The question wasn't whether the driver had a face.
Was what that face meant.
And why it had appeared now, on death number 328.
Chen Tiehan's breath stopped. A fist of ice closed around his lungs. The driver's seat was empty for a full second—just empty space and the steering wheel turning itself—before a figure shimmered into existence. Old Zhou. But different.
The gray uniform was the same. The posture, rigid. But the blur that had covered his head was gone, peeled back like a layer of static dissolving in rain.
The face was ordinary. Late fifties, maybe. Deep grooves beside the mouth. Thick eyebrows. A flat, unreadable expression. Eyes fixed on the rain-streaked windshield, reflecting nothing but the tunnel of streetlights ahead.
But ordinary wasn't possible here.
Nothing was ordinary here.
The bus hit a pothole. A jolt. One of the faceless passengers in the back let out a soft gasp. Tiehan didn't turn. His own reflection, pale and hollow-eyed, was superimposed over Old Zhou's profile in the glass.
No. Not just his reflection.
A flicker. For a split second, the driver's face looked like his own face, aged thirty years. Then it was Old Zhou again.
His heart hammered against his ribs. Too loud.
Is this me? Is this what I become? Another driver in this endless goddamn loop?
The System remained silent. No update. No count.
Just the face.
Old Zhou's hands tightened on the wheel. Knuckles white. He tilted his head slightly, as if listening to a distant sound beneath the rumble of the engine.
Tiehan forced his own hands to unclench. The police instincts, the rusted gears of his former life, began to turn. Observe. Analyze. Don't react, understand.
The face appeared because I started asking questions. Because I looked. The rules of this place… they're reactive. They respond to intent.
He remembered the hand on his shoulder in memory 004. The whisper: Find us.
Maybe the rules weren't just about survival. Maybe they were about investigation.
His gaze dropped to the dashboard. The same buttons, the same ticket machine. But next to the gear shift, half-hidden by a faded cloth, was a small, framed photo. He hadn't seen it before. Couldn't have seen it before—it wasn't there when the face was blurred.
It was a black-and-white picture. A younger Old Zhou, standing next to the bus. Smiling. Beside him, a woman and a boy of about seven. The boy was holding a toy bus.
A family.
A life outside this midnight run.
The bus lurched again, swerving slightly. Old Zhou corrected it smoothly, but his eyes, in that moment, flicked down toward the hidden photo. A microscopic movement. A crack in the stone.
And in that crack, Tiehan saw it: pain. A deep, old, grinding pain. The kind that sleeps in the bones.
"You can see it too, can't you?" Tiehan said quietly, not expecting an answer. His voice was raw in the unnatural quiet. "The loops. The memories."
Old Zhou didn't turn. Didn't speak.
But the temperature in the bus dropped another few degrees. The breath of the faceless passengers became visible, faint plumes of white in the dim light, as if they were breathing in a winter they couldn't feel.
The System window flickered to life, transparent blue in the corner of his vision.
[Alert: Environmental Convergence Detected.]
[Current Memory Anchor: 'Bus Driver – Zhou' is stabilizing.]
[Proximity to core memory increased. Caution advised.]
Core memory. The heart of Old Zhou's death. The thing he was trapped reliving.
Tiehan leaned forward, just a little. "What happened to them?" he asked, nodding his head faintly toward the hidden photo. "Your family."
Silence.
Then, the bus's interior lights—the sickly yellow ones that ran along the ceiling—began to pulse. Flicker. Slow at first, then faster, like a dying heartbeat.
Thump-thump. Darkness.
Thump-thump. Light.
Thump-thump. Darkness.
In the flashes of darkness, the bus changed.
The seats weren't blue plastic. They were old, patterned fabric, worn thin. The advertisements on the walls weren't for phone plans or clinics. They were for Tiger Balm and a long-defunct cinema. The smell shifted—damp wool, diesel fuel, and a hint of sweat replaced the sterile ozone.
In the flashes of light, it was the modern bus, with Old Zhou at the wheel, face grim.
Thump-thump. Dark. An older bus, swerving on a wet road. A younger Zhou, terrified, screaming at passengers to hold on.
