Ten minutes later, the players gathered in the guest-room area.
The corridor’s sound-activated lights flickered on and off, casting swaying shadows across mottled walls. Seven blurry figures crowded into the narrow passage.
Converted to normal time, it was already close to midnight. Everyone had spent the day busy and then been dragged into this horror game at night. Their nerves were stretched tight, and exhaustion was impossible to hide from their faces.
The manager walked in front of them with his hands clasped behind his back, strolling at an infuriatingly slow pace.
“How can changing into a work uniform take this long? Where’s your speed? Your efficiency? I’ve trained so many batches of employees, and you’re the worst group I’ve ever seen!”
Lu Jin idly played with a mop, using the sole of his shoe to crush a chunk of flesh on the mop head that might have been part of a finger or a toe.
“Was this guy a teacher before he died?” Lu Jin frowned impatiently. “He talks exactly like a school discipline director.”
Xu Moyang could not hold back a snort of laughter.
He did not dare insult the manager to his face, but that did not stop him from gossiping behind his back. “With a head that bald, I thought he was a programmer before he died!”
Fang Yuan immediately objected. “You have misconceptions about programmers. Not every programmer is bald!”
But Fang Yuan’s own hair was soft, fine, and clearly not particularly abundant, so his protest was entirely unconvincing.
After their joking, the atmosphere loosened considerably. The players suddenly felt that the manager was not quite as terrifying as before.
Then Jiang Sui’s puzzled voice came from beside them. “Why do you keep saying ‘before he died’? Is the manager already dead?”
The light mood shattered in a second. A draft carrying cold dampness swept through the corridor, rising from their feet straight to the tops of their heads and sending chills down their spines.
Players who had experienced instances before all knew NPCs were not human.
But no player had ever said the NPCs were dead people!
Everyone’s gaze snapped toward Lu Jin, wondering how he had reached the conclusion that the manager was dead.
Lu Jin: “I was just saying it.”
Players: “?”
Xie Zhi lowered his voice and snapped, “The instance is already terrifying enough. Can you stop making things up to scare everyone?”
Lu Jin spread his hands. “NPCs aren’t human anyway. What difference does it make whether they’re alive or dead?”
“There’s still a difference!” Xie Zhi gritted his teeth. “It’s already bad enough that they aren’t human, but if a dead person is standing in front of us ordering us around, that’s unbelievably creepy!”
The players nodded fervently in agreement. Even Xu Moyang nodded so hard his head nearly shook off.
Lu Jin stared at Xu Moyang speechlessly. He had intended to say something, but in the end he swallowed the words.
The manager continued nagging for several more minutes before finally getting to the point. He ordered the players to pair up and clean the guest rooms.
There were seven players. Yu Nan and Fang Yuan each attached themselves to one of the veteran players, while Xu Moyang stuck closely to Lu Jin. Only Jiang Sui was left alone.
The manager pointed at Jiang Sui. “You’re a team by yourself. Get to work! No work means no dinner tonight!”
The players looked at Jiang Sui sympathetically, then cast equally sympathetic glances toward Lu Jin and Xu Moyang. On one side was a player forced to work alone; on the other was a pair of weaklings from the Danger Zone. It was hard to say which group had it worse.
Lu Jin did not care. Carrying the mop, he lazily walked into the guest room assigned to him, with Xu Moyang following close behind.
Only after everyone else had gone to their assigned areas did Xu Moyang move closer.
“Brother Lu! What did you mean earlier? The NPCs here… are all ghosts?”
Lu Jin was in the bathroom, rubbing the mop carelessly around a sink filled with bloody water. He gave a noncommittal hum.
Xu Moyang swallowed. “But… but they all have shadows!”
Lu Jin said nothing. He lowered his gaze, indicating the floor.
Xu Moyang followed his line of sight. In the dim bathroom, he could clearly see Lu Jin’s shadow cast across the tile—and his own.
He had a shadow too!
“A shadow isn’t how you tell humans and ghosts apart,” Lu Jin explained. “In places with extremely heavy ghostly energy, ghosts can have shadows too.”
For example, the Netherworld.
