The Beginning

Chapter 6: The Eighth Cycle of Time

Li Shiqing is particularly tired every time she is awake, probably because of the after-effects of her concussion.

She hadn't noticed it before, but this time, she couldn't even stand up and could only lean back against the back of the seat and wait uncomfortably for the dizziness to pass.

Boy with glasses next door seems to have woken up too and lets out a frustrated lament.

Li Shiqing could feel the other man looking at her steadily, and his gaze was blazing with frightening heat.

Such a gaze is too strange for anyone to want to be stared at all the time.

So Li Shiqing opened her eyes and gave him a defiant glare.

Seeing Li Shiqing awake, Glasses Boy did not look embarrassed, but asked her in an almost pleading tone.

"Do you really not know me? Think about it more carefully?"

The tone was all too familiar, exactly the same as the two officers who had come to her at the beginning.

At that time they were quite kind to her and were very sincere in their questions, and she felt particularly guilty when the slightest "I don't know" came out of her mouth.

Li Shiqing has always been a soft-hearted person, and having watched him try to stop the car twice only to be subdued, I was so impressed with his "feat" that I really tried to recall it.

"I really don't know you."

She doesn't have a big dating circle and a decent looking Boy like this must have left some kind of impression.

"I don't think I've seen you before, have I?"

When he heard Li Shiqing's answer, the boy with the glasses looked disappointed and sad, as if it was a terrible thing that she did not know him.

Such emotions even infected Li Shiqing and made her feel a little sorry for herself.

In fact, Li Shiqing also found it a little strange.

She had thought that perhaps it was because the accident the two officers had described to her was so tragic that she had subconsciously wished for someone to save her from the accident, and had created such a person in her "nightmare" to keep trying to stop the car.

But if she wanted a "hero" who could save the day, shouldn't she have imagined a fit, handsome adult?

Why such a slim, young boy who also looks highly myopic?

If it wasn't a dream, just a fragment of her fragmented memory, then why didn't she get out of the car from start to finish?

Both officers clearly said that she and the other passenger got off early, so if they were repeating her memory, there should have been this bit.

While Li Shiqing is thinking with a head full of questions, the Boy is stroking his chin and muttering something to himself.

"This is the third time ...... the third time. I can't irritate him again."

After pondering for a while, he seemed to have an idea and politely asked Li Shiqing to let him out.

Hearing the other man's "third time", Li Shiqing shivered and subconsciously stepped aside, but his whole body was horrified.

"Why does he know it's the third time?"

If the boy was just a "hero" of her imagination or a fragment of her memory, then why did he know that this was the third time it had happened to him?

Would a person who exists in memory, or an imaginary person, know what happened the first two times?

Will know that you are in a bus that has been in an accident for the third time?

Could he be a real person, like himself?

Li Shiqing looks up creepily.

In her panic, she saw the boy sitting on his butt in one of the empty seats behind the driver and chatting with him in a casual manner.

The driver's uncle was preoccupied with driving, not really willing to pay attention to him and clearly lacking in interest.

For some reason, Li Shiqing also got up and moved to a nearby seat.

Glasses Boy took one look at her and withdrew his gaze.

Leaning against the window, Li Shiqing appears to be looking out of the window, but in fact she is focused on Boy.

She used to see people sleeping through the stops hoping to get off the bus, but I never saw the driver let them off.

When there are few people in the car, he would rather cross the bridge and take people to the terminal and then send them back for free than leave them on the bridge across the river where traffic is moving.

He is really a very responsible and nice guy.

This Boy had probably never been on this bus before, so his questions were very presumptuous.

"Didn't the driver have a good night's rest last night? I can see that you have dark circles under your eyes."

He said with a smile.

The older man ignored him.

"Uncle was born with heavy dark circles under his eyes, he's always been like that."

Li Shiqing couldn't resist and opened up from the sidelines.

