Ch1 - Three People Become Ghosts

Welcome to the new novel of the author of Don’t Pick Up Boyfriends from the Trash Bin, Riding a Whale South. It is an unlimited flow novel with elements of gaming and I chose to go with the author’s English title that was written on the cover.

This is a really great novel. Apart from the instances they have to pass, there are also many mysteries involved the world, the MC and the ML. I can’t wait for some of you to experience some of the plot twists and WTF moments. 

In addition, I have found some great fanart on Weibo. I will post them slowly on CG’s discord in the fanart and fanfic links channel. I won’t post all of them immediately because many of them involve spoilers from later chapters. So if you want to keep seeing fanart then keep following CG’s discord and the FOT tag.

No one knew how those ‘people’ got on.

The bus drove on the highway around the city and didn’t stop midway. It always maintained a speed of 80 kilometers per hour. However, the number of people in the bus had indeed increased. Perhaps only Li Yinhang discovered this or perhaps everyone in the vehicle discovered it. It was just that no one dared to say it.

She lowered her entire body, her nose full of the hot, stuffy smell in the enclosed space. The air conditioner in the bus was set at 16 degrees and it was just above her head. The wind was strong and the sound was audible. Her fingers squeezed together tightly as the cold wind and hot sweat slowly flowed down her hair to her neck like a reptile. 

…There were indeed more people in the vehicle. This feeling lingered but it was hard to tell where there were more people. Perhaps they were peeping at her from somewhere behind her. Perhaps it was the man sitting two rows in front of her who showed a small patch of stubble. He might silently turn his head 180 degrees and stare in her direction.

***

Imagination was a human gift. Since a week ago, people’s talent in this area started to be greatly exercised.

At first, there were only one or two unusual disappearances.

For example, friends went out to play together. Those who left came back with milk tea but there was no one in front of the movie theater.

Another example was a middle-aged chemistry teacher with a big belly teaching a drowsy second-year liberal arts class that was at the bottom of the overall rankings. The students had fallen asleep and only the class leader cared about his reputation. He had the chemistry book open while secretly filling out his language exercise book underneath.

The class leader was startled by a clear falling sound and raised his head to find only the fallen whiteboard marker on the ground. He stood up angrily and criticized the students. “The teacher became angry because of you.”

The deterioration of the situation took only one day and night. 

A housewife watching a drama with her husband on the sofa found that the tap in the kitchen kept making noise. She was distressed about the water bill. She kept nagging as she walked into the kitchen only to find a stack of foam-filled bowls. Her daughter was gone together with the old slippers that would make noise when she walked.

The housewife walked back to the living room. The living room was quiet. A ball game was showing on the television, a new box of cigarettes had just been opened and the ashtray had been taken out from under the coffee table. Under the warm light, the family portrait of three people hanging in the living room only showed the reflection of the bewildered housewife.

The disappearances quickly escalated to the ‘disappearance incident.’ On the TV, static color screens repeatedly showed precautions reminding citizens to stop unnecessary outings in the near future. The data showed that staying in a fixed place didn’t mean the possibility of a sudden disappearance could be avoided but those who went out and ran around disappeared faster.

The whole world seemed to be experiencing a strange bug that couldn’t be fixed. This wasn’t a wild guess. 

It was because five months ago at 6 p.m. on February 5th, millions of people saw a huge dialog box in the position of the sun with a background of red clouds.

[Sun.exe isn’t responding. If you continue to wait, the program might respond.]

[Do you want to end this process?]

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

[End Process/ Cancel] 

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Dialog boxes appeared in the sky above cities all over the world in various languages. It was seen above a large rose plantation in Bulgaria, in the beautiful starry sky above the small town of Lake Tekapo in New Zealand and through the porthole of a plane taking children to summer camp in Australia.

At the end of the storm, a foreign art group claimed that this was their performance art. It projected people’s deep fears onto the sun. They didn’t prove that they had the equipment to achieve this great artistic feat but by then, everyone was exhausted from discussing the topic. This reason was enough to make everyone feel at ease and turn to the next hot topic in society.

Later, there was a great god who compiled tens of thousands of photos and compared them one by one. Due to the time difference, the time when the dialog box appeared in some places was late at night. Nevertheless, the positions where they appeared were still close to the orbit of the sun at that time. 

However, most ordinary people had long lost interest in this and passed over it with words of praise. In any case, they experienced no loss and life went on as usual. Who would’ve thought that the world would become like this five months later?

