Taoist priest goes to America

The black cat outside the window was still panting. It was squatting on the steps in front of the grocery store, its body arched as it breathed on the bus.

Ang Lee looked at the cat through the car window; the cat's pupils had shrunk to slits. It kept staring at the window, or more precisely, at the passengers inside.

Its ears were flattened against its head, and its whiskers trembled, as if facing an unseen enemy.

Ang Lee leaned back in his seat. He had felt something was off since he got on the bus. The passengers were too quiet. They didn't talk, didn't look at each other, and each of them was huddled in their own private world.

He thought this was normal on the night bus; at one in the morning, everyone was exhausted and no one wanted to talk. The old man was snoring, the woman was nailing her nails, and the worker was drinking beer. Everything made sense, but now he wasn't sure.

A fly flew in from who knows where. The carriage was dimly lit. It flew over Ang Lee's face, its wings flashing green in the light, before landing on the eye of the middle-aged man in the row in front of him.

The fly's six legs crawled on the man's eyelashes, its antennae probing into his eyes, but the man did not react.

He didn't even blink; his eyes were open, staring at something outside the window. A fly circled the surface of his eyeballs before flying away.

Ang Lee was now certain that there was something wrong with the people in that car.

Were the people in the car corpses? Are there other corpse-transporting people like him in the US?

But he didn't smell the stench of a corpse. The smell in the carriage was normal: diesel fuel, cheap white perfume, and sweat—all the smells of living people.

But a fly landing on an eyeball without blinking is something a living person cannot do.

Ang Lee stared at the man's profile for a while. The man was still breathing evenly, his chest rising and falling slowly.

Ang Lee suddenly realized something and looked at the others.

The woman who was pricking her nails had the same rhythmic rise and fall of her chest as the man.

Ang Lee turned to look at the others. The worker had finished his beer and was leaning against the handrail, his chest heaving in the same rhythm. The seven or eight people in the carriage were breathing in perfect unison, inhaling and exhaling at the same time, like light bulbs connected in series by the same switch, turning on and off at the same moment.

Ang Lee lifted his back from the chair, his fingers resting on the string of wooden puppets at his waist. The jujube wood puppets felt warm to the touch, and Doyle's hat brim pressed against his palm. He didn't move, but simply sat up straight.

This bus is something else... Let's see what kind of monsters and demons will pop up next. We'll kill them, then drive their corpses around to collect the system rewards.

The bus continued on its way. At the next stop, the doors opened, and an elderly man boarded.

The old man was wearing a dirty gray coat, and his face was covered with dark red pustules. He picked at his face with his fingers, his nails digging into the edges of the pustules, squeezing out yellowish-white pus that trickled down his cheeks.

He didn't wipe it off, leaving the pus on his face, found a seat, and continued to pick at it.

Ang Lee looked at the old man. After the old man sat down, his breathing rhythm synchronized with that of the others in the carriage.

From the moment this guy sat down, his breathing aligned with everyone else's.

Two stops later, a young man boarded the train through the front door. His hair was blond and plastered to his scalp; he was soaking wet, his clothes and trousers dripping water.

He walked, convulsing, through the aisle in the middle of the carriage, water dripping from his trousers and cuffs, leaving a trail of wet stains on the floor.

His wet clothes clung to his body, causing him to continuously lose body temperature in the cold night.

His body was shivering from the cold, but his expression remained unchanged. His neck was tilted to one side, and he walked around the carriage expressionlessly, as if his frozen body was not his own.

He sat down in the back seat by the window, but his convulsions didn't stop.

His breathing, like that of the previous old man with a face full of pus, synchronized with everyone else in the carriage the moment he sat down.

The bus was approaching an intersection. People were waving at the bus stop ahead, but the bus didn't slow down. The driver kept his eyes straight ahead, didn't move the steering wheel, and the bus drove right past them.

Through the car window, Ang Lee saw the group of people open their mouths and curse at the bus. The bus accelerated, and the platform and the group of people quickly shrank and disappeared from the rearview mirror.

At the next intersection, a middle-aged woman in a red jacket, carrying two shopping bags, stood in the middle of the deserted road.

