My ‘Healing’ Game
Chapter 448: Is His Girlfriend Also a Figment of His Imagination?

Chapter 448: Chapter 448: Is His Girlfriend Also a Figment of His Imagination?

The No. 32 bus, an ordinary bus with no distinctive features.

This route had gone almost ten years without an accident, and last month it was even selected by the bus company as the passengers’ most satisfying model route.

Yet, this very ordinary bus became somewhat different tonight.

It drove out of the darkness, its entire body covered with a thick darkness, as if wrapped in a dense fog.

"The bus is starting, please sit tight and hold on, next stop, next stop, next stop..."

The bus radio kept broadcasting nonstop, but except for Han Fei, no one inside the bus noticed anything amiss; everything seemed as usual.

"If any strange people get on at the next stop, we get off immediately, understand?"

"Why though?" Li Hu was somewhat puzzled, he heard Han Fei speaking in a low voice, and unconsciously lowered his own voice, "This is the last bus, if we get off halfway, with no village ahead and no shop behind, how are we going to get back?"

"There’s always a way back." The broadcast kept coming through Han Fei’s right ear. This bus seemed to have no final destination, and it’s possible that its next stop was death.

Late at night, the highway was already devoid of other vehicles, only the No. 32 bus was traveling, and the driver, accustomed to this situation, began to speed up to get home earlier.

"There are usually very few people at these stops, does anyone want to get off at the next stop? If not, I won’t stop!" the driver shouted without turning his head.

No one inside the bus responded, but the driver immediately followed up with, "Old lady, speak up, I can’t hear what you’re saying!"

Hearing what the driver said, Li Long curiously looked towards the back of the bus and indeed saw an old lady sitting in the corner of the last row, holding a bundle that seemed to contain a sleeping infant.

Had she been on the bus before?

Li Long had no recollection; he thought he might have been too tired earlier, so he hadn’t noticed her.

Shaking his head, Li Long turned his head, ready to rest with his eyes closed, but just then, the driver unexpectedly spoke again.

"You’re getting off too? Why are all of you going to Shahe Hospital? With your complexions looking so poor, could it be food poisoning?"

The bus was dead silent, Li Long and Li Hu exchanged glances, both unsure who the driver was talking to.

Li Hu lightly nudged Han Fei and whispered, "Is the driver nuts? Where are all these people he’s talking about? There are only a few of us..."

As he said this and looked to the side, the rest of his sentence was caught in his throat, and he didn’t dare to say it out loud.

The bus had suddenly become crowded with a lot of people at some point; some were playing with their mobile phones, some were resting, and others were silently watching outside the window.

These people behaved normally, except their faces were pale, and their skin surfaces looked as if something had gone moldy, with some spots remaining.

"When did they get on?" Li Hu’s mind couldn’t quite wrap around this, and subconsciously he turned to ask his brother, but then he saw that Li Long’s complexion had turned ashen.

It was unclear whether it was because of the lighting or because Li Long was too exhausted, but at that moment, his face was filled with Death Intent, as though he were a corpse just rolled out from the morgue.

Gripping Han Fei’s shoulder, Li Hu kept shaking him, trying to tell Han Fei about his brother’s abnormal state, but quickly he noticed something even more abnormal.

Han Fei’s left hand clutched at his own left eye, as if he was about to gouge his eyeball out.

"Fuck! What’s happened to you all?"

The bus sped up and it got colder inside, but the driver was oblivious to the issue, mumbling to himself if the air conditioning was broken?

In the harmonious and refreshing atmosphere, the second platform finally appeared in the distance.

The faint outline of a hospital could be seen at the edge of the night, a private hospital built beside Shahe, which was originally meant to be a sanatorium for the wealthy, but due to various reasons, it was later converted into a private hospital.

"Let’s get off, let’s get off here!" Before the bus reached the stop, Li Hu urged, lightly touching Li Long’s shoulder with his cast-wrapped arm: "Bro, don’t scare me, okay?"

"Are you crazy?" Li Long was full of confusion: "Am I the one scaring you? Or are you trying to scare me? Lower your voice, don’t you see everyone’s sleeping, mind your professional ethics."

"Bro..." Li Hu looked at his brother’s face, if it hadn’t been for the cast on his wrist, he definitely would have grabbed Li Long’s hand and made him feel his face: "It looks like there’s black mist flowing down your face."

