Chapter 38: The Twenty-Second Time Cycle

Waking up again, Li Shiqing and Boy are full of "? .

There's nothing more irritating than having a very well thought out plan and the whole thing not going according to plan.

"Is he in a hurry to get to his reincarnation?"

Boy raised his eyes to the older woman and the older man in front of him, his eyes rarely filled with hostility.

According to the police investigation, in the years following her daughter's accident, the older woman, Tao Yinghong, was clearly mentally disturbed, often becoming irritable and out of control, and was usually indifferent to people, clearly suffering from a mood disorder.

But the driver didn't.

Each time, just when he and Li Shiqing thought the driver had something to "do", the driver would give them a good smack on the head, knocking them out.

"Isn't there a rush to get reincarnated ......"

Li Shiqing hit herself hard on the head, trying to clear her head a little.

"So what now? We're in a weird circle again."

Boy said coldly, "If we don't delay directly at Gang Wu New Village Station and DongGang New Village Station, the police won't be able to get on the bus to help; if we do, the driver will be worried about delaying the timed explosion and won't stop at the station at all, and the police still won't be able to get on the bus... ..."

After so many times, Li Shiqing had not given up hope, but Boy's repressed negative emotions were on the verge of exploding.

To give hope again and again and again, and to have it dashed, is something that even the gods, not to mention men, cannot endure.

He snorted a laugh.

"So what does God mean by this? Advising us to stop thinking about relying on others and better rely on ourselves?"

Apart from the time he got out of the car and called the police, Boy had never behaved like this before, he was so full of thorns.

"Whatever it is, call the police first."

Li Shiqing takes out her mobile phone and prepares to edit the text message again.

"Don't try it, it's too late."

A palm reaches out from the side and covers Li Shiqing's phone.

Li Shiqing lifted her head and what hit her mind was a pair of bloodshot eyes of her companion.

Her hands stopped for a moment.

Boy doesn't look right, very wrong.

"Good."

She meekly retrieved the phone.

"All yours."

Nothing was more important than him right now, including the fact that this car was about to explode.

Her companion has never shown much "personality", and although she is a good strategist, she does not insist on making decisions herself, but is used to constantly modifying her plans according to the needs of the team, like the kind of "strategist" often found in ancient times. ".

Of the two, it seems that the stronger one makes more decisions, but Li Shiqing knows in her heart that it is not she but Boy, who always has the magic of a spring breeze, who has been able to support them so far.

She, on the other hand, is not the backbone.

She would have been "cannon fodder" if she hadn't been lucky enough to have a "scheming" teammate.

Boy is her moral backbone and Boy must not fall.

Li Shiqing has no way of imagining what would become of Boy if he did have a mental breakdown in one of the time loops, leaving her alone to reincarnate.

Maybe it's a hell on earth where you can't even seek death.

With this in mind, Li Shiqing took his hand in return with the gentlest of gestures and held it tightly in his cold palm.

"What are you going to do about it? We'll figure it out together."

What he needs now is an "outlet" for his anger.

"Don't keep thinking about the police, it's simply too late."

Boy no longer expects help from the police.

The last time the time loop, the police did not get on the bus, but decisively chose to "sacrifice", in the knowledge that there was a high probability of a bomb on board, but still tried to use the police car to force the bus to stop, in order to prohibit the car to drive into the more crowded cross-river bridge.

Didn't the officers know that with a bomb on the car they would die too?

They knew it, but they did it anyway.

Just because there is a limit to the range of the bomb's explosion, the more damage it can cause in the tighter the space.

Under the approach bridge was an open suburban road, and in order to keep the car from exploding on the crowded river crossing and causing more casualties, they had to force the bus to the side in such a way as to interfere with its normal movement in that urgent situation.

With the bus unwilling to stop, even the police have to "sacrifice themselves" to reduce further casualties, so how can they be sure that they will be safe on the bus?

Boy, who has always insisted on "self-help", decided to see the light and stop thinking about relying on others.

"Aren't the driver and the older woman husband and wife?"

Boy's mind wasn't muddled despite being on the verge of an emotional outburst, "Since you think the driver will let you out of the car because you haven't completely lost your humanity, let's take it from here!"

Li Shiqing couldn't help but look at the older woman.

The older woman looks out of the window with vacant eyes, but keeps one hand ready to grab the plastic bag, as if that has become her instinct.