Some people are born with heavy bags under their eyes and dark circles under their eyes, and some people have jokingly asked Uncle before if he wanted to put something on, but he laughed it off.

It's actually quite rude to ask a serious driver that way.

When he saw Li Shiqing answer the door, Boy with glasses gave her an unexpected look and pushed up his glasses, "Is that so? You look like you know Uncle Driver well."

"I take this bus a lot."

Li Shiqing tried to hold back the oddity that was welling up inside her and answered him with as natural an expression as possible.

"It's my first time on this route line ......"

Glasses Boy paused and added with a bitter smile, "No, not for the first time either, that ......"

His "incoherence" was back and he was mumbling helplessly to himself.

"Anyway, never got to the destination that's all."

The driver's uncle probably didn't understand his remark and didn't pick up on it at all.

"It's not easy to drive now, it's useless to follow the traffic rules yourself, others can't prevent others from messing up. Even if you have an accident, you have to implicate others."

Boy with glasses continued with a seemingly unintentional lament, "So it's important to pay more attention to the road when driving, don't you think?"

The driver gave a perfunctory "hmm".

So that's it!

As Li Shiqing listened on, she suddenly understood what Glasses Boy was trying to do.

The first few times the bus was involved in accidents, the car suddenly lost control and hit a tanker truck in the opposite lane.

If we exclude the factor that the driver was not well rested and therefore not mentally focused, then he would have suddenly lost control, either by external factors or something happened inside the car that distracted him.

But what if there was no one inside the car to distract him?

What if external distractions are also removed?

As long as the car didn't go out of control, it must have been able to drive past the tanker well enough to avoid it!

Boy, whose glasses are as thick as the bottom of a glass bottle, is a quick thinker!

Understanding what Boy was up to, Li Shiqing listened carefully to Boy's conversation with the driver, but kept her eyes nervously on the road outside the window.

It's almost time to get to the place where the last accident took place.

"Uncle, watch out at the next intersection, I see a lot of motorbikes waiting for the traffic lights on the right."

While waiting at the traffic lights, Boy suddenly stood up and looked nervously at the junction further to his right.

"You're such a worrywart, you young man!"

The driver's uncle shook his head.

"I'm such a big car, am I afraid of anyone hitting it?"

When faced with a stranger's 'advice', most people don't take it to heart, and some may feel that they are being nosy.

But it is different when this 'advice' comes from an acquaintance.

"Uncle, I don't think these motorbikes on the right are quite right either. There are so many 'road races' at once, maybe they don't even have a licence and specialise in racing on the road, the kind of people I've seen before."

The sound of the throttle is particularly loud and the cars are so loud that they make people shudder.

"You drive out a little slower in case people's motorbikes aren't watching the road?"

Not expecting Li Shiqing to say the same thing, the driver nodded as he looked at the few motorbikes in the junction to his right.

"Well, it's never wrong to be careful."

In the face of such differential treatment, Boy with glasses grimaced and began to look at Li Shiqing, who was helping out.

Li Shiqing's attitude towards the crash was different when she realised that the Boy could be a 'real person'.

She had previously thought that these 'time loops' were just fragments of her own memories or a nightmare she was experiencing, and certainly had no 'awe' of the accident.

On the contrary, in order to find the truth about the accident and wake up to the police as soon as possible, she not only has no time to be afraid, but also looks very carefully at the various causes of the accident, even Boy, whom she thinks is a figment of her imagination or a figure from the "past".

But now he reacts like a "real person" and makes the same choices as a "real person", and although Li Shiqing doesn't know how this is happening, he feels he should help him.

Perhaps they will all "wake up" when the bus arrives at the station without incident.

With this in mind, Li Shiqing and Boy with glasses watched carefully in all directions, working together to warn drivers to be safe.

Sure enough, after repeated instructions, the driver didn't start so fast when the light came on and narrowly avoided the sudden acceleration of the group of motorbikes.

