Chapter 12: The Mountain Rope Bridge
"What's wrong?" the man in the black hat asked, noticing Jiang Yan's distracted expression.
"Oh, it's nothing," Jiang Yan replied. "Just a little bug on the window."
"A bug? You're afraid of a bug? You can handle ghosts, but you're scared of a bug?" the man scoffed. He couldn't understand the psychology of these students these days—such a small thing wasn't worth the surprise. After all, they were in a bus full of ghosts.
Jiang Yan kept his thoughts to himself, quietly starting up the bus.
The engine roared to life with a rattling rumble, making the seats and windows shudder. The old, rusted bus creaked forward, slowly rolling along the narrow mountain road. Just as the black-hatted man had mentioned, driving the ghost bus in the real world barely tapped into its supernatural energy. Still, the controls were challenging—simple functions like the steering wheel and accelerator required substantial effort.
"Why is the accelerator so hard to press…" Jiang Yan muttered. He strained, managing to press the pedal down only halfway. Even turning the steering wheel required all his strength, moving just a few centimeters at a time.
He quickly realized why. "It must be that I'm only partially controlling the ghost bus—barely a fraction of its true power," he concluded.
Under the pale moonlight, the dilapidated bus, full of corpses, made its way along the winding mountain road. Jiang Yan glanced out the front window from time to time, watching the small bug crawling slowly across the glass. It was nothing unusual by itself, but a few moments ago, it had been right in front of the moon, casting an eerie shadow.
A "bug" and "moon" together reminded him of the Chinese character "蛊" (gu, meaning "poison" or "curse"), an ominous sign. He recalled the hexagram reading Qi Xiu had given him before he'd left. At first, he had thought the omen referred to the ghost bus. But it hadn't ended yet—the danger Qi Xiu had predicted was still lurking.
"Don't believe everything you see," Qi Xiu had warned.
A bit uneasy, Jiang Yan glanced into the rearview mirror at the two people seated in the back. Suspicion was beginning to form in his mind.
He knew Zhang Tiantian well, and she hadn't shown any unusual behavior so far, aside from the strange coincidence with the name of her village, Gong Yue Village, sounding so similar to Hong Yue Village, which the questioning ghost had mentioned.
But as for the man in the black hat, Jiang Yan had no idea what to make of him.
This mysterious man kept his hat, mask, and sunglasses on, hiding his face. Jiang Yan only knew that he came from a ghost-handling organization and controlled a ghost-infused trench coat, along with another unidentified spirit. But his true purpose for coming to Mount Lugang was still unclear. Why had he even boarded the ghost bus in the first place?
Time to dig a little deeper, Jiang Yan decided.
"Hey, are you planning to follow us all the way to Gong Yue Village?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder. "As a ghost-tamer, you should already know about the ghost bus situation. Since the bus is under control now, do you really need to stick with us?"
The man had been dozing, clearly exhausted after their ordeal. The recent events had brought him dangerously close to a full ghost resurgence, and he'd needed rest to stave it off. Hearing Jiang Yan's question, he paused, and then replied, "You're right—I did come to deal with the ghost bus. About a week ago, a lost file was discovered at the Dafeng City branch. It contained information about the ghost bus, and I took it for granted that it was a class-C ghost incident. But I nearly didn't make it out."
"Hmm. So you weren't just randomly on this bus after all," Jiang Yan replied, nodding thoughtfully but remaining skeptical. He didn't fully buy the story. This man claimed to have come to resolve the ghost incident, yet he had done nothing but sleep after getting on, completely indifferent to the deaths of ordinary passengers.
The black-hatted man certainly had his reasons for boarding the bus, but "resolving the ghost incident" wasn't one of them. Jiang Yan kept his thoughts to himself but stayed on guard. Trusting this man too easily would be foolish.
The ghost bus rolled on for another ten minutes before slowing down.
Jiang Yan checked the map app and frowned. "No signal?"
The GPS had cut off, and their location disappeared from the map. It seemed they'd lost service in this remote area.
Zooming out on the map, he estimated that Gong Yue Village was less than two kilometers away. Even without GPS, they should be able to reach it if they relied on Zhang Tiantian's memory.
He turned to her. "Looks like we're off the grid. But we should be close by now. You remember the route, right? Let me know when we're there."
"Got it," Zhang Tiantian replied, nodding.
After another few minutes of driving through a shadowed valley, Zhang Tiantian spoke up. "This is it—we're here."
Jiang Yan brought the bus to a gradual stop. The brakes were just as difficult to handle as the accelerator.
He looked through the grime-covered windows, taking in their surroundings. They were still on the mountain road, but on the shadowed side, where no moonlight reached. The entire area was steeped in darkness.
"Where's Gong Yue Village?" he asked, turning to Zhang Tiantian. He couldn't see any signs of a village nearby.
"We need to cross a bridge. Once we're across, we'll be in the village," Zhang Tiantian explained.
The three of them got off the bus and followed Zhang Tiantian along a narrow path until they reached a rope bridge.
"This is the bridge?" Jiang Yan was taken aback.
In front of them stretched a dilapidated rope bridge that seemed to be barely holding together.
The bridge spanned a steep ravine, nearly a hundred meters long, its wooden planks and iron cables weathered and rotting. The wood was visibly decayed in many places, and some sections seemed to be barely connected at all.
A cold wind swept through the ravine, making the bridge sway ominously, the cables clinking with an unsettling chime, like an eerie wind chime.
But what unsettled Jiang Yan most wasn't the bridge itself—it was the mountain on the other side.
Though it was dark, something about that far slope looked different, as though its shadow was darker than the surrounding area. The outlines of trees on the other side were blurred, and a thick, white mist swirled just beyond the bridge.
"Is this mist normal?" he asked, turning to the man in the black hat.
The man smirked, understanding Jiang Yan's apprehension. "You think that mist is supernatural? Not every patch of fog leads to the spirit realm. If this really were a gateway to the mist realm, the organization would've noticed it by now. The mist realm can't just be stumbled upon—it can only be reached through certain ghostly means, like the ghost bus."
Jiang Yan nodded, steadying himself. "Alright, then. Let's cross."
With that, he took a step onto the creaking bridge.
Neither the man in the black hat nor Zhang Tiantian voiced any objections, so they followed closely behind him, each step tentative on the swaying, aged planks.
The bridge groaned underfoot, every movement sending a fresh wave of anxiety down their spines.