Horror Game Designer

The moving clock ticked. There was less than half a minute left to the end of the countdown. The path before the bus changed. The headlights came on. There was no new station. The bus called Past entered a dark tunnel. The normal Gao Ming walked to the front. He tried to communicate with the driver, but the driver didn’t respond. The normal Gao Ming tried different methods but he failed to even see the driver’s face.

“Where are you driving this bus to? Speak! Who are you? Why would you appear in my past?” The bus rolled silently down the tunnel.

“Since there are no more stations, we have to reach the end soon, right? But what is going on with this tunnel?” The normal Gao Ming tried his best to understand it, but it made no sense to him. The lights in the bus flickered. The electronic clock moved slower, and so did the bus. When the secondhand ticked for one last time, the timer stopped, and the bus gradually came to a stop inside the tunnel.

The light in the driver’s cubicle suddenly went out. Then, the lights inside the bus switched off. The normal Gao Ming made it to the back of the bus before all the lights went out. He carried the corpse that had the picture in its chest. Compared to the unknown darkness, his own corpse was more comforting.

“Now, only the two of us are left.” The normal Gao Ming rummaged through his bag to see if he could find anything useful. He found the death portrait that was supposed to be his present. Two of the final passengers had a death portrait each.

“This is so strange.” The normal Gao Ming took out his phone, which had no signal, and aimed the light at the corpse’s chest. The investigation centre exhausted a lot of resources to collect the portrait inside the corpse. The picture was unusual. Among the black-and-white background, Gao Ming wore the uniform of the investigation centre headquarters’ upper echelon. His expression was cold, and his gaze aloof. His body was covered in stitches like he had been sewn together from different body parts. The picture emitted a powerful curse. If one stared at it for too long, one might be drawn into it.

“Is this me too?”

Some death portraits felt familiar to Gao Ming, while others made him scared. The normal Gao Ming didn’t want to become any of the Gao Mings in the portraits, but he couldn’t control what would happen in the future. The lights on the bus were out. The normal Gao Ming hauled his corpse and walked down the tunnel.

“Where is the end?”

The surroundings were dark. He couldn’t see the path from whence he came or the path he was going down. The only thing he could rely on was his own corpse. He was not that courageous. However, whenever he felt like giving up, the images of the other Gao Mings would appear in his mind. He could reach that stage because the other Gao Mings traded for it with their lives. At that moment, they were experiencing the worst despair at the other stations.

The normal Gao Ming had no choice. He had to keep on going to reach the end. He tripped and fell. He bumped into the walls. He had to give himself a pep-talk every time. He didn’t know why everyone placed their hope on him. He should have replaced the kind Gao Ming or any other Gao Ming and got off the bus earlier.

Darkness, silence and loneliness. He started to converse with his corpse. Time lost its meaning. He couldn’t remember how long he had walked. When he accidentally raised his arm, he realised there were no longer rocks on the wall but frozen dead bodies. He touched a human face!

“Are there corpses embedded in the wall?”

He halted. He summoned his courage and lifted his hand again. His finger caressed the brows, nose and lips of the corpse. The normal Gao Ming had a stunning discovery. This was another corpse of himself!

Gao Ming wanted to shine his phone’s flashlight on the corpse, but at that moment, his phone vibrated. Someone sent him a message.

“I swear there was no signal earlier. Did a ghost send me a message?”

Gao Ming checked his inbox with confusion. Gao Ming was bombarded with messages from his classmates in Class 13. Most of them told him to stop moving forward and tell him to get back on the bus. The messages were so real, as they described the dangers hidden in the dark tunnel and the strange ways Gao Ming was reacting to them. It made Gao Ming feel like he was losing his mind.

The normal Gao Ming’s heart trembled from reading the messages. Ghosts were waiting to ambush him in the dark. His classmates were waiting for his return. There were calls, messages and video calls. Most of the students tried to achieve one goal: get Gao Ming to return to the bus.

“Everyone has sent a message… No, wait. Where is Gao Yun’s message? He said he was my classmate. Why didn’t he send me a message to persuade me to go back?”

After a long hesitation, the normal Gao Ming chose to put faith in himself. He touched the corpses along the wall and ignored the ‘warnings’ from his classmates. After a long walk, when the normal Gao Ming felt like he was going to have a breakdown, his hand found an empty crevice on the wall. The crevice was large enough to fit a corpse.

“A corpse is missing? Should I be embedded here?” He tried to squeeze into the hole, but his limbs couldn’t be bent at the strange angles.

Perhaps it was a coincidence. At that moment, the corpse he had been carrying suddenly slid off. Its arm landed on the wall as if bidding him farewell. After a short silence, the normal Gao Ming sighed. He slowly inserted his corpse into the crevice. When the corpse was perfectly installed into the wall, blood vessels grew out of the death portrait on its chest. Soon, the vessels crawled along the wall towards the other corpses. Something was being torn apart!

A drum-like heartbeat pounded. A lot of death memories surged into the normal Gao Ming’s heart. He had too many pasts. Each past was a sad death memory!

The dark tunnel didn’t seem to be able to sustain the pressure. Cracks appeared on the wall. The normal Gao Ming held his heart. He dropped his phone and ran ahead as fast as he could.

The tunnel collapsed behind him. The darkness was chased away. The normal Gao Ming’s heart reverberated with the hearts of the endless corpses. He ran faster and faster until he exited the tunnel at the last moment.

A loud boom echoed throughout the world behind the door. The normal Gao Ming stood on the ruin and turned back to look. On the winding path, there were one after another stations emitting light. That was his whole life.

The rebellious Gao Ming lay in the mud and glanced at him with blood in his mouth.

The dying kind Gao Ming leaned against the window at Li San Private School. He revealed a smile for the first time.

The flesh Gao Ming’s body was rapidly evolving as he gripped Lu Zang by his neck.

“Is this my end? The place… where everything started?”