"Bullshit, behave yourself."

Seeing that Li Long didn’t listen to him, Li Hu continued to shake Han Fei’s shoulder: "Bro, let’s get off, there’s really something wrong with this bus."

"My mood value is dropping faster, something very special is surely going to get on at the next stop," said Han Fei, covering his bloodshot left eye, staring straight at the window glass.

With the help of the interior light, he saw a strange young man in the window reflection.

The young man was wrapped in bandages over his head, arms, and torso, looking incredibly weak, as blood continuously soaked the bandages red.

"Is this the former Master of Shrine? How did he leave the West City District in such a state?"

The man reflected in the window glass had no trace of innocence or kindness left on his face, his intact eyes were filled with pain and hatred, his teeth almost shattered. It was hard to imagine what kind of power supported him, driving him to keep fighting for survival.

It might’ve been for his mother who was still waiting for surgery, or perhaps due to the hatred for his father.

With surging pain in his blood-soaked left eye, as the bus reached the Shahe Hospital stop, the battered young man in the glass reflection fell over.

Then Han Fei witnessed something even more bizarre, his left eye looking into the distance saw a woman in a nurse’s uniform just jumping off the top of Shahe Hospital, her body hitting the outer wall, blood flowing all over her.

She eventually fell onto the huge sign at the entrance of Shahe Hospital, her blood dying the nurse’s uniform red.

The voice from the bus’s onboard broadcast continued, the fallen woman seemed to hear it, her completely twisted and deformed skeleton gradually stood up, supporting her broken body, walking towards the bus stop outside Shahe Hospital, as if she would do anything to escape Shahe Hospital.

With every step, the falling nurse left a bloody footprint on the ground. Witnessed by Han Fei’s left eye, she drew closer to the bus stop.

The moment the bus on route 32 came to a stop, the woman also appeared on the platform.

"Get ready to get off!" Han Fei stood up from his seat, and at that moment, both front and rear doors of the bus opened simultaneously.

"Is something weird really going to come on board?" Already jittery, Li Hu, hearing Han Fei’s voice, quickly pulled his brother to their feet.

The two brothers, both injured, struggled to move; as they left their seat, the blood-covered nurse from Han Fei’s left eye view climbed onto the bus.

Li Hu held his breath, and Han Fei too felt uneasy, clenching his fists, but the next moment the woman who appeared inside the bus was completely different from the falling nurse he saw with his left eye.

She was dressed in a clean, tidy coat, holding a bag containing a set of nurse uniforms.

The woman looked a year or two younger than Han Fei, dressed not particularly fashionably, but she had a comforting presence.

The light shined on the young woman, and she too noticed Han Fei sitting near the back door.

For some reason, the woman smiled at Han Fei.

She wasn’t exceptionally beautiful and didn’t have a particularly striking aura, but there was something about her that felt comforting to Han Fei, especially when she smiled—like a winter jasmine blooming at the end of a cold night.

After dropping her fare into the coin box, the woman with a bag containing a nurse’s uniform walked over to Han Fei: "Is this seat taken?"

In the Master of Shrine’s Memory World, it was the first time Han Fei had heard such a moving voice, each word like a song.

He shook his head, subconsciously glancing at Li Long and Li Hu, the two brothers who seemed unsure of what to do.

Wasn’t there supposed to be something terrifying getting on the bus?

"Then I’ll sit right here next to you," the woman said, not standing on ceremony, and sat down with her bag.

Han Fei quietly observed her and discovered that his left eye couldn’t see the girl at all, only his right eye could see her.

The bus started again, and the temperature inside seemed to rise quite a bit, the lights also grew brighter.

Sitting quietly, Han Fei couldn’t shake the feeling that there were secrets hidden about this woman, but with so little information at hand, he couldn’t begin to guess what they might be.

"How did your leg get injured?" the woman asked, looking at Han Fei’s still-bleeding calf: "That kind of bandage won’t stop the bleeding and will cause secondary damage to the wound!"

Crouching down, the woman placed her bag on the seat, taking out clean bandages and some medical supplies, and carefully re-bandaged Han Fei’s wounds on his leg and arm.

Han Fei silently watched the woman work, not resisting, just observing her.

