, a man’s loud shout was heard outside. The driver slammed the brakes after moving a few meters.
Xiao Muyu lurched forward and then fell back into her seat. She watched as an angry man boarded the bus, followed by a woman carrying a child, who hurriedly climbed aboard, breathless.
The woman, holding her child unsteadily, sat down two rows in front of Xiao Muyu, gasping for breath. The man, however, stayed by the driver and began to shout, “Are you blind or deaf? Didn’t you see someone hadn’t boarded yet? My wife is holding a child! Don’t you have any decency? Are you in such a rush to reincarnate?”
The man’s tone was aggressive, and his behavior was confrontational, poking his finger in the driver’s face. The driver, equally hot-tempered, shot back with a loud retort.
“If you curse one more time, is this bus your home? Another bus will be here soon. If you’re in such a hurry, you must be the one rushing to reincarnate!”
This ignited the man’s fury. His eyes bulged, his face twisted with rage, and his words became more vulgar as his actions grew more aggressive.
“Hey, stop fighting. The driver’s working,” a few people spoke up, but the burly man silenced them with a glare. Even his wife was too scared to intervene.
The driver, equally incensed, retaliated but did not slow down or stop. Instead, he sped up and took a sharp turn, throwing the man off balance.
Passengers screamed as the bus veered off course, heading straight for a tunnel ahead.
“Driver, calm down! Stop the bus and call the police!” someone shouted.
Before the words were fully spoken, the man lunged for the steering wheel, causing the bus to sway violently.
“If you don’t want to die, stop the bus now! It’s going to crash into the tunnel!”
A cold female voice cut through the chaos, and Xiao Muyu pushed forward from the back row. But in the out-of-control bus, it was hard to stand, let alone walk.
The driver seemed entranced, refusing to slow down. Xiao Muyu was thrown to the floor, ending up near the woman with the crying child.
Ignoring the pain in her ribs, she tried to get up, intending to stop the reckless man. But just as she took a step, her face changed. The passengers screamed in terror as the bus sped into the tunnel, and the concrete walls loomed closer and closer.
A loud crash! Glass shattered everywhere. The scene flipped and spun, and then everything went dark. Xiao Muyu’s consciousness was dragged into an abyss.
She didn’t know how long it was before she regained consciousness. Opening her eyes, she found herself in complete darkness, without a single light. Her body didn’t hurt as much as she expected, which felt oddly unsettling.
The last scene in her memory was clear—surviving such a violent collision was a miracle, so why wasn’t her body in more pain? And how could it be this dark in broad daylight, even inside a tunnel? The most unnerving part was the dead silence around her.
“Is anyone there?” Her voice was hoarse, tinged with a slight tremor. She closed her mouth, steadied her voice, and called out again, but there was no response.
No light, no sound, not even the expected cries or chaos—nothing but suffocating silence. The darkness wrapped around her like a thick blanket. Even someone as calm and indifferent as Xiao Muyu felt her heartbeat quicken in this eerie atmosphere.
Struggling to stand, she groped around, her phone lost somewhere in the crash. The bus seemed to have overturned, its interior compressed and deformed. Remembering she had moved to the middle of the bus before the crash, she crouched and navigated by touch.
She felt a broken window, its glass shards cutting her hand, but it confirmed an escape route. She continued feeling her way around, her breathing becoming erratic when her fingers touched something warm and sticky.
Pulling her hand back quickly, she realized she had touched the child.
She wiped her hand on her clothes, forcing herself not to dwell on the gruesome thought. Focusing on finding a way out, she encountered more twisted, soft objects—likely remains of the passengers.
Imagining the hellish scene inside the bus, Xiao Muyu steeled herself. She kicked out a shattered glass pane and cautiously crawled through, determined to get out of the bus.
When her feet touched the ground, the feeling of suffocating darkness dissipated, as if the fingers choking her throat had finally loosened.
But her anxious yet lucid mind still made Xiao Muyu acutely aware of the dire situation she was facing.
It seemed like everyone in the bus had died, and the place she found herself in was definitely not where the accident had occurred. There was no rescue, no light, and recalling the premonitions that flashed through her mind on the bus, she knew her worldview was about to collapse.
At the thought, she chuckled. She truly was a freak. For most people, witnessing everyone around them die would likely cause a mental breakdown, but she… Just as her mom had said, she lacked much human decency.
She had foreseen her own fate, yet had no power to change it. This was definitely not a good sign.
Although Xiao Muyu wasn’t particularly fond of being alive, she also wasn’t keen on dying in such a mysterious place without understanding why.
With her backpack slung over her shoulder, she adjusted the hat she found in the darkness, stood in the endless abyss, and cautiously extended her limbs to explore the surroundings. Oddly enough, she was still in the tunnel.
Since it was a tunnel, there should be an exit. Both sides were enveloped in boundless darkness, indicating that the exit was not nearby.
Because she didn’t want to get closer to the bus again, Xiao Muyu turned and began to walk along the tunnel wall, taking one step at a time forward.
At this moment: Countdown: 05:20