It always made people wonder about the familiar Windows 16 pop up box. Was this really a human joke? Or was it a certain force demonstrating? Did it just want to give them a dangerous reminder that could be understood with human common sense?

Li Yinhang couldn’t figure it out and she didn’t want to. Life mattered. It was better not to disappear than to disappear. As a humble bank customer service worker, she and a new colleague who had been employed only a few days lived in the dormitory provided by the job and decided to stay in place.

Her colleague entered the bathroom because she couldn’t stand not washing her hair for three days and never came back. Li Yinhang didn’t dare go to check out of fear she would follow in the footsteps of her colleague. As a result, the leaking water from the shower head that wasn’t shut off fell on the tiles for two days. 

At times like this, she was very grateful for her laziness in putting snacks at a distance she could reach while lying in bed. She relied on snacks, silly videos and the charger to continue her life, trying to ignore the sound of water that got on her nerves.

Drip, drip.

This lasted until the rescue team knocked on the door.

There were too many missing people so the Organization Department changed its response strategy in a timely manner. They organized volunteers to form a rescue team to search from door to door. Children, the elderly and the disabled who hadn’t disappeared and didn’t have the ability to take care of themselves were sent to a nearby temporary ‘safe cocoon room.’ They also sent food to those trapped at home to assist those who didn’t want to leave. 

The volunteers were all men and women wearing red armbands. It was because the data showed there were currently no cases of disappearance among children under 18 and elderly people over 60.

Li Yinhang thought about it. Going out was a knife and shrinking back was also a knife. If she stayed here, all her food would be gone one day eventually. She didn’t want to live alone in an empty apartment with only the sound of dripping water. Even if she disappeared, she hoped to disappear in a crowd.

Thus, she got on the two-door bus that was temporarily requisitioned. Before she got in, the uncle sitting in the driver’s seat casually said, “Number three.”

Li Yinhang got on the bus and saw two other figures in the back. A person was sleeping on the double seats in the second to last row. The other person covered his face with his clothes and was leaning back against his seat in the first row, asleep. 

She suppressed the desire to say hello and went to sit down by the window in the row that was fourth from the back.

A signal shielding device was installed on the bus. This was one of the recent methods used by authorities to control unprovoked disappearances. They used high magnetic field interference in confined spaces. It was just that the function and coverage of the signal shielding instrument was too limited. In order to achieve comprehensive and effective magnetic field isolation, it was necessary to go to a ‘room’ made of special materials. Therefore, the psychological comfort of this shielding instrument might be far greater than the actual effect.

Li Yinhang couldn’t play with her mobile phone and had to empty her brain to try to block the sound of dripping water that had lasted in her mind for the past few days.

Drip, drip. 

The bus took only three adults with it from this apartment complex. As the bus stopped and went, some people came up and some people left. There were several children who were sent to the children’s shelter. There were two volunteers, one young and one old, who signed up and went to a site. There was a husband who regretted it after getting on the bus and decided to wait in place for his wife to come back.

At first, Li Yinhang saw the people getting on the bus and would curiously take a look, trying to catch a few words. Then she soon burned out. The bus was never filled up to even one-third capacity. Everyone was a stranger so they were naturally vigilant. They sat down in a scattered manner and had no thoughts about chatting.

Li Yinhang silently sent her desire to greet people to the bottom of the river and stayed silent.

They crossed a river using a bridge. A small car lay askew near the bridge pillar. It was burned to the point where only the framework was left. The scorched sheepskin smell of the airbag penetrated through the window. Half of the front hood was blown off and hung on the bridge rail. The wind caused it to make a sharp metal rubbing sound. 

Li Yinhang didn’t want to think about the cause of the accident. She shifted her gaze to the inside of the bus, trying to count how many people were in the bus now. Then the next second, the bus rushed into a tunnel and faced overwhelming darkness. Once it was light again, Li Yinhang felt there was a strange misalignment with her retinas.

…There seemed to be more people in the bus than before. Then her sense of reality replaced this fleeting visual afterimage at a very fast speed. She didn’t even have time to compare what was wrong. It was just that her sixth sense told her there must be more. Just now, there weren’t so many people in the bus.

There was no such dead silence.

Various conjectures flashed through her mind. The fear that overlapped one after another made Li Yinhang even more afraid to look up. Her fingers shook nervously and she was afraid of being the first person to make a sound. It was just that due to excessive strength, her knuckles made a clear cracking sound. 

Crack.