The bus didn't brake, and the driver didn't swerve to avoid it; it just drove straight up, the orange headlights illuminating the dazed face of the woman in the red jacket.

The front of the car hit the woman, and Li An felt the car vibrate slightly, as if it had rolled over a raised section of road.

The woman flew off the hood of the car, did two somersaults in the air, and landed about ten meters in front of the car. Her body bounced once on the ground and then remained still.

Expensive cosmetics and fashion magazines from her two shopping bags were scattered all over the ground, and blood seeped out from under her body, pooling on the asphalt.

The bus continued driving forward and slowly came to a stop in front of the woman lying on the ground.

Ang Lee turned his head and looked at the road through the rear window. The woman's body lay motionless in a pool of blood, but she moved when the bus stopped.

The woman slowly got up from the ground. Her once red jacket was now soaked in blood, making the red appear even more vibrant.

Her face was covered in blood, obscuring her features. Her left arm was bent at a 90-degree angle like a broken tree branch, hanging down behind her from the elbow.

She limped a few steps after the bus, then steadied herself and looked up at the front door of the bus.

"Swoosh—" The front door of the bus opened, and the woman limped onto the bus through the front door.

Blood was still on her face, and her left arm was bent, but he didn't forget to pay the fare. He used his good right arm to take out some change from his pocket, put it in the fare box of the bus, and then walked into the carriage and found an empty seat.

The moment she sat down, her breathing synchronized with everyone else's. Although her arm was still bent backward and blood was still dripping down, she was now just like everyone else in the car.

Numb, empty, and expressionless—that was the look on the faces of all the passengers on the bus except for Ang Lee.

Ang Lee removed his fingers from the puppet and leaned back in his chair.

This guy is actually quite cute. Knowing that he had noticed something was wrong with the people in the car, he deliberately did something scary to scare himself, just bluffing.

The bus passed a few more stops. People were waving at the bus stop, but the bus ignored them and drove right past. Some people cursed from behind, while others simply stood there, watching the bus drive away without any expression on their faces.

Fewer and fewer passengers boarded, but the number of people on the bus increased.

Sometimes, even when it's not a bus stop, the bus stops, and when the doors open, groups of people emerge from the darkness and line up at the door. No one knows where these people came from.

The bus entered a street without streetlights. The buildings on both sides were completely dark; there was no light in the windows and no lights on the porches.

The car headlights shone on the road ahead, illuminating a small patch of asphalt road with cracks in it, from which withered grass grew.

For some reason, the lights in the carriage changed from yellowish-white to a stark white, shining on the faces of the passengers and making them look more like wax figures sculpted into human form.

We arrived at another station, and the train doors opened.

Three people walked up.

They were all people Ang Lee knew, people he met in the subway car: one was the narcissistic woman who accused him of secretly filming her, another was her good-natured black boyfriend, and the third was the old lady who had been rubbing her feet with a foot-rubbing board for a long time in the car.

The leader was a narcissistic white woman with messy long blonde hair, wearing a beige cashmere coat stained with blood, and carrying a black handbag. She led the way.

Her nose was crooked and flat, caused by Ang Lee. Her face had many scars of varying sizes that were not healing well. The scabs were cracking open, and several streams of blood were flowing from the scars, covering her entire face.

The tall, good-natured Black man followed behind her, wearing a dark blue outfit with a scarf wrapped around his neck.

The last one was an elderly woman, wearing a flashy coat and carrying a canvas bag over her shoulder. In her hand, she held a wooden foot scrubber, which was covered with white crumbs.

The three of them stepped out of the car in unison.

Ang Lee stared at their faces, which were expressionless, their eyes vacant like two glass beads.

As they walked past Ang Lee, they didn't turn around or react at all. The three men seemed to have no idea who Ang Lee was or what had happened on the subway.

The narcissistic white woman walked to the row of seats behind Ang Lee and sat down. Her black boyfriend sat next to her, and they stayed together in the back row behind Ang Lee.

The older woman sat in the seat in front of Ang Lee, with the back of her head facing him.

The three men blocked Li An from both the front and back.