Because of the slow start, the bus avoided the "racing party" at the same time, but also avoided the tanker that just drove through the intersection, but because the driver was slow to pass the traffic lights, there were many cars behind the horn to remind.

But at this moment, no one has noticed that someone is honking behind them.

As soon as the tanker passed, Glasses Boy's tense nerves relaxed and he slumped into his seat with a sense of relief, looking as if his "body" had been emptied.

The driver was also taken aback, and with a car urging him on from behind, he hurriedly accelerated off the most heavily trafficked section of road and began to drive towards the entrance to the river crossing bridge.

Li Shiqing's lungs exploded as she watched the desperate 'bikers' take off.

Being in a visual blind spot, she hadn't seen how the bus and tanker had collided several times before, but this time they avoided the motorbike and felt the tension and fear of the motorbike accelerating past their car, so she felt more and more angry.

Racing on this main road along the river is not just joking with your life, it's a straw man.

They had no idea that just by that act of rushing out early, they had cost countless people their lives just like that!

"They're going to be a big deal like that."

Someone in the car muttered, "Young people nowadays, they don't think about the consequences at all!"

"It's not necessarily the young people."

The uncle who was driving his car also followed the sentiment, "Even adults and elderly people may not always consider the consequences of their actions."

After passing through the 'death zone', both Li Shiqing and Glasses Boy could not help but smile.

Boy with glasses also doesn't understand why Li Shiqing is helping him, but it's clear that this 'help' has given him a shot in the arm and lifted his spirits.

With the "success" they had just had, the two men spent the rest of the day being more careful.

"Uncle, stay away from the dump truck across the street!"

"Uncle, uncle, there's a sanitation worker on the bridge, watch out!"

"Uncle, are you going a little too fast? Slow down a bit, will you?"

With the two young men chattering and "reminding" them, the car drove smoothly onto the bridge, avoiding several accident-prone spots on the way, and in the blink of an eye, it was in the middle of the bridge.

Outside the car was crowded traffic, mostly cars, and the driver's bus was driving on the outside in the slow lane, so slow that even in the event of any accident, it would most likely only be a few minor cuts.

The bridge is not long and it only takes ten minutes to drive across it completely, which means that in a few minutes they will reach the bottom station.

Even though she has ridden the bus route countless times before, Li Shiqing can't help but feel good when she sees Boy's increasingly relaxed smile.

As is often the case in fiction, they would have woken up when the car crossed the bridge, right?

Just as both young men felt that this "dream" was coming to an end, a mobile phone suddenly rang in the car.

"No. ......"

Li Shiqing's body shuddered and her heart beat faster and faster when the Canons' chorus was familiar and monotonous.

"Whose phone is ringing? Answer it!"

Someone yelled impatiently.

The very next moment he roared out those words, there was a sudden, earth-shattering bang.

Immediately afterwards, a wave of fiery heat from nowhere suddenly swept through the entire carriage, the flames volleying down and engulfing everything, the shattered body of the car splattering with blood and flesh ......

The bus exploded.

--

In her life, Li Shiqing has never faced such a tragic "accident".

Even the first few times she thought she was dreaming, she lost consciousness quickly and didn't suffer too much.

But this time, she felt herself being 'torn apart' in a living way.

Even when she came to her senses, the flames that brought death seemed to cling to her as if to punish her for trying to stop "fate", to remember her in this way.

Yes, at the moment the bus exploded, all the memories she had lost before came back.

Includes ......

She looked apologetically at Boy with glasses who was just coming to his senses.

Then she saw the newly sober Glasses Boy looking at her with an even more apologetic look?

"I'm sorry."

He lifted his hand and reached out suddenly.

Feeling the soft curvature of his hand, the scarlet blush on Glasses Boy's face went all the way to the back of his ears, completely unmistakable from the lewd actions he was making that were completely at odds with his expression.

"Actually, I'm a pervert."

Author's Note: A little theater.

Boy: (reaching for his paw) I give up, let me off.