Thump-thump. Light. The modern bus, steady, on a straight, empty road.
Thump-thump. Dark. The crash. Screaming metal. Glass shattering like a million stars. A child's cry, abruptly cut off.
Thump-thump. Light. Silence. Seven breathing statues. A driver with a face full of ghosts.
Tiehan was seeing two timelines superimposed. The memory of the crash. And this… this afterlife taxi service.
Old Zhou was living both at once.
"It was an accident," Tiehan said, piecing it together from the flickering trauma. "You crashed. Long ago. People died. The boy… your son?"
The driver's head turned. Just an inch. His eyes, finally, met Tiehan's in the rearview mirror.
They weren't human eyes. Not anymore.
They were pools of rainwater on a dark road, reflecting broken glass and distant, unreachable streetlights. The pain in them was a physical force, a vacuum that threatened to pull Tiehan's soul right out of his chest.
"Not… accident."
The voice wasn't a voice. It was the sound of gravel under tires, of brakes grinding too late, of a bone snapping. It came from everywhere and nowhere.
The flickering stopped. The bus solidified into its modern, purgatorial form. But the past was in the air now, thick as the night outside.
[Warning: Core Memory Access Threshold Approaching.]
[Passive Observation Mode Maximum.]
[Initiate Dive? Y/N]
A choice. The System was offering a choice. Dive into Old Zhou's core memory—the moment of his death—or stay in the relative safety of the observational bus.
Safe? Nothing was safe. But not knowing was a slower death.
Tiehan's finger hovered over the mental 'Y'. He looked at the driver, at the face that was a key and a lock. Find us.
He wasn't just finding them. He was becoming part of their story. Each dive, each connection, was weaving him deeper into this maze. He could feel it—his own edges getting fuzzier, the line between Chen Tiehan, ex-cop, and Chen Tiehan, memory-ghost, beginning to blur.
But the alternative was to be another faceless passenger. Forever.
"Show me," he said, to Old Zhou, to the System, to the maze itself.
The 'Y' glowed in his mind.
And the world dissolved.
The noise hit first. Not the sleek hum of the modern bus, but the roaring, clattering thunder of an old diesel engine pushed to its limit. The smell of fuel was acrid, real. Rain hammered the windshield in blinding sheets, the wipers squealing a frantic, useless rhythm.
Tiehan wasn't a passenger now. He was standing in the aisle of the old bus, swaying violently as it careened down a narrow, winding mountain road. Hong Kong, 1965. The signs, the shop fronts flashing by in the storm, told him that. The passengers weren't faceless—they were terrified, vivid people. A woman clutching a market basket, chickens inside squawking. An old man praying with rosary beads. A young couple holding each other, faces white.
And at the wheel—Young Zhou. Maybe thirty. Drenched in sweat, uniform soaked through. His eyes were wide, fixed not on the road, but darting to the rearview mirror again and again. Pure, animal fear.
"Faster, Zhou! They're gaining!" a voice barked.
Tiehan turned. A man in a cheap, ill-fitting suit stood behind the driver, one hand gripping a seat back, the other clutching a leather briefcase to his chest. His face was pinched with greed and panic.
"The brakes… the rain…" Zhou stammered, wrestling with the heavy steering wheel.
"Forget the brakes! If they catch us with this, we're both dead! My family… your family…" the suit-man hissed.
This wasn't an accident. The realization was a cold knife. This was a getaway. A bus driver used for smuggling. Something in that briefcase. Drugs? Gold? Secrets?
Zhou glanced at a small photo taped to the dashboard. The same family. His wife's gentle smile. His son's bright eyes. A promise of a life he was gambling with on this rain-slicked road.
A loud BANG from the back of the bus. Not a crash—a gunshot. A passenger screamed. Two men in dark coats were forcing their way from the rear door, shouting in a language Tiehan didn't know, waving pistols.
Chaos.
The bus swerved wildly. Zhou screamed, "Hold on!"
Tiehan was thrown against a metal pole. The sensation was solid, shocking. He was here. Truly here. Not a ghost. He could feel the cold metal, smell the fear and rain.
