Chapter 153 Main Quest 2 Completed, Achieving Ghost Coin Financial Freedom...
Just as Zhou Fangdong felt his headache subside slightly, a system notification sound, like an alarm clock, rang out:
[Dynamic Event: Night Attack by a Hundred Demons (Countdown: 4 days)]
Zhou Fangdong sprang up from the bed with a swift motion.
He stared at the system notification in disbelief...
It's already the second day? How did it go by so fast!
He actually wasted an entire afternoon and evening lying in bed because of a headache! That evil god is truly despicable!
Zhou Fangdong glanced at the miniature attribute panel floating in the upper left corner.
The dementia debuff has disappeared, and his mental bar is full. The system must have been continuously recharging his spirit with ghost coins.
The thought of ghost coins instantly dampened Zhou Fangdong's spirits.
His pitiful savings... clearing the curse and replenishing his health bar actually cost him 80,000 ghost coins, truly back to square one overnight.
Zhou Fangdong opened the task panel. He wanted to check the system pop-ups he hadn't had time to look at yesterday, but when his gaze swept over his Ghost Coin balance, he suddenly froze.
The ghost coin balance shown above is a staggering 460,000!
Thinking he had misread it, Zhou Fangdong closed the system page and reopened it. Finding that the balance was still 460,000, he quickly brought up the history of the system pop-up.
[Erosion of Authority Progress 100%, Body Repair Progress 85%]
[Global defenses enhanced, Liwan Apartments' defenses enhanced, completely isolating the power of the evil god]
[Received 430,000 Ghost Coins]
[Gained 230,000 Ghost Coins by devouring the spiritual projection of the evil god and a portion of the evil god's true form; gained 200,000 Ghost Coins by devouring the ghosts in the 15th-floor corridor.]
An ordinary outer god's spiritual projection is worth 10,000 ghost coins, but the spiritual projection and the original body of an evil god together are worth a staggering 230,000, which is quite valuable.
But those ghost coins contributed by the ghosts on the 15th floor...
Looking at the 200,000 Ghost Coins he had gained from devouring the ghosts in the 15th-floor corridor, Zhou Fangdong suddenly felt a little guilty: "System, how many ghosts are left in the 15th-floor corridor?"
[Six remain, all highly resilient and adept at hiding, with the potential to become room ghosts. Although they lack reason, the host can turn them into ghost tenants and decorate the garden; their reason will gradually return.]
All the ghosts on the entire floor have been cleared out, leaving only six... Is the [Half-Body Shrine] skill really that powerful?
When Zhou Fangdong used the [Strange Shrine] before, he felt full after eating two ghosts. But this time, after using the [Half-Body Shrine] and eating all the ghosts and evil gods on the floor, he didn't feel full at all.
...Such a powerful attack skill. Its devouring effect is even more terrifying than the [Judgment/Decision] skill. If it didn't have a 50% chance of losing consciousness, and it didn't have the headache and dementia debuffs, it would be a god-tier skill.
Zhou Fangdong sighed.
He spent the afternoon and evening in bed yesterday due to the dementia debuff, and he felt very anxious about the time he had wasted.
Room 306 was only half-finished, and the room intended for the junior investigator wasn't even cleaned. The hidden room on the third floor, which was also planned to be checked that night, wasn't inspected either. The normal nighttime operation was to repair the collapsed area and look for the Key Ghost, but he did nothing... Sigh, so much has been wasted.
Zhou Fangdong was about to close the window and continue working when his gaze swept over the first pop-up window and he suddenly felt something was off.
"System, what's going on with my body repair progress? I remember it was 90.1% last time, why has it regressed?"
[The host has consumed too much of the evil god's true form and is currently experiencing indigestion, so it has retreated somewhat.]
Once digestion is complete, the body's repair progress will resume as normal.
"That's good. Now we don't have to worry about the evil god anymore, right?"
[Don't worry, once the host has wiped out all the cultists of the Bone Society, main quest 2 will be completed.]
Zhou Fangdong breathed a sigh of relief.
Finally, we no longer need to worry about evil gods causing trouble in secret.