Her gaze was fixed on the older woman, while Boy's almost gritted teeth sounded in her ears.

"I remember that the knife is in the right outer pocket of the older woman's blouse, so let's wait and do it the same way we did, first seeking the help of the fit older man and then holding the older woman down together."

Boy's tone from start to finish is calm, but his eyes carry a fierce look.

"Once we've restrained the older woman, I'll search her for her knife, put it to her neck and threaten the driver to stop."

Li Shiqing was completely astonished.

She could never have imagined that Boy would come up with such a lousy idea.

"But they were supposed to kill themselves ......"

Li Shiqing said, dumbfounded, "Are you, are you sure this is going to work?"

"We're just betting on what the driver will do."

Boy said coldly, "We can't control the driver, so we'll have to gamble on that one in a million chance. As long as he has hesitation, we can find a breakthrough from the driver later."

"Who wants to die when they can live? What if there was a chance that he wouldn't have to die? If he had to stop and abandon the plan because his wife was under duress, then he wouldn't have to die, would he? We've even got a reason for him, so maybe the driver can get past that 'hurdle' of his own? Didn't the police say he was a good old boy?"

"His daughter is pitiful, but her death was self-inflicted, and even if she didn't cause it, why should so many people be buried with her when they deserve it? Does his daughter deserve it?"

Boy This is less of an analysis and more of a venting of his own grievances.

"If he doesn't understand, I'll tell him!"

Li Shiqing looked at Boy, who was so "willful", with a vague sense of unease. Her intuition told her that Boy's choice to "try" in this way was probably a wasted opportunity.

But in the end, her concern for Boy's mental state prevailed and she could only give a reluctant 'hmm'.

"All right then, you name it, I'll do it."

After some simple planning, they managed to get the hunky uncle to agree to help again with a note and a "bonus", and the masked man agreed to look after the pressure cooker.

This time, Boy didn't even want to lose half a second, and almost as soon as the stocky uncle agreed, he was the first to pounce on the older woman.

Even though Xiao Heyun was a weakling, he had experience in dealing with the same person so many times, and with the help of the sturdy uncle, the older woman was kept in check despite her violent struggles.

As the able-bodied uncle twisted the older woman's arms backwards, Boy pulled it out of her pocket and placed a hand on her neck.

"Don't move! Tell your husband to stop the car! Stop the car!"

The moment that knife was placed across the older woman's neck, a carload of passengers began to panic.

The older woman pursed her lips tightly, and instead of speaking, she sneered.

Boy then turned to the driver and berated him for stopping.

The driver did not stop either.

After glancing back at them, he actually sped up in silence.

Li Shiqing's heart is bleak.

There was already little hope, but now they were told outright that there was no way to threaten them with their lives, which would only provoke them and make the driver choose to "execute" their plan even more quickly.

"What do you want, lad?"

"Young man, you put the knife down!"

"Comrade, that's not what you just said, you said you were just asking me to help make an arrest ......"

Even the hunky uncle turned white with fear.

Nothing about helping to kill people!

" Li Shiqing, break the window!"

Boy watched as the bus began to accelerate towards the bridge, signalling to his companion who had just handed the pressure cooker to the masked man to "save himself".

They didn't say a few words from start to finish, and the passengers on the bus didn't figure out what was going on, quietly calling the police and secretly taking pictures.

"You're the police?"

With a knife clearly against her neck, the older woman showed no sign of fear and only asked in a hoarse voice.

"Yes."

Boy spouted without changing his face, "We already know about you, and I know what was in that pressure cooker, and while I'm sorry about what happened to Wang Mengmeng, that's no reason to take a busload of people to their deaths. It is not too late for you to choose to stop doing evil and seek leniency with your surrender."

Hearing the words " Wang Mengmeng", the older woman swayed.

The next moment, her whole body tensed up.

"You know about my daughter? You have investigated her!"

Her voice was hoarse, her throat hoarse from the knife against it, "Why didn't you investigate earlier? Why didn't you investigate when she was in trouble? She's dead, she's been dead for four years, and now you're telling me you're sorry! It's no use, there's nothing you can say that will help."

Li Shiqing managed to break the window with a safety hammer under Boy's direction, but the car was going too fast and had gone over the bridge and the driver had been forcing a lane change, squeezing into the lane where there was more traffic.

The bridge was full of vehicles and the car was driving so precariously that there was no way she could find a safe place to drop the bomb.

