Chapter 5: Looming Evil Spirit …
Jiang Yi did not seem like a professional actor, hence he and his wife must be couple in real life.
Ye Jiang, Nian Zhou and Du Yan split up to find the woman. Jiang Yi told everyone her name was Han Ruo Yue.
Cell phone was useless in this place, so the only option was to go around looking for her.
Jiang Yi could not find his wife, so he shouted out: “Ruo Yue! Ruo Yue!! Where are you?”
Ye Jiang panicked! This place was a haunted mountainous area, and if he kept shouting like that and the ghost came, what should they do?
But if Ye Jiang was in Jiang Yi’s position, he also could not have stopped acting like that.
“This woman is so unlucky!”
Nian Zhou found out that he could say some sentence outside the script without losing tickets, so he started to complain: “I thought I was unlucky but this woman…”
Ye Jiang pinched Zhou’s hand to signal him. He was Nian Zhou, he must remember this was also his life, not only an actor character in this horror movie world.
“Mister Jiang!”
Ye Jiang hold Jiang Yi’s hands: “Temporarily, you should not …”
As soon as he began speaking, his tickets started to decrease, from 177 to 167. It made him scared that if he kept going, the result would be immeasurable.
“But, my wife …” Jiang Yi told: “Where did she go ?…”
“Everyone, look!” Zhang De Kun pointed in one place and spoke: “That is …”
When hearing this, everyone started to look at the place De Kun pointed. There was a shoe stuck between the rocks.
Jiang Yi ran to pick up the shoe and spoke in a trembling voice: “This…this is my wife’s shoe!”
This meant she was in danger!
Ye Jiang started to shiver, fear running from his head to toe.
He always thought himself as a brave man, he could stay calm even when he watched horror movies. But now, in this world of real horror, when he recalled the scary scenes in canon film, like when the spirit of Yamamura Sadako crawled out from the TV, or the evil spirit of Kayako wandered and haunted all people that stepped into the house, Ye Jiang could not even take a step forward due to fear..
Ye Jiang was just a normal office-worker, he never had to go through any bizarre incident, he had once believed there were no ghosts or devils or evil spirit in the world. When he saw the dropped shoe however, all the horror in the world seemingly appeared to revive in his mind. Still he had to stay calm and stay fearless in this situation. That showed his strong mentality. Others people all looked terrified and anxious, except Liu An, his face could not be seen clearly.
Along with that, his tickets rapidly deducted. If by the end of the movie, the number of tickets became negative, he would still die even if he managed to survive.
“Ah, look at this!”
Zhang De Kun sat on his heels and observed the rocks where the shoe was stuck. Ye Jiang’s group came near, and soon they saw a long deep line on the ground. This trace was not interrupted and led straight into the wood.
Ye Jiang immediately imagined, that an evil spirit dragged Ruo Yue into the dark forest.
As he kept observing, he found marks of five fingers that could have possibly tried to hold on the ground right next to the track!
“It doesn’t look good!”, Zhang De Kun said. “We need to find her! Mr. Xia, you and others should go back to the bus and find some kind of support! In this forest, maybe some beasts or some outlaws have taken her away?”
Ye Jiang thought that Zhang De Kun was a long term actor. Maybe an experienced actor still could played the support character.
“How about you?”
“Mister Jiang and I will go together to find her.”De Kun spoke with determined voice,“ You should go back, bring more people here!”
Jiang Yi held De Kun’s hands and showed his gratitude, ”Thank you so much!”
Then, these two men immediately went into the forest!
Ye Jiang was very surprised. He could understand now, these men must have been acting for a really long time now, and probably had saved many tickets from before this movie. Hence, they could continue going. But Ye Jiang didn’t dare to go, for as he peeked in the deep dark forest, the thought of the evils from the flyer made him fearful.
“There was no more choice, he must turn back! And from what information he could collect from this first scene, it would be absolutely safe to stay with in the bus. However, this also meant he had wasted that many tickets for nothing.
“We…we need to turn back!” Without waiting for Ye Jiang to speak, Nian Zhou said,” I …I don’t want to stay here waiting!”
Liu An and Du Yan kept silence. A while later, Du Yan sighed, and said,“We should probably go.”
Ye Jiang turned around, and walked towards the bus. Liu An walked behind them without saying anything. This time, Ye Jiang went a bit fast, he was afraid that the ghost would attack from the woods.
He began to walk fast, and then soon began to run. But what bothered him the most was that as he moved closer to the bus, the more tickets had kept decreasing. When the bus appeared in front of his eyes, only 148 tickets remained.
Many people were standing outside the bus. Ye Jiang guessed that they were hesitating whether to escape or not.
“Hey! Look over there, somebody is coming!”
When these people saw Ye Jiang group back, these people started to discuss. As Ye Jiang arrived, one of the men with a cigarette asked him in a San Tong’s accent,”Why did you come back? Can’t you find the way down?”
