Chapter 37: Are you happy making money with blood? (15) They are...
The guests entered the clubhouse and made their way to the rooftop banquet hall. Everyone was dressed in formal attire, their expensive evening gowns and suits gleaming beautifully under the massive, multi-million-dollar crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
Whether ladies or gentlemen, young or old, everyone was elegant and kind, and had extraordinary conversation. It looked like a grand event for the upper class.
"What a beast in human clothing..." Ah Zhui was floating in the clouds outside watching the fun.
Xuan Chi floated a few steps away, arms folded, staring out the window expressionlessly. Ah Zhui stared for a moment longer, then turned back to him with boredom. Pointing at the grand spectacle outside the window, he asked, "Hey, you used to be a deity. Are there such hypocritical villains in Heaven?"
Xuan Chi's eyes froze, and after a long pause, he said, "I don't remember."
"What about the Heavenly Emperor?" Ah Zhui curled his lips. Seeing Xuan Chi remained silent, he continued, "Have you ever considered not going to the Heavenly Emperor to ask for the reason?! He can inflict such torture. I think he is a tyrant. Just pretend he doesn't exist. Being a ghost has its own pleasures. Look, isn't Si Ling living a good life?"
What Azhu said actually makes sense.
Tens of thousands of years was too long, even for ghosts. Even more terrifying was the screams in the school legend. Ah Zhu knew that Xuan Chi had been conscious during those ten thousand years, at least he could feel pain.
She felt that there was no crime that needed to be atonemented in this way, and that it was quite perverted for the Emperor of Heaven to do this.
Xuan Chi remained silent, and this silence made Ah Zhui think that she would not get any answer, so she had to shut up in disappointment.
Xuan Chi suddenly said, "The Emperor of Heaven is not a tyrant."
His tone was calm and there was no change in his intonation.
Ah Zhui was startled: "You remembered him?"
"No." Xuan Chi shook his head.
Ah Zhui was speechless: "Then how do you know?"
Xuan Chi paused for a moment: "I just know."
“…” Ah Zhu was speechless.
She felt pity for Hyun Chi's predicament, but that didn't stop her from silently complaining about his irrational loyalty. Furthermore, she worried about him, fearing he might one day return to Heaven with this blind loyalty and discover that the Emperor of Heaven was truly a tyrant...that would be hell.
After a while, Si Ling's voice came from the sound transmission note: "Come to work, friends."
Xuan Chi flew straight to the window on the 21st floor upon hearing the sound, followed closely by Ah Zhu. According to the place Si Ling had chosen earlier, they went to the public restroom on the 21st floor, but seeing no one there, they went directly across the rooftop to the lounge on the 22nd floor.
To be precise, the "lounge on the 22nd floor of the club" selected by Si Ling includes two places, one on each side of the main banquet venue. The layout is completely symmetrical, but there is no connection at all.
If Si Ling wanted to design both lounges in the Rule Ghost Story, she would need two prop scrolls. Therefore, when both Azhu and Xuan Chi heard that the six places selected by Si Ling included the lounge, they naturally thought that she would only use one of them.
But now they discovered through the breath that both lounges were included in the barrier of the rule ghost story.
A Zhui was confused for three seconds before he came to his own conclusion, believing that this was the magical power of a super powerful ghost.
Xuan Chi frowned slightly, looked at her and said, "You used the bathroom on the 21st floor to connect to this barrier?"
The restrooms on the 21st floor are located directly below the main banquet hall. The designers thoughtfully considered that the restrooms on the 22nd floor might be insufficient for large banquets. Furthermore, since the main hall and lounge space could not be reduced, the restrooms on the 22nd floor were limited, so they designed the public restrooms on the 21st floor to be quite large.
Therefore, the toilets arranged horizontally on the north side of the 21st floor occupy one-third of the main banquet hall. The west wall of the men's toilet is the same wall as the east wall of the lounge on the west side of the upstairs, and the east wall of the women's toilet is the same wall as the west wall of the lounge on the east side of the upstairs. The three spaces form an inverted Chinese character "品", and the places where they are connected are just used by Si Ling. He treats them as a complete space and uses only one scroll to open the strange stories of the rules of the three places.
According to Mammon's design, each scroll can contain up to 30 rules, which is enough to split it into three rooms.
Ah Zhui asked curiously, "What did you do with the other scroll?"
Si Ling curled his lips: "It's useless. Just save it for later use. It has no expiration date."
He paused, then said sincerely, "If we never use them, it wouldn't be bad to sell them on the black market for a good price. Normally, no one would burn paper for the three of us, right?"
“…”
Ah Zhui could only say: "That makes sense."
After Si Ling finished speaking, he sat cross-legged on the ground. A Zhui and Xuan Chi also sat down, regulating their breathing and casting spells.
