Mao Xiaoqian's legs buckled and he sat down on the ground with a thud.

Old Bai and Yin Kai's smiles froze on their faces, their hands trembling so much they could barely hold the talisman.

Conan was completely petrified, and the expression on his face gradually cracked.

Completely unaware of the bomb he had dropped, Ruan Bei looked utterly bewildered, unable to understand why his friends were making such faces.

"What's wrong with you? Is there a problem?"

Mao Xiaoqian's heart nearly leaped out of his chest: "Big big big big..."

Ruan Bei: "Big?"

"Boss!" Old Bai shouted loudly before Mao Xiaoqian, who was so frightened he started to stutter, "So it's Boss Qin, I've heard so much about you."

"Yes, yes, boss, boss..." Mao Xiaoqian cried, recalling the things he had said to scare the newbies, and suddenly felt a wave of dizziness.

Ruan Bei asked with a mixture of confusion and delight, "So you all know Kunkun, oh, he's my junior brother. That makes sense, he participated in the exchange competition before. Did you meet during the competition?"

"no!"

"We don't know each other, we don't know each other..."

"No, we're not familiar with the big boss at all!" Mao Xiaoqian waved his hands frantically, wishing he could go back a few days and beat up his past self who had acted out of mischief.

"Although he is quite capable, he is still young and can't really be considered a big shot." Ruan Bei said somewhat embarrassedly on behalf of his son, Kunkun.

Mao Xiaoqian and the others could only manage awkward smiles, unable to utter a word. They dared not agree.

Rebuttal? The Great Demon King's junior brother is just the Little Demon King, isn't he? They wouldn't dare!

“You don’t need to do this. We’re all friends. I’ll introduce you to him later,” Ruan Bei said happily. “He’s not very talkative, but he’s a very nice person with a gentle temperament.”

Warm, mild?

who?

Qin the Great Demon King?

What a joke! Was it his twin brother who blasted people with lightning talismans last year?

If he had a mild temper, even the Thunder God could turn into Maitreya Buddha.

Conan suddenly remembered something and cautiously asked, "Have you mentioned us to your... senior brother?"

Ruan Bei nodded. He had said it on the day the team was formed: "Can't I say?"

"Yes, I can speak."

Conan glanced at Mao Xiaoqian and, out of consideration for their long-standing friendship, inquired on his behalf: "Did he say anything?"

"They didn't say anything." Ruan Bei felt that their expressions were strange. Could it be that his Kunkun was really a very powerful figure, and his teammates were all his little fans?

"Oh, right, he asked for your names."

"Our names?" Conan felt a bad premonition. "Why are you asking our names? Didn't you introduce us?"

“I told him, but then he said he didn’t remember and asked me to repeat it again.”

A chill ran down their spines. Mao Xiaoqian, who had been the most vocal but was now the most distressed, was filled with despair: "Why did he ask for our names? What's the point of him remembering us? We're just ordinary noobs, we don't deserve to be remembered by a big shot!"

Ruan Bei thought to himself, "As expected, it turns out everyone really is a big fan of Kunkun."

The treasured talisman that Mao Xiaoqian just took out seems to have been drawn by Kunkun. He probably just couldn't bear to use it.

"Don't say that. We're all friends. You don't need to feel guilty."

After trying to comfort him, Ruan Bei saw that Mao Xiaoqian still had tears in his eyes and looked extremely excited, so he said, "I told him that you told me a lot of information, and he said he wanted to thank you properly."

"Really?" Mao Xiaoqian asked incredulously. "Tell him what we told you?"

"Those common-sense things I don't know, like the Great Demon King?" Ruan Bei asked doubtfully. "Speaking of which, it seems he doesn't know anything about the Great Demon King either. Could it be that he hasn't encountered him before... Hey? Little Mao, what's wrong with you..."

...

"Is Brother Mao alright?" Ruan Bei looked worriedly at Mao Xiaoqian in the back seat. He was so excited that his eyes were vacant and his face was blank. Even his blue hair was drooping. He was still clutching the talisman that Ruan Bei had given them.

They initially refused to accept them, but perhaps because they were too shy, Ruan Bei insisted on giving them the ones they had previously chosen.

"It's nothing, what could be wrong? He's just too happy," Conan said coldly.

Let him be so foul-mouthed, let him scare the newbies, now look what happened, serves him right!

Ruan Bei had a feeling that they were hiding something from him, but Conan seemed quite normal.

However, Mao Xiaoqian's occasional eccentricities shouldn't be too surprising.

In the taxi behind, Yin Kai clutched the talisman Ruan Bei had given him, muttering to himself, "Tall and mighty is a compliment, right? Yes, it's a compliment..."

If the Demon King were to seek revenge, he should target Mao Xiaoqian first. However, Mao Xiaoqian is a body cultivator, and should be at the forefront in times of danger...

The group had different thoughts, but they still had to keep going.

Conan logged into the app in the taxi, submitted the task he had just completed, and successfully earned seventy points.

Yesterday, someone from the organizers came to register the team members for the competition. Their names have already been submitted. After Conan submitted the mission and refreshed the page, he found that his account had gained fourteen points.

During registration, the clerk repeatedly emphasized that once a team is formed, it cannot be split up at will, so he directly received one-fifth of the total points after submitting his task.