“About this… Wait for me for a minute or so…”
Ye Jiang got on the bus to see the driver was trying to repair the bus. Ye Jiang could not deny the acting skills of the driver, he knew that the bus could not be fixed but still tried to repair it.
“Miss tour guide!” he came to the rear and asked the guide: “A problem occurred …”
Then, he told her all about what happened. The tour guide’s color changed after hearing the situation. She exclaimed,”Miss Han gone missing? This is really serious! Did you try to call her?”
“We did, but the cell phone has no signal!”, Ye Jiang shook his head. “Maybe because this is a mountainous area … Jiang Yi and De Kun are looking for her. They want me to find some aid.”
The other passengers, however, showed no concern, it seemed as if they did not want to get involved. But they had their right to remain silent, they all knew there were ghosts outside. So, why would they want to run to their possible death just to save others?
Ye Jiang felt he finished his mission now. He wanted to stay inside for a while, so, he and Nian Zhou came back to their original seats. Hao Sheng and Xue Yan observed them for a while then asked, “Why did you return? You wanted to go down the mountain, didn’t you?”
In this situation, one thing must be mentioned, if other actors made the change in the script and forced you to speak or do something outside the plot, in general, your tickets would not be deducted. But this is not absolute. If someone takes advantage of this to change the plot but still save tickets, this would be a serious bug. So there is a limit for this, if you speak your own sentence or do minor affect actions, there would be no problems. But if the script was affected and was changed too much by these dialogues and actions, then the tickets would get deducted.
“This mountain must have some kind of wild beasts, so we didn’t dare walk carelessly.” Ye Jiang said. “We should wait here. We should wait for the driver to fix the bus.”
He was very nervous. If his cell phone had signal, he could have surfed the internet. When he was outside he had carefully examined the map, he noticed that this map was very plain and very simple, there was no way to identify where it was in China. This mountain could have been invented. A mountainous area in the night was a perfect place to film a horror movie!
If he could just use the internet and know where this place was, he could find out if there was any legends of ghost in this place. If he discovered the origin, he could have made better plans. Right now, he didn’t know how the evil spirit originated.
Even if the ghost came to him for revenge, he wouldn’t know. He was completely unaware what good or bad things his character had done in the past, and if this was some kind of retribution!
After a long time, no one wanted to go out to seek the ghosts.
Cell phone was useless so, they could not call the police or contact people that lived at the mountain foot. Ye Jiang sighed, he was just an employee and now he had to try to survive in a horror movie. And he had no choice.
He could hear Hao Sheng and Xue Yan talking. This was the dialog in the script, “After we return, I will call and complain to the tourism company.”
Hao Sheng lit a cigarette and said, “Maybe we can not leave here in this night”.
“Right.”Xue Yan replied, “The way down this mountain is not easy, and also, we don’t even know how long it takes to walk down. In addition, maybe there are real wild beasts wandering around here.”
The smoke spread out, Ye Jiang tried to evade it and opened the window. Smoking was not an obligation in the plot. Hao Sheng had found some cigarettes in his pockets, so he started to smoke. Under the pressure of all the terrifying incidents, smoking was just normal action. From the way he smoked, it was easy to tell that he was addicted. Ye Jiang always thought smoking was bad for health, so he had never smoked before. But he could sympathize with Hao Sheng, so he sat there silently and unwillingly had to go through second-hand smoking.
At the end of first scene, the driver would definitely die in the bus, it also meant the evil would break into the bus to start killing. Before that happened, how could he prepare? He was a heathen, he had neither beads nor cross, and it was impossible for him to find peach wood or blood of black dog in this place. Perhaps he should try to escape one more time before midnight?
But when he remembered about the evil spirit images in the flyer, he thought there were more than one evil spirit. So, even if he could escape this one, what could protect him when the next one came? According to normal films, the devil would only kill two or three people per time, and it would not appear in front of a crowd even during the night. There were almost forty people in the bus, most of them were old and could not do much, but still the devil would not appear before that many people. Thinking carefully, there was no movie in which devil killed people openly in the public. Only when a character carelessly separated from the group, and ran to a deserted place, the devil would come.
So…what I did before…running from the bus, was the most stupidest thing I could have done, wasn’t it? Shit! I am not gonna budge easily now. Just stay inside the bus Ye Jiang, stay calm. You can overcome this(… thought Ye Jiang.)={ED: If you want mention this thinking part, the story gets boring…}
If he could unite all the others, they could easily find the way to solve this problem. No, it would not work … It was quite unacceptable but it was true that when the devil came, he may not be the first one to be killed. While others were being killed, he could find a way to run. Maybe it was immoral to think like that, but that was the best plan to survive in this film. The evil spirits were immortal. Ye Jiang was just a normal man, not a Mao Shan Taoist hermit! How could he fight against the devil?
But he still had to consider one more thing……
When the devil comes into the bus, kills the driver… What should he do?