The noise created a strange echo in the overly silent bus. For a moment, Li Yinhang even tensed the muscles of her throat. Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. Behind Li Yinhang, a man spoke in a trembling voice that he was trying to control. “Driver, can you stop? I’m not feeling well…”

The driver didn’t respond. Li Yihang didn’t know if this was unexpected or she should’ve expected it.

After the silence was broken, the man gained a sharp increase in courage. He was about to get up to go to the driver’s seat and check the situation. He had just passed by Li Yinhang’s seat when a hand protruded from the side and blocked the man’s way. 

The nervous Li Yinhang was startled. She didn’t know from when there was a person sitting in front of her.

The man glanced down and found the person blocking him had dyed silver hair. The beautiful hair was tied in a pretty scorpion braid with a black hair tie and hung half over the collarbone. This contrasted sharply with the black choker with a silver chain around the slender neck.

Facing such a good-looking side-profile, the man immediately became more courageous.

“Beauty, don’t worry, I’ll go check the situation,” he said with relief. 

Then Li Yinhang heard a clearly male voice. “Don’t move.”

…He acquiesced to the title of ‘beauty’ very calmly. Before the stunned man could recover, a large amount of colorful balloons suddenly burst out from the position of the driver’s seat where a person should be sitting.

Bright purple, blue, red and green. The color saturation hurt people’s eyes.

A girl sitting in the front row screamed in horror and stepped on the edge of her seat to avoid the balloons that rolled like human heads. Then from the hundreds of colorful balloons emerged a simple head, short arms… it was a mushroom. 

It was a red mushroom with white spots on its cap. It looked no different from the mushrooms in Super Mario that were hidden in bricks that allowed one to become bigger when eaten. The mushroom shook its cap in an exaggerated manner and straightened the rim like it was a hat. Due to its short hands and feet, it almost looked like a pet. However, no one could laugh at this scene that subverted their world view.

The mushroom clumsily jumped forward twice and opened its short hands. “Welcome everyone to the world of Forces of Temptation! Pika is honored to be your guide! Welcome to the trial level—”

Li Yinhang couldn’t move. The scene in front of her was too beyond the scope of her 24 years of life. She couldn’t think about why the name ‘Forces of Temptation’ was so familiar to her and instinctively observed the reactions of others.

In particular, the silver-haired young man who stopped the man in time just now. He wasn’t even looking at the eye-catching mushroom. His eyes were passing over the carriage and counting the number of people as quickly as possible. 

Li Yinhang followed along and counted with him. Excluding the mushroom, there were 11 in total. It was just that Li Yinhang didn’t dare to easily use the word ‘human’ to describe those in the bus.

Before Li Yinhang’s wild ideas could become deeper, she saw a figure slowly rising up from the front row of seats.

…There was one more person?

Li Yinhang saw the person and the first words that popped up were ‘out of place.’ 

This young man wore a half-length black lapel trench coat with a two-piece suit. She couldn’t judge if he was tall but she could tell from the curve of his neck that he had a remarkable temperament.

His skin was very white, as white as the light after passing through the tunnel just now. His medium-length hair was slightly curled and just reached his shoulder, giving him a dignified and beautiful cold feeling.

The point was that he was the closest one to the mushroom in the bus. He was almost on a horizontal line with it. Yet he didn’t look afraid. He was even holding an apple in his hand.

…He also seemed to be studying the mushroom seriously. 

Li Yinhang observed carefully for a moment and found something else that was wrong. His eyes as he gazed at the mushroom were leisurely and bleary. This man seemed simple and not fully awake.

Before Li Yinhang could make any useless judgments, a sudden cracking sound behind her frightened her. The man in the second to last row had picked up the red emergency escape hammer installed by the window and smashed the window. Once the glass broke, the wind of 80 kilometers per hour poured in and caused Li Yinhang to squint.

She didn’t have time to calculate his hope of surviving the jump out of the bus in this situation when the man reached out to grab the window frame. In the face of this strange situation, escape was indeed a human instinct. However, his head was only half out the window when he couldn’t move any longer.

No one knew what suffering he experienced in that moment. Everyone only saw him fall back to his original place, his complexion pale. His hands were scratching his squirming face like there was a colony of insects waiting to fly out. 

Bang!

There was the muffled sound of something bursting and everyone saw a bright and colorful mushroom emerge from his neck. The snow-white slime dripping down his shoulder was like the secretions of a mushroom.

The sharp female voice from the mushroom made everyone feel like their scalps were skinned while they were still alive.

“Please listen to the precautions of the trial level—” 

“First, once the instance is opened, don’t try to force your way out—”