To survive in the Deep World, he had learned various first-aid techniques and noticed that many of the nurse’s procedures were not up to standard, barely making the grade.

"There, this should prevent it from getting worse," the young woman said, looking at her handiwork on the bandages with satisfaction before retying her bag and taking her seat.

The vehicle continued on, the lights dimming once more; when the temperature inside dropped again, Han Fei suddenly felt something tap his left shoulder.

The woman leaned in next to him, gently snuggling up.

Frowning, Han Fei surreptitiously grasped the handle of the knife in his pocket, but then the woman stealthily passed her phone in front of Han Fei, the screen displaying a message—Do you need me to call the cops for you? Those two guys behind you don’t look like good news; are you being held by them?

With their bodies close together, Li Long and Li Hu, sitting behind them, failed to see the light from the phone screen.

The woman seemed to have misunderstood something, but Han Fei didn’t bother to explain; he was more curious about who the woman really was, what she represented in the Master of Shrine’s memory, and why the nurse who jumped from the hospital building had turned into this after boarding the bus?

Looking carefully at the woman, Han Fei was surprised to find that the nurse bore a slight resemblance to the Master of Shrine’s mother.

"Could you tell me your name?"

"Lin Lu."

Her fingers swiftly moved across the phone screen, typing another line—If you can’t speak, just blink your eyes, blink several times for yes to calling the police.

Han Fei no longer looked at the text on the phone screen; right after the woman gave her name, he heard the system’s notification in his mind.

"Player number 0000 please take note! You have triggered a Shrine Random Task—Wish Three."

"Wish Three—Love (Shrine Random Task): I have never felt the sensation of being loved; there is not a single minute in my memory worth cherishing."

"Task Requirement: At the appropriate time, in the appropriate place, using the appropriate method, kill Lin Lu."

As the system finished laying out the task requirements, Han Fei’s gaze was still fixed on Lin Lu’s face.

"Kill?"

Moving his gaze, Han Fei looked toward the bus window.

Reflected in the cold glass was a man riddled with injuries, his clothes soaked in blood, on the brink of death.

He slumped alone in his seat, with the other passengers too wary to approach him, not a single person coming to his aid.

"The scene seen by the left eye, isn’t it too cruel?"

Gently pushing Lin Lu away, Han Fei took out his phone: "Thanks for your kindness, but you seem to have misunderstood something. The injuries on me are from an accident I had by myself; those two sitting in the back are my friends."

Lin Lu didn’t believe Han Fei’s words at all. To any normal person, it would be hard to believe that such severe injuries could have been self-inflicted.

She desperately gestured to Han Fei with her eyebrows, continuously signaling to him.

"You should get off at your stop and mind your own business," Han Fei said, suddenly realizing that his landlord seemed to have said something similar to him just yesterday.

Lin Lu appeared to understand something and stopped conversing with Han Fei.

It was only after bus 32 reached the upper reaches of Shahe that Lin Lu tapped Han Fei and quietly slipped a note into his pocket before she got off.

The stop where she got off was right in front of People’s Hospital.

After Lin Lu left, the temperature in the bus dropped again, and all the passengers remained as silent as the dead; exuding a foul smell.

Reaching into his pocket, Han Fei looked at the contact number on the note. His right eye saw an unfamiliar number, but his left eye revealed his own.

"Without Lin Lu’s appearance, the bus seemed like it would never reach the next stop; it represents that the Master of Shrine felt close to death, doubting he could make it much further."

"On bus 32, all the passengers were like silent dead bodies, corresponding to those who were afraid of getting into trouble; human indifference can be as bone-chilling as ice."

"Lastly, there’s the continuously dropping temperature inside the bus, which must be the body temperature of the Master of Shrine himself—he’s hovering on the brink of life and death; for him, this is a journey to death."

"Every chance turn happened after Lin Lu boarded the bus; the temperature normalized, the lights no longer warped. But was Lin Lu even real?"

"The woman from Shahe Hospital who died after jumping, she rose gradually, climbed aboard, and turned into Lin Lu."

"Maybe Lin Lu is just a fantasy of the Master of Shrine, who, after witnessing the nurse’s leap to death, compelled by a strong will to live, had his brain conjure a glimmer of something beautiful."