Cleansing out cult members is much simpler than dealing with evil gods, because every member of the Bone Society carries the mark of an evil god and can become a backup body for that evil god.
His current erosion of authority is at 100%. Zhou Fangdong can now sense the marks within his 'believers' like the evil gods of the past, thus knowing their location.
To completely eliminate cult members, simply detonate the markings within their bodies.
Before that, we need to make use of these wastes. The owner of the funeral shop in the ghost market is collecting the corpses of these cult members, with each corpse worth 300 ghost coins.
Although he now holds 460,000 ghost coins and has achieved financial freedom, he can't just ignore money that's fallen on the ground.
Zhou Fangdong directly issued a divine decree through the mark of the evil god, ordering all cultists to rush to the ghost market.
Let these cultists die right in front of the funeral shop, so he doesn't have to make another trip.
To prevent the funeral shop owner from mistaking these cult members for gifts from nature and refusing to pay, Zhou Fangdong specifically instilled a subconscious instruction in each cult member's mind, instructing them to shout "Cash on delivery, thank you for your patronage, 300 ghost coins per person, the apartment will send someone to collect the payment shortly" when they arrived at the funeral shop.
The cultists would need some time to travel, so Zhou Fangdong used this time to continue cleaning room 306, which he hadn't finished cleaning the day before.
Before that, he needed to teleport to the second floor to get the furniture that Hou San had asked him to help purchase yesterday.
As soon as he stood up, Zhou Fangdong suddenly noticed that the prayer beads on his left wrist were still gold.
After dealing with the evil god, he forgot to shut down the domain... The domain existed for as long as he rested in bed yesterday.
By now, the supervisory bureau should have cleared out all the ghosts and monsters wandering the city.
After all, the monsters in the domain don't move, and you can take them down in a minute. The time spent on them should all be the time spent traveling.
Even so, before dispelling the domain, Zhou Fangdong still contacted the director of the Supervision Bureau to confirm that the investigators had cleared out all the ghosts in the city center before dispelling the domain.
Although the area itself does not pose any harm to ordinary people, if the apartment is deprived of sunlight for too long, not only may residents become depressed, but it may also lower the apartment's image in the eyes of the public.
In fact, Zhou Fangdong had never understood why activating the bracelet required consuming apartment reputation.
Even if the scene in the bracelet realm is too bizarre and frightens the citizens, it shouldn't affect the apartment, right? How would ordinary people know that this realm is related to Liwan Apartment?
Yesterday, Zhou Fangdong was busy hunting down the evil god, so he only glanced at the scene inside the domain when it was first activated. He didn't pay attention to it constantly and didn't know if there were any other changes that occurred later.
Could it be that after this scene appears for a while, several large characters will float in the blood-red sky, like authorship of a thesis, with the first author being Liwan Apartment, the second author being his name Zhou Fangdong, and the third author thanking a certain unnamed Mahasattva from the underworld?
It's kind of like a lame joke.
Forget it, I've already used up a thousand reputation points, so I'd better not think about it anymore. Getting the furniture from Hou San and continuing to tidy up the room is the priority.
After being teleported to the second floor, Zhou Fangdong suddenly thought of something, turned and walked into the hidden room on the second floor, the slime farm.
What will he do after achieving financial freedom with Ghost Coins? Of course, he'll buy all the things he couldn't afford before—today he's going to get his hands on that starry sky ceiling that comes with neon strips and a disco ball!
This ceiling only cost a mere 75,000 Ghost Coins, but he's now a tycoon with 460,000 Ghost Coins! A super-rich man!
However, he didn't want to change the fourth-floor renovation because the ceiling was already installed, which had already cost money. Unlike decorations, ceilings can't be recycled and stored during the adjustment process; changing them would mean the old ceiling decoration would simply disappear, which would be too wasteful.
Zhou Fangdong decided to install this cool starry sky ceiling on the fifth floor.
The collapse and cracks on the fifth floor have all been repaired. Once he goes to the slime farm to kill a mature baby slime and uses the evil god core to install a decoration purification device in the fifth-floor corridor, he can start decorating the fifth floor.