…
After struggling for ages, the mop was still sticky and filthy no matter how much they washed it, so Lu Jin simply gave up.
He walked onto the guest-room balcony and pushed open the dirty floor-to-ceiling window. Bright sunlight poured in, so intense it made it difficult to keep his eyes open.
Clear River Guesthouse was located near a scenic area and occupied a surprisingly large property. Farther away stood scattered farmhouses at different heights, with crisscrossing field paths between them. Beyond that stretched blue sky, white clouds, and undulating mountain ranges.
The map was much larger than Lu Jin had expected. Judging by the fact that ghosts could move freely under sunlight, this definitely was not the human world.
“Brother Lu, what are you looking at?”
Xu Moyang followed him onto the balcony and imitated Lu Jin by staring outside for a long time. All he could make out was green countryside and sunlight.
Lu Jin said, “Wait here. I’m going out for a bit.”
Xu Moyang turned pale with shock. “Brother Lu, you’re not doing the mission? Didn’t the System say we have to investigate Boss Huang’s troubles? If we don’t figure it out within six hours, the Boss will get angry!”
An hour had already passed!
Lu Jin pulled out his phone and lit the screen. His lock screen displayed a modern prison interface. Inside, Huang Youquan was furiously pounding on an invisible wall, trying to escape the space.
Lu Jin asked him, “If I don’t complete the mission, will you get angry?”
“Huh?”
Huang Youquan crossed one leg over the other and answered arrogantly, “What kind of stupid question is that? I hired you because I want you to solve my problems! You dare refuse to do the mission? Believe me, I’ll kill you!”
Lu Jin calmly pulled out his long saber.
Huang Youquan dropped to his knees in one second. “No problem at all! We’re all friends here. If you don’t want to do the mission, then don’t! I won’t get angry. As long as you’re happy, everything is fine! ^^”
Lu Jin nodded in satisfaction and put away his phone. “See? Even the Boss says there’s no problem.”
Xu Moyang: “…”
How was that “no problem”? He was clearly surrendering under your tyrannical power!
“But…” Xu Moyang was still afraid. “Brother Lu, all the NPCs here are ghosts. I’m scared of ghosts!”
He had been afraid of ghosts since childhood. Even watching Coco could give him nightmares.
Lu Jin fell silent.
His silence was deafening.
He endured for a very long time before finally saying the one sentence that made Xu Moyang’s entire worldview crack apart.
“Have you considered that you might also be a ghost?”
*
Lu Jin eventually left the guesthouse anyway.
Xu Moyang had not completed the revival procedure. His body was still lying in the hospital in a state where he would die without intubation. Strictly speaking, right now he truly was a ghost.
A ghost had slipped in among the players.
The ghosts were not the ones who should be afraid.
The other players were.
After leaving from the balcony, Lu Jin moved quickly, sprinting eastward. That was the direction from which the bus had entered the guesthouse grounds, and he might be able to find clues about the game there.
After running for around ten minutes, he finally reached the boundary of the instance.
The scenery before him abruptly changed. The mountains turned into hazy illusions, the sky warped and twisted, and thick fog flooded the area. An invisible wall stood directly ahead.
Lu Jin reached out. His fingertips touched something cold and hard, like glass or some kind of barrier.
His skin was once again sliced by an invisible blade. Blood flowed down the unseen wall.
This instance was a constructed space.
Its underlying principle was the same as the soul bus.
And the soul bus was a product of the Underworld.
Could this game also have been created by the Underworld?
Lu Jin could not understand it. The King of Hell might spend every day idling around and tinkering with strange things, but surely even he would not do something this immoral?
Unfortunately, Lu Jin had been studying in the human world and had not returned to the Netherworld for almost half a year. He had also muted the Underworld group chat and had not checked the messages there in ages.
Now, when he opened the group chat, there was no signal anyway.
A breeze blew past, carrying a faint, pleasant cedar fragrance. Leaves rustled in the wind, and the distant grass rolled like green waves.
The area was so isolated that there were not even any NPCs nearby. It felt as if Lu Jin were the only person left in the entire world.