The designed horror scenes unfolded one by one. The scenes were essentially fixed, but the NPCs within them all needed some degree of "intelligence." The most important parts required the three of them to personally perform them, such as Ah Zhui, who played the role of the Aries ghost bride in the Western Restaurant dungeon. The next level could use spells to clone themselves, such as the coffin-bound female corpse that frightened Wu Yunfeng to death. The least technically demanding, Si Ling, could simply use paper figurines to fill in the gaps, as was the case with the waiters in the Western Restaurant dungeon.
This mode makes the rule-based weird talk look much simpler than directly scaring people, because as long as the participants trigger the rules, these pre-designed scenes will be triggered like the established plot, and losing SAN is also inevitable in the mechanism. But from another perspective, it is better to say that this copy transfers the difficulty rather than reducing it.
...Not only do the ghosts using the scrolls have to think hard about designing rules and terrifying scenarios, but each step in realizing these scenarios also consumes mana. While this mana requirement isn't particularly high, the students in the beginner and intermediate classes of the Ghost Academy are completely incapable of using such advanced props.
The three of them took about a quarter of an hour to set up everything, and the banquet began in the main banquet hall separated by a wall.
On stage, the host delivered his opening remarks with enthusiasm; below, Gongbu, now over 90 years old, sat majestically in the center of the first row. The loss of contact with dozens of attendees had initially been somewhat disturbing, but now that everyone saw Gongbu sitting there steadily, all doubts were dispelled.
The fact that Gongbu's two sons, Aji and Awang, were not present actually reassured everyone at this time. The believers felt that since Gongbu could sit here, it meant that his two sons were fine, and that the others should be fine too. The Tumba family was not lying when they said they were going into seclusion to practice.
In the basement directly below the main venue, the Western ghosts who formed an alliance were ready to go.
This alliance was led by vampires of noble birth, so almost all the ghosts involved in the mission joined, with only five exceptions: the Si Ling trio, plus Elizabeth and Fredis.
Aymeric was not surprised by the Eastern Ghosts' decision to go it alone; he had never expected them to agree to join.
But Elizabeth and Fredis worried him greatly.
...In fact, it was Elizabeth who had organized this alliance. He didn't deny that she had performed well this time, but the arrogance she showed towards Si Ling made him more and more uneasy.
So he organized an alliance. On the one hand, he hoped that if everyone acted together, the mission could be completed quickly and without worries. On the other hand, he also hoped that Elizabeth and Fredis would join in, so that he could know their movements and perhaps help them solve some dangers.
But Elizabeth rarely refused his invitation. She gritted her teeth and said to him, "I know you are fascinated by that Porcelain Ghost, but I will let you know that we are not inferior to her. Not only will I get the heads of many major targets, but also Gongbu himself. Just wait and see."
Faced with such stubbornness, Aymeric had no choice but to give up trying to persuade her and instead hoped that he could "make a quick decision".
Although the other trainees participating in the mission were not as anxious as Aymeric, they also hoped for a quick victory.
After all, the target this time is professionals in the field of metaphysics. Compared with ordinary villains, people in professional fields have the ability to fight back against ghosts. The longer they delay, the greater the risk they will face.
Tonight's banquet was their best chance for a quick resolution, as everyone was present. But it also meant danger, and this sense of both opportunity and danger filled everyone waiting in the basement with anxiety.
They hoped to wipe out all their targets, and hoped that the sudden situation at the banquet would cause chaos and a stampede - as ghosts, they had to scare San away in order to kill people, but it would be much easier if they could cause a stampede among humans.
Now, they are making their final wait.
Waiting for the banquet to reach its climax, waiting for the guests to have three rounds of drinks, and their nerves to relax under the paralysis of alcohol, and their reaction ability to become slow.
.
Under the dark silky night, Aji led seven or eight monks and slowly approached a corner on the west side of the manor.
He didn't know who his opponent was this time, but the feeling brought by the spell came from all directions. However, he still sensed a more obvious aura coming from the west side of the manor.
This is a strong yin energy, which does not directly mean the power of the mastermind behind the scenes, but is closely related to the victims. Although not everyone will become a ghost after death, it is true that everyone will have a "lingering ghost" for a period of seven days or as long as forty-nine days after death. This is the origin of the "seventh day of mourning" for the dead in the Eastern world.
If a person was murdered, then during this period of "lingering ghost" that may be long or short, his ghost will linger around the culprit, and Aji sensed the traces through this.
Holding a compass, he searched for the direction with the heaviest yin energy, gradually narrowing the scope.
As the chamber symphony orchestra in the club's banquet hall played a lively opening song, the group's range narrowed to a desolate area.
They had actually been to this place during the day. They had found bloodstains in this area and a lot of scattered pieces of meat further away.
At this moment, the Yin Qi accurately led them here. When the range was narrowed enough, everyone could only see one building: a small blue house.
None of them had ever been to this house before, and no one had even noticed its existence before today. So everyone stopped and looked at Aji hesitantly.
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