He looked at his hands. Solid. But translucent at the edges, like smoke. An observer. A ghost in the machine of this memory. He could not interfere. The System's warning pulsed at the edge of his perception: [Passive Mode: Interaction Minimal. Reality Integrity Unstable.]
The bus hit a bend too fast.
The tires lost their grip on the muddy margin of the road.
For a single, infinite second, everything was weightless. The prayers, the screams, the squawking chickens, all rose into a single chorus of impending doom.
Zhou's eyes met the photo of his family. His mouth formed a single, silent word: Sorry.
Then the world turned over.
Metal shrieked. Glass exploded inward in a lethal storm. Tiehan felt nothing—the memory let him pass through the physics of destruction—but he saw everything. The bus tumbling, a steel coffin rolling down the steep embankment. Bodies becoming projectiles. The suit-man's briefcase flying open, spilling not gold or drugs, but bundles of official-looking documents stamped with seals that bled into illegibility as they were soaked by rain and mud.
He saw the young couple crushed against a seat.
The old man's rosary breaking, beads scattering like black tears.
The woman and her chickens, gone.
He saw Zhou, still strapped in his seat by a futile lap belt, head slamming against the window with a wet, final crack.
The bus came to rest at the bottom of the gorge, on its side, wheels spinning slowly in the air. Rain fell into the wreckage. The only sounds were the hiss of steam from the radiator, the drip of fluids, and the weak, fading moans of the dying.
Tiehan stood amidst the carnage, a phantom. His heart was a stone in his chest. This was death number 328's origin. Not a random accident. A crime. A small man caught between a criminal and thugs, trying to save his family, ending them all.
The memory began to fray at the edges, losing color, losing sound. It was ending. He would be pulled back to the loop-bus soon.
But then, from the driver's seat, a figure stirred.
Young Zhou's body was broken, clearly dead. Yet a shape—a pale, shimmering outline—pulled itself free. It was the ghost of Zhou, blinking, confused, looking at his own corpse.
And then he saw them.
Standing at the treeline, untouched by the rain, were two figures in long, dark coats. They wore no recognizable insignia. Their faces were calm, observing. One held a small, complex device that glowed with a soft, sickly green light.
They weren't rescuers. They weren't the thugs. They were… collectors.
The ghost of Zhou stared, mouth open in a silent cry. One of the dark-coated figures made a notation on a tablet. The other pointed the device. A thin green beam lanced out, hooking onto Zhou's ghostly form.
Zhou's spirit struggled, silently, desperately, trying to reach for the photo of his family, now floating in the mud.
It was no use. The beam pulled. His ghostly form distorted, stretched, and was siphoned into the device.
The two figures exchanged a nod. Their job was done. They turned and walked into the shadows of the trees, disappearing as if they'd never been.
The memory shattered.
[Memory Dive Terminated.]
[Core Memory of 'Zhou – Bus Driver' archived.]
[Fatality Pattern Updated: Death by Vehicular Trauma (Induced). Post-mortem acquisition noted.]
[Returning to Primary Loop…]
Tiehan gasped, back in his seat on the midnight bus. The bus was the same. The faceless passengers. The steady hum. The rain outside.
Old Zhou was at the wheel again, his face once more visible, etched with a sadness so profound it was geological. But now Tiehan knew what was behind those eyes. Not just the memory of a crash.
The memory of being harvested.
His hands were trembling. The System's death count remained at 327/1000. But that was a lie too. It wasn't a count of his deaths. It was an inventory. Experiment 327.
And those figures in the woods… They worked for someone. They cleaned up. They collected the souls, the memories, the experiments.
The bus's destination sign flickered, the pixels dancing before settling on a new, glowing line of text:
NEXT STOP: MEMORY SCAFFOLDING – "THE BLOODY WEDDING"
PREPARING DOWNLOAD OF SUBJECT: LIN WEIWEI.
Lin Weiwei. The woman with no face in seat 3B. Her turn was next.
And as the name appeared, in his mind's eye, Tiehan saw not a memory, but a preview: a church aisle, white lace stained crimson, and a single, silver key lying in a pool of blood.
The hook was set. The maze had another path for him.
The question wasn't if he would walk it.
Was how much of himself he would leave behind in the dark.