Suddenly, Lu Jin’s figure flickered and vanished from where he stood!
At the same time, Jiang Sui, who had been hiding in an unfinished building not far away, saw his pupils contract sharply. Almost by instinct, he burst out of the shadows and retreated more than ten meters!
“BOOM!”
Lu Jin’s figure appeared like a ghost at the exact place where Jiang Sui had been hiding one second earlier!
Lu Jin raised one hand and casually brushed nonexistent dust from his jeans. Then he looked up, expressionless, at Jiang Sui several meters away.
Jiang Sui clicked his tongue, sounding mildly surprised.
“You actually noticed me.”
Now that he had been discovered, he did not panic. He stood leisurely and leaned against a rust-covered railing.
The posture looked completely relaxed, but the muscles in his arms beneath his shirt were taut, ready to counterattack at any moment.
For no clear reason, Lu Jin had the impression that Jiang Sui came from somewhere with rigid discipline. Yet at the same time, the man seemed fundamentally too unruly by nature. Strict discipline and innate carelessness had somehow fused strangely within the same person.
“You followed me,” Lu Jin said with certainty.
“I don’t think so,” Jiang Sui denied immediately. “Can’t I be curious about the instance too, just like you, and come outside to investigate?”
Lu Jin: “No.”
Jiang Sui: “…?”
Lu Jin: “There are roads leading north, south, east, and west from the guesthouse. How convenient that we happened to choose exactly the same one.”
“Fate.” Jiang Sui lied without blinking. “You and I are destined to meet.”
Lu Jin: “…”
This man was so irritating.
Lu Jin no longer wanted to circle around the subject and decided to go straight to the point.
“You knew me.” He paused, then added, “Before the game started.”
Jiang Sui narrowed his attractive eyes. An unreadable emotion flickered through them.
“Was I that bad at hiding it?”
He had always thought his acting was excellent. He had fooled plenty of people before.
Lu Jin did not answer.
Actually, Jiang Sui had not been that obvious. When the Danger Zone list appeared, Lu Jin had only been suspicious. He became certain during the introductions. Jiang Sui had shown no interest in anyone else’s name, but when he heard “Lu Jin,” his expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
It was the kind of change seen when a cat locked onto a mouse or a police officer identified a thief.
Lu Jin found it extremely uncomfortable.
“So,” Lu Jin asked again, his voice turning colder, “why are you watching me?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you.” This time Jiang Sui was honest. “It’s an order from above. I don’t know the specific reason either.”
After speaking, he tilted his head, some curiosity entering his gaze. “But don’t you have any idea why you’re being watched?” The higher-ups would not order them to watch someone for no reason.
Lu Jin tugged at the corner of his mouth and cursed inwardly: How the hell would he know? If he knew, would he need to stand here wasting words with this man?
Jiang Sui was obviously planning to keep hiding things and had no intention of revealing the truth.
Lu Jin was tired. He hated troublesome matters, which was exactly why he had chosen to become a Reaper—a job requiring little thought—instead of a desk clerk.
The Underworld had rules forbidding Reapers from harming humans.
But Lu Jin was a special case. He was currently wearing a shadow puppet body, which meant he counted as human, not as a Reaper.
In that case, he only needed to beat Jiang Sui until the man told the truth!
Without changing his expression, Lu Jin pulled out his long saber. A faint trace of excitement even appeared in his eyes.
At the same time—
Jiang Sui was also making calculations of his own.
Since Lu Jin had already discovered him, and the Administration Bureau needed to investigate Lu Jin anyway, why not simply tie him up and drag him back?
Violence was shameful, but useful.
The Administration Bureau prohibited Enforcement Specialists from attacking ordinary civilians.
But this was inside an instance. The Bureau would never know.
If he simply knocked Lu Jin unconscious and tied him up before taking him back, that should… be fine!
Excitement flashed through Jiang Sui’s pupils. His bonded metal hidden around his wrist transformed into several metal spheres that spun rapidly across his palm.
Their eyes met.
The air seemed to freeze.
In the next second, both men shot forward like arrows released from their strings, charging at each other at exactly the same time!