" Wang Xingde, you and your wife are now taking a bomb to the bridge to kill yourselves, people won't feel sorry for your family of three, they will only think your daughter deserves to die even more!"

Boy started shouting.

"What, the bomb?"

The passengers on the bus heard there was a bomb on board and their brains exploded straight away!

Some of them rushed like mad to the back door, desperately tapping on the emergency door opener and demanding to get out of the car, while others shouted out the window "police help" and other phrases.

But no one cared about the headless passengers, and the driver and his wife had very cold expressions.

Boy's eyes, on the other hand, were fixed only on the driver's seat in front of him.

"What do you think people will think when you do this? A girl who got off by herself got into a car accident and her parents went to get back at society because of that, bringing a bomb and trying to die with the people on the bridge? Do you know how many people are going to die from this? This is adding a new sin to their daughter's life for all eternity!"

Xiao Heyun's attitude seems to be all about venting, and his words are like cold, sharp swords, with no concern for irritating the two 'killers'.

"This incident will be rehashed again by the internet, the video of your daughter's death will be watched over and over again, and now even better, with the video of you and your wife dragging a carload of people to their deaths, and being called out by everyone that this family deserves to die!"

"You think this is 'revenge' on your part? You think this is going to get the community to pay attention to what happened to your daughter? No, you're trying to get your daughter 'whipped'!"

"What do you know!"

The driver drove to his intended spot and braked straight away, finally unable to hold back his roar.

He stood up and turned around with an iron face, facing Boy, who was holding his wife hostage, as if his eyes were on fire.

"My daughter was raised to be good and obedient, yet you call her a self-made fool! I only wanted my daughter to be buried in peace and my wife to be less upset, so I chose not to pursue the matter any further, but you all ridiculed us as self-made fools! If we had known the outcome, even if we had died on the spot, we wouldn't have just let it go!"

"People who one moment ask us to 'mourn and take care of our health', and the next moment laugh at our daughter for 'bringing it on herself' and blame us for not teaching our children well! What does it matter to you how my daughter died, how we are going to live and how we are going to die! Isn't it bad enough that the child we worked so hard to raise for 20 years has just been lost? Why do we have to be reminded of this over and over again?"

"Do you people ever do what people do, apart from making hot jokes on the internet?"

"My daughter ......"

Tao Yinghong, hearing her husband's accusations, trembled and burst into tears.

"It's too late for you to pursue what's dead or not!"

The driver looked out of the window at the chaotic scene, then at the pressure cooker in the hands of the masked man, and with a sneer removed the white driving gloves from his hands and threw them hard on the floor.

"You kill my wife, it's time, we're going to be reunited with our daughter as a couple soon!"

"Go! Give me the pressure cooker later!"

While Boy confronted the driver couple, Li Shiqing had led the masked man to the car window, and as soon as the car stopped, she closed her eyes and jumped out of the window.

The next moment she jumped out of the car window, the familiar ringing of Canons came from the direction of the older woman in flower.

"Leave it, throw it!"

Li Shiqing's face paled and, ignoring the sharp pain coming from her ankle, her entire body panicked as she reached out to the masked man at the car window.

The masked man hastily peeks out to pass the pressure cooker down the window.

However it was too late.

The change in the bus had already been noticed by many people, and passengers who had fled for their lives jumped out of the bus one by one, throwing the traffic on the bridge into chaos for a while. Not only could the bus not move, but the cars in front and behind it were also jammed to death.

Li Shiqing Just by sweeping around her, she knew there was absolutely no way she could get through such congested traffic, dropped the pressure cooker under the bridge and had to resign herself to her impending fate by closing her eyes ......

Boom!

》"

When she came to her senses from the horrific explosion, Li Shiqing felt her brains had been blown to mush.

Her ears kept buzzing, her eyes were full of white light, even the burning pain came from her skin, she briefly forgot where she was and what she was doing, and the excruciating pain forced her to flop down on the seat in front of her, moaning silently.

She didn't even have the strength to scream.

Halfway out of that uncomfortable state, the first thing Li Shiqing did was to check on Xiao Heyun.

He was not in a good condition either, his head was covered in cold sweat and his face was pale as a ghost, but he wore a smile on his face and even laughed out loud.

To Li Shiqing, that smile has an indescribable satisfaction, the kind of smile you get when you've scored an advance on a difficult exam, when you've made all the right arrangements for a first date and your girlfriend likes it.