The same applies to other teams. As for participants who did not join the Special Affairs Bureau, they will be issued temporary accounts without code names.

After the competition, they can also use their points to redeem some items from the Special Affairs Bureau's warehouse, but there is a time limit. If they are not used within the time limit, they will be invalidated, and their accounts will be reclaimed.

Conan saw the extra points and sent a screenshot to his teammates in the group chat.

Upon seeing the first payment, the team members, who had been feeling dejected, finally put aside their sadness and checked their respective accounts.

Seventy points seems like a lot at first glance, but when divided among five people, it's only that much. Mao Xiaoqian said dejectedly, "If the level two missions are this troublesome, I wonder how difficult the later missions will be."

"Otherwise, why would it be a backlog mission?" Conan smiled wryly. He had now seen through the true nature of the Special Affairs Bureau. They had simply found a group of free laborers, and the particularly enthusiastic ones at that.

"We need to be careful when we do missions later," Conan advised. "Let's increase the difficulty of each mission by one level."

The group chat erupted in groans. They were doing harder work for less money. If it weren't for the competition, they would have quit long ago.

Unbeknownst to the group of people who were sitting in a taxi on their way to their next destination, at the same time, a group of young people in their twenties were walking out of the airport they had passed a few hours earlier.

One of them looked at his phone and his expression suddenly changed: "Damn it, the task we were interested in has already been completed by someone else."

"What?"

The others took out their phones and, sure enough, saw that the task they were about to do had been completed.

"Has another team gotten ahead of us?"

"Brother Jiao, what should we do?"

The man called Brother Jiao was a young man with slightly curly hair. He glanced at the phone his companion handed him and said with a gloomy expression, "What are you afraid of? Since you're both interested in the same mission, let's compete for it. Whoever wins gets the mission."

"Let's go to the next mission point." Brother Jiao led his teammates and immediately headed to the next destination.

The airport was far away, and just as Jiao Ge and his group got into a taxi, Ruan Bei's team had already arrived at the location of their second mission.

This is a relatively remote urban village with low and cramped buildings. The houses are all quite old, and many of the residents are migrant workers from other places. There are many renters, and the population is quite diverse.

They got off the plane a little after 1 p.m., ate, traveled, hunted ghosts, and traveled until they arrived at their destination after 6 p.m.

It gets dark early now. Although it's not pitch black by six o'clock, there's no sunlight at all. The streetlights in the urban village are sparse, only on the two main roads.

Furthermore, the buildings were crammed together, the ground was uneven, and only faint light shone through the windows.

Under the cover of night, the entire urban village resembled a deformed monster. Fortunately, there were still quite a few pedestrians coming and going outside, which prevented it from appearing too terrifying.

"Should we... go in now?"

Ruan Bei and his group stopped at the mission's location, an abandoned old building.

Other houses may also be dilapidated, but because people live in them, even if they are dirty and messy, they still seem to have a human touch.

But the house was dirty, old, and gloomy; the whole building was pitch black.

Conan looked down at the short mission briefing for a while, his brows furrowed.

After the previous mission, he already knew that these missions were not simple. This mission was classified as a level three mission, and the points were quite substantial.

The mission description only mentioned that someone was injured, and that the methods used were much more ruthless than those of the previous female ghost.

However, since no one died, it was classified as a Level 3 mission, but Conan always felt that it wasn't that simple.

"Forget it, let's come back during the day tomorrow. Let's find a place to rest properly tonight." Conan finally decided not to take any risks. Nighttime is the ghosts' domain, and they were going to enter the small building guarded by ghosts. They had to take advantage of the right time and place.

No one else objected; it was late at night, and they hadn't even had dinner yet.

Moreover, after a long day of running around, I'm quite tired. I need to rest and recharge so I can better complete the task.

Although the urban villages are dilapidated, they have all the necessary living facilities, such as restaurants, supermarkets, and hotels, although they are a bit small in scale.

They found a relatively clean-looking shop, ate something casually, bought some snacks and bottled water at a convenience store, and then booked two rooms at what looked like a respectable-looking small hotel.

After dawdling over washing up and having a late-night snack, it was almost nine o'clock. Many windows in the urban village were already dark. For manual laborers, going to bed early is essential to getting up early for work, and sufficient sleep is necessary to maintain enough energy.

For young people like Mao Xiaoqian, nine o'clock is not the start of their nightlife.

Everyone was engrossed in scrolling through their phones, and Ruan Bei also took out his phone to start chatting with Qin Gu.

Qin Gu was staying at his senior brother's house. He received news of the start of the competition in the morning, so he immediately arranged for someone to take him to the outskirts of Beijing, where he completed a level 3 quest. After that, he took a car to his next destination.

Unlike Ruan Bei's team, who flew across most of China, he chose the nearest route, drawing a straight line from the capital to the province where Ruan Bei and his team were located, intending to complete all the missions along the way.

Ruan Bei was amazed; perhaps this was the source of a big shot's confidence.

After Qin Gu finished speaking, he asked him about his situation today. After all, they were in a competitive relationship, and he wasn't alone, so he asked his teammate if he could talk about it first.

Mao Xiaoqian was reading a message from someone with his legs crossed when he heard them mention Qin Gu, and he jumped up in a flash.

Just as he was about to ask what was going on, he suddenly saw Ruan Bei's expression change and he rushed to the window.