*
On a new day, Ahao, an ordinary office worker in Linjiang City, sat up in bed at 6 a.m.
He drew back the curtains, looking at the blood-red sky that had lasted for a day and a night, and the blood-red rain that continued to fall. His expression was numb, and his eyes were devoid of any emotion.
It seems today will be another bright and sunny day.
After yesterday's experience, Ahao felt that his mental resilience had reached a new level.
Yesterday, when the city experienced the strange occurrence, he had just finished lunch at a fast food restaurant near his company and was walking towards the office building where his company was located.
Because he was outdoors, he clearly saw the golden light that tore through the sky, and he saw how it dragged the whole world into incomprehensible terror.
This golden light did not bring hope; instead, it devoured all light.
The beam of light that shot into the sky was like a red-hot iron, peeling away the skin of the sky to reveal the scarlet muscle texture beneath.
A vast expanse of dark red replaced the azure sky; the sunlight went out, and the city was shrouded in an ominous red veil.
Immediately following was a bone-chilling cold, as a faint black mist silently seeped into every corner of the city.
Faced with such a terrifying change, Ah Hao was completely stunned and stood there blankly, as if he had triggered a rigid self-protection mechanism.
Moreover, as the black fog swept through, Ahao also saw many ferocious ghosts slowly taking shape—some hiding in trash cans, some hiding under billboards, and some even lying on the backs of passersby.
...It turns out that these terrifying monsters had been lurking around them all along, right within their reach.
At this moment, Ah Hao truly realized that the warnings issued by the Supervision Bureau on a daily basis were not unfounded.
Linjiang City is a city where humans and ghosts coexist, but only today has its terrifying side truly been revealed to ordinary people.
At the same time the ghosts appeared, everyone in Linjiang City saw two huge buildings that looked like mirages, hanging upside down in the blood-red sky.
—Liwan Apartments.
This is a famous haunted building that anyone from Linjiang City can recognize at a glance.
It turns out that all of this was because of Liwan Apartments.
The end of the world has truly come.
After this thought popped into Ahao's mind, he opened his phone and glanced at his financial management account.
The screen full of green alleviated the impact of the blood-red sky... Compared to the apocalypse, this green seemed to be even more despairing.
Faced with this terrifying scene, resembling an apocalyptic catastrophe, Ahao didn't even have the will to run for his life. After all, where could he possibly run to in this situation?
Around the Guomao office building where he was located, which had a particularly high volume of foot traffic, all the pedestrians coming and going were just like him, either standing still or slumped on the ground, without a single person screaming or running away.
Rain began to fall from the sky, and the white paper money with round holes mixed with the drizzling blood-like rain fell, as if it were shedding tears of blood, holding a funeral for the whole world.
Before Ah Hao could dodge, the blood rain poured directly onto him.
However, the burning sensation I had imagined did not occur. Instead, the rain brought a very pleasant and comfortable feeling to my body. The stiffness in my joints from sitting for a long time, the neurasthenia and palpitations caused by work pressure and lack of sleep all disappeared, and my body felt lighter than ever before.
Ahao blankly wiped the bloody rain off his face, staring at the rainwater that looked exactly like bloodstains. He didn't smell any blood at all; instead, he smelled a calming sandalwood scent.
While the ordinary people were unharmed, the monsters exposed to the blood rain were as if they had been splashed with strong acid, their bodies hissing and emitting blue smoke.
It was only then that Ah Hao noticed that all the manifested ghosts were actually imprisoned in place. Even though their expressions were extremely ferocious and painful, they remained motionless like statues.
What's going on?
Ah Hao felt like his brain was a complete mess.
Is this not the end of the world? Is this eerie blood rain eliminating monsters and protecting humanity?
Just as his thoughts were in disarray, his phone received a barrage of calls from the company's department head.
By the way, lunch break is almost over.
...It's one thing for heartless and unscrupulous capitalist bosses to make their employees work during typhoons, but they also refuse to give them a day off in this situation.
Sigh, for office workers, even if it's the end of the world, they still have to keep working. Besides, nothing's happening right now, except the sky has turned a slightly eerie color.