But the problem is, he's just had a failed plan and a failed attempt at success!

"It's over, it's over."

Li Shiqing's mind went blank.

Boy is still mad!

Boy, with a sweaty forehead and a creepy smile, poked Li Shiqing and lowered his voice to whisper in her ear, "Call the police to Mr. Zhang and ask for backup."

"What?"

Li Shiqing, still reeling from the terrible news that Boy might have been driven mad, asks dumbly.

"Make up a text message ...... Forget it, I'll do it."

Seeing Li Shiqing's mute expression, Boy thought that his companion had not yet recovered from the death he had just suffered and chose to call the police himself.

When he had almost finished editing his text message, Li Shiqing came back to his senses and reached over to look at it.

Officer Zhang, we have found a bomb on a No. 45 bus that has just left Gang Wu New Village Station. The time of the explosion should be at 13:45, the location of the explosion is the cross-river bridge, and the vehicle is expected to be on the bridge between 13:30 and 40. Please close the bridge to traffic and evacuate vehicles immediately, but do not prohibit the vehicle from going onto the bridge. The driver was complicit so that he would not detonate the bomb directly after discovering that the bridge was blocked. My companion and I are in the vehicle and will try to control the prisoner carrying the bomb and drop the pressure cooker containing the bomb under the bridge, please meet the vehicle when it stops. Time is running out to make further contact, please trust us!

"Is this another one of your new programmes?"

Li Shiqing watched Boy send the text message to Officer Zhang and was taken aback.

"That time loop just now made me sure of one thing ......"

Before putting his phone away, Boy looked at the time and said to Li Shiqing, "You're right, the driver can be impressed."

"He was furious in the face of my pressing questions and hot taunts."

Boy said, "A man who is bent on death and wants nothing else will not be angry before a certain death. At most, he will be like the older woman who laughs at us again before he dies."

"To be angry means that he has regrets, and they don't come from anyone else, they come from himself."

Boy slowly and methodically wipes his glasses clean and prepares himself for the next move.

"...... And with regret, comes weakness."

Li Shiqing is not stupid either; on the contrary, she has an excellent capacity for empathy.

So it only took her a moment to think back and she managed to understand the knot in the two men's hearts.

"The fact that the older woman has been accusing others of why they are only now coming to investigate her daughter's affairs shows that her regret is 'time'."

Four years ago, when her daughter was first involved in the accident, the traffic police had carefully investigated the vehicle and found that there was nothing unusual in the car and that the driver, although negligent in putting her down midway, was not a major factor in her death. Because her daughter had not been coerced into getting out of the car, a verdict was handed down that her daughter was primarily responsible for the accident.

But the older woman had always suspected this outcome and hoped that the police would give her the answers she wanted to prove that her daughter had not gotten off the bus for no reason.

The girl is dead, and whether she is to blame or not will not help, but it will be a comfort to the mother.

But with the investigation results all in order and no authentication or physical evidence, there was no need for the police to intervene in the case based on the older woman's mere speculation. Later on, when she encountered that kind of public opinion storm, the older woman should have hoped in her heart that someone would give her justice and support, and the easiest person for others to agree with in terms of credibility is the police.

But the crash was over long ago, the man was buried, and time could not be turned back to the beginning.

"The uncle kept emphasising 'others did this' and 'others did that', accusing others of laughing at him for his compromise, when in reality it was just a way to escape his own momentary cowardice in the first place. Tao Yinghong would have liked to have gone deeper when his daughter's accident first occurred, but he was concerned about the stares of others and the pressure from his extended family and chose to sign off and go home, which as a result was an admission that her daughter was the primary party responsible."

If they had later moved on from the hurt and everything had been restored to peace, Uncle might have felt he was right to compromise at the time, but the driver's heart must have blamed himself for the way things turned out later.

This may be why the driver agreed to conspire with his wife to do this on the anniversary of his daughter's death.

From the police investigation can be seen, the driver is usually a "good old boy", is a recognized will not start an argument, often compromise people, perhaps in his heart, also want to make such a "big deal", so as to prove that they are not just a He may have wanted to do something big to prove that he was not just a "good old boy".

"Yes."

Brother nodded his head and made a summary.

"And to get to the bottom of it, the reason they have such and such a knot in their heart ......"

"It's because none of them believe that their daughter is the kind of person who would mess around with getting off."