After receiving a call from his department head, Ahao also received a mass message from the Supervision Bureau to the citizens.
According to the Supervision Bureau, this was just artificial rain, a city-wide cleaning and sanitation campaign, and everyone should not panic.
Ah Hao felt that the wording of the text message from the Supervisory Bureau was rather stiff, and he didn't know how many people could believe it... After all, the Liwan Apartment was practically hanging in the sky.
He silently put away his phone and mechanically walked towards the company.
As soon as he reached the bottom of the company building, he suddenly found that the surrounding light had become much dimmer, almost turning into complete darkness.
He subconsciously looked up and vaguely saw a huge black phantom occupying the entire sky.
Compared to the black phantom, the enormous apartment reflection in the sky was as tiny as a grain of rice.
However, this relatively small apartment reflection clung to that enormous black body like a vacuum cleaner.
The terrifying black shadow struggled and writhed desperately. After abandoning most of its body, it fled in panic, eventually turning into a small black dot and disappearing completely into the sky.
After the phantom disappeared, he saw investigators from the Bureau of Investigation arriving one after another to deal with the ghosts that were standing frozen nearby.
Just as the Bureau of Supervision said in its message, this hellish projection was not a doomsday prophecy, but rather a large-scale cleanup operation.
Ah Hao scratched his head.
But it doesn't matter to him anyway; even if the sky falls, there are always tall people to hold it up.
So what if it's red sky? So what if it's blood rain? It won't kill anyone.
If the inspection bureau calls it a cleaning activity, then it is a cleaning activity.
As long as I can live, that's enough.
Life has to go on, and there's still the hefty monthly rent to pay. If I don't go back to the company soon, my salary will be docked.
Ah Hao returned to the company, stood at the door, patted his blood-stained suit, and walked unsteadily to his workstation. His empty, numb eyes fell on the lit computer screen, and listening to the sound of his colleagues' fingers tapping on the keyboard, he felt a strange sense of peace.
No matter how the world changes, for office workers, it's just a brief, bizarre, and ultimately mundane interlude in a long workday.
Back at his workstation, Ahao continued with his work as usual... He went to get off work, went home to sleep, and then woke up at dawn, drew back the curtains, and found that the next day was still a bright red day.
Looking at the still blood-red sky, Ahao sighed, pulling his thoughts away from his memories.
I have to clock in at 8 a.m., so I need to wash up now, otherwise I won't get my perfect attendance bonus for the month.
Just as he was about to turn around, the blood-red sky faded and returned to its normal azure color.
The blood-red sky seemed like just a nightmare.
Everything seemed the same as usual, yet everything felt different.
Ah Hao's gaze fell upon the seemingly unreal azure sky outside the window, and only one thought occupied his mind.
When will he find a job with weekends off...?
*
Inside the Liwan Apartments.
The purification system on the fifth floor will take some time to complete, so Zhou Fangdong can't do any renovations for the time being. After installing the device with the Evil God Core, he teleported to room 203 where Hou San was.
After receiving the furniture from Hou San, Zhou Fangdong suddenly discovered that many cult members were not acting according to his instructions.
Those who obediently followed the 'evil god's' instructions and rushed to the funeral shop in the ghost market were only some fanatical, low-level cult members. These were the kind of people who were obsessed with the evil god, blindly following his every word without any independent thought.
The mid- to high-level elite cult members did not react at all and remained in place.
Some high-ranking officials seemed to have realized that there was something wrong with the 'evil god' who issued the divine oracle, so they chose to flee and try to leave Linjiang City.
Seeing this, Zhou Fangdong didn't delay any longer and directly detonated the evil god imprints within all the cultists.
He noted down the locations of these cult leaders, then turned back to room 203 and told Hou San to take a trip to these strongholds and bring back anything usable.
At the moment all the Bones cult members died, the system's electronic voice simultaneously announced:
[Main Quest 2: Find the evil god of the Bone Inheritance Society, expel the evil god from this world, and kill all cultists. Completed. Please claim your